Description: The Taft Court offers the definitive history of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. Using untapped archival material, Robert C. Post engagingly recounts the ambivalent effort to create a modern American administrative state out of the institutional innovations of World War I. He shows how the Court sought to establish authoritative forms of constitutional interpretation despite the culture wars that enveloped prohibition and pervasive labor unrest. He explores in great detail how constitutional law responds to altered circumstances. The work provides comprehensive portraits of seminal figures such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Dembitz Brandeis. It describes William Howard Taft's many judicial reforms and his profound alteration of the role of Chief Justice. A critical and timely contribution, The Taft Court sheds light on jurisprudential debates that are just as relevant today as they were a century ago.
Brief description: Robert C. Post is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He served as the sixteenth Dean of Yale Law School from 2009 to 2017. He specializes in constitutional law, with particular emphasis on the First Amendment. His book For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (with Matthew W. Finkin) has become the standard reference text for the meaning of academic freedom in the United States.
Review Quotes: 'In his expansive examination of the Taft Court, Robert Post describes the Chief Justice and former President as a man of immense capacity and prodigious energy. The same could be said of Post in this, the latest volume of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court. Post's crystalline prose and probing intellect paint a nuanced picture of both this transformative chief justice and the transformative decade of the 1920s. As rich in biography and culture as it is sophisticated in legal analysis, The Taft Court effortlessly guides the reader across the broad and complex terrain of the Court's cases and their relationship to the social, political, and economic developments of their day. This is a master work by a master legal scholar and historian at his very best.' Risa Goluboff, Dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, and author of Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s