A timely history of the profound impact of Earl Warren's Supreme Court on many areas of modern American government and society
From 1953 to 1969, Earl Warren served as chief justice of the US Supreme Court. During that time, the Warren Court made a number of historically important decisions involving anti-miscegenation laws (Loving v. Virginia), the right to privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut), and, perhaps most important, racial segregation (Brown v. Board of Education).
In The Warren Court and Democratic Constitution, Horwitz highlights the radical shift in traditional jurisprudential ideas that occurred during Earl Warren's tenure as chief justice. He details how Brown v. Board of Education exerted a powerful influence on the agenda of the Warren Court and reshaped almost every subject area in constitutional law. With this decision, the concept of a "living Constitution," the idea that the Constitution ought to develop to accommodate social change, emerged and was institutionalized by the Court. Brown inspired a more active reading of the Equal Protection Clause, and the Court soon applied this expanded notion of "equal protection" to legislative apportionment, recognized the rights of supposed "outsiders" (e.g., undocumented peoples and children born out of wedlock), and initiated a new era of legal attacks on gender discrimination.
The Warren Court's jurisprudence is radically opposed to the current Supreme Court's emphasis on originalism, the approach of interpreting the Constitution according to its meaning at the time of writing. Readers interested in an alternative to originalism, as well as Supreme Court history and civil rights, will gain a deeper understanding of the profound impact of the Warren Court on many areas of modern American government and society.
Reviews
"The Warren Court and the Democratic Constitution is an important and timely book. It is being published at a historical moment in which the United States Supreme Court seems poised to reverse the Warren Court's direction of distinctively democratic constitutional interpretation. Morton Horwitz, the leading constitutional historian of our time, here sets out a bold and unflinching reading of the opinions of the court, sketching the constitutionally revolutionary innovations of Warren's jurisprudence. Horwitz's interpretation draws upon newly available information on the internal deliberations of the court and combines it with a strongly liberal understanding of the Warren Court's accomplishments. This is a smart, insightful, and gracefully written account that will bring tears to the eyes of readers who admire the course set by the Warren Court and fear the consequences for democracy of the jurisprudential course that currently seems to be set for constitutionalism in America."—Stanley N. Katz, retired professor, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, former editor-in-chief, Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the United States Supreme Court
"The Warren Court's decisions look in retrospect like the high point of legal liberalism: the judiciary's promotion of civil rights, civil liberties, and the institutions of democracy. In Morton Horwitz's majestic, nuanced, and judicious account, the court has found a history worthy of its momentous importance."—Robert W. Gordon, professor emeritus, Stanford and Yale Law Schools
About the Author
Morton J. Horwitz is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He is the author of numerous articles on American legal history, as well as the two-volume set The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1979) and 1870–1960 (1994), the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. He is also the author of The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice (1998) and a coeditor of American Legal Realism (1993).
