Miller V The United States 4 Us 6 1799

File No. 70

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.

A fascinating exploration of the first two Supreme Courts and how they laid the groundwork for the modern-day Court. When the Supreme Court was established in 1789, no other country had a judicial body quite like it. The early justices struggled to give definition to such concepts as "judicial review" and "separation of powers." The early court approached its role in ways that would be startling today, often using its power to support the new government rather than merely serving as an independent arbiter. The Jay-Ellsworth Courts were the first to take up the role of interpreting the constitution, and their approach influenced constitutional debates for the next two centuries. Clearly, this is a book for any reader who wishes to understand how the court was initially set up and how it functioned in our early judicial history.

William R. Casto sheds a new light on America's federal judiciary and the changing legal landscape with his detailed examination of the Supreme Court's formative years. In a study that spans the period from the Court's tentative beginnings through the appointment of its third chief justice, Casto reveals a judicial body quite different in orientation and philosophy from the current Supreme Court and one with a legacy of enduring significance for the U.S. legal system. Casto portrays the founding of the Supreme Court as a conscious effort to help the newly established government deal more effectively with national security and foreign policy concerns, and he credits the Court with assisting the Washington and Adams administrations establish stable relationships with Great Britain and France. The initial debate over the Supreme Court's jurisdiction as well as over the method of selecting its justices is recalled here. Casto also reveals the philosophical mindset of the first Supreme Court, contrasting the eighteenth-century concept of natural law with the legal positivism on which the Supreme Court now relies. Using this historical context, he addresses the political controversy over federal common-law crimes, the drafting of the Judiciary Act of 1789, and the adoption of judicial review.