Friends of the Libraries' Guest Columnist Features Interesting reading -- on constitutional history By Ann Fidler September 3, 2005 The Athens Messenger

Like many of my colleagues, I have a selfish interest in the confirmation hearings being held for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Legal historians hope that media coverage of the confirmation process will spark public interest in learning more about the past of one of the most powerful documents ever devised by mankind. Astronomers tell us that our bodies owe their composition to the distribution of chemical building blocks created in the furnaces of stars. Legal historians might make a similar claim about their realm. The drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 compressed ideas, philosophies, legal cases, and aspirations into a single document. The ratification of that document precipitated a percussive wave from which emerged, over time, the building blocks of American citizenship and national identity. Our bodies may be composed of star dust, but our lives and our relationships to each other and the world consist of the endlessly contested molecules of constitutionalism.

Fortunately for those who want to know more about those molecules the literature of constitutional history is rich and far more accessible than one might suspect. There are wonderful biographies, excellent studies of particular eras, and fascinating overviews of developments in legal doctrine. A good source to learn more about this literature is H-LAW an on-line discussion network that forms part of the huge history web resource known as H-NET (www.h-net.msu.edu).

If the confirmation hearings trigger your interest, constitutional history through the lens of a particular case is a great entry point. A well-done case study humanizes legal issues, helps to explain the personalities and philosophies of Supreme Court justices, and makes sense of the procedural and institutional factors that surround significant legal questions. The granddaddy of this genre is Anthony Lewis's much loved Gideon's Trumpet. First published in 1964, it endures as an inspiring story of how an indigent prisoner changed the course of constitutional history by writing a letter to the Supreme Court. Even more compelling is Richard Kluger's examination of the history of Brown v. Board of Education entitled Simple Justice. An updated and expanded version was published in 2004 to mark the 50th anniversary of the case; it has lost none of its power to chasten and uplift. Another intriguing case study is Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips, Jr.'s Contempt of Court (1999) which delves into United States v. Shipp (1909). Shipp pitted Justice John Marshall Harlan against a Tennessee lynch mob, and resulted in the first and only criminal trial conducted by the Supreme Court. If you prefer variety, a recent book, Constitutional Law Stories (2004), edited by Michael Dorf examines a number of landmark cases. Pairing some of the cases covered by Dorf with the multi-media CD entitled The Supreme Court's Greatest Hits which provides images and recordings of oral arguments makes for an enriching constitutional history experience. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once wrote that "a page of history is worth a volume of logic," but he forgot to note that not only is history valuable it is also riveting particularly when it is constitutional history.

Professor Ann Fidler, J.D., Ph.D., is Dean of the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University.