Professor Bernstein has recommended the following books on the Marshall and Taney courts:
Newmyer, R. Kent. The Supreme Court Under Marshall
and Taney, 2nd Ed. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2006 (orig.
ed., 1968).
Newmyer, R. Kent. John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme
Court. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Hobson Charles F. The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule
of Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.
Johnson, Herbert A. The Chief Justiceship of John Marshall, 1801-1835.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Smith, Jean Edward. John Marshall: Definer of the Law. New York:
Henry Holt, 1996.
Simon, James F. What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall,
and the Epic Struggle to Create the United States. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2002.
Simon, James F. Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession,
and the President's War Powers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978. abridged edition titled Slavery, Law, and Politics: The
Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1981.
Frankfurter, Felix. The Commerce Clause Under Marshall, Taney, and
Waite. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.
Huebner, Timothy S. The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy.
Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
Swisher, Carl Brent. Roger B. Taney. New York: Macmillan, 1935;
reprint, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1961.
If you and your students are interested in the first dozen years of the
Court’s history, you should look at these books:
Casto, William R. The Supreme Court In The Early Republic: The Chief
Justiceships Of John Jay And Oliver Ellsworth. Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina Press, 1995.
Gerber, Scott Douglas, ed. Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John
Marshall. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
A Fascinating collection of essays examining justices who served on the
Court in its first dozen years. It dispels the notion that the Court somehow
didn’t matter until Marshall arrived.
Goebel, Julius. Antecedents and beginnings to 1801. New York:
Macmillan, 1971.
Vol. 1 in the History of the Supreme Court (a series that moved from publisher
to publisher over the decades). Out of print, but well worth looking at.
There is a wide selection of books about Marshall and his tenure on the Supreme Court. These are just some of the more recent:
Haskins, George Lee, and Johnson, Herbert A. Foundations Of Power: John Marshall, 1801-15. New York: Macmillan, 1981.
Johnson, Herbert A. The Chief Justiceship of John Marshall. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
Robarge, David Scott. A Chief Justice's Progress: John Marshall from Revolutionary Virginia to the Supreme Court. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Shevory, Thomas C. John Marshall's Law: Interpretation, Ideology, and Interest. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
White, G. Edward. The Marshall Court and Cultural Change: 1815-35.
New York: Macmillan, 1988; abridged edition, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991.
If you and your students would like to read more widely in Marshall’s
own writings, take a look at this series:
Charles F. Hobson, et al., Eds. The Papers of John Marshall.
12 vols. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1974-2006.
These authors focus their attention on Taney and his court:
Allen, Austin. Origins Of The Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence
And The Supreme Court, 1837-1857. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2006.
Hyman, Harold M., and Wiecek, William M. Equal Justice under Law:
Constitutional Development, 1835-1875. New York: Harper & Row,
1982.
Siegel, Martin. The Taney Court, 1836-1864. Millwood, N.Y.:
Associated Faculty Press, 1987.
Lewis, H. H. Walker. Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice
Roger Brooke Taney. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
If you’d like more general background on the Jackson administration:
Cole, Donald B. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson. Lawrence, Kan.:
University Press of Kansas, 1993.
Ellis, Richard E. Andrew Jackson. Washington, DC: CQ Press,
2003.
Magliocca, Gerard N. Andrew Jackson and the Constitution: The Rise
and Fall of Generational Regimes. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2007.
Remini, Robert Vincent. Andrew Jackson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Jackson. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1945. This has been reprinted many times, and it’s still
a lively read.
Wilentz, Sean. Andrew Jackson. New York: Times Books, 2005.
These books address specific issues that threatened conflict between Jackson
and the Court:
Remini, Robert Vincent. Andrew Jackson And The Bank War: A Study
In The Growth Of Presidential Power. New York, Norton, 1967
_____. Andrew Jackson & His Indian Wars. New York: Viking,
2001.
O'Brien, Sean Michael. In Bitterness and in Tears: Andrew Jackson's
Destruction of the Creeks And Seminoles. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and
the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
These biographies study two other leading legal and judicial figures
in Taney’s era:
Newmyer, R. Kent. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of
the Old Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1985.
Remini, Robert Vincent. Daniel Webster: The Man and his Time.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
These are only a few of the books that study the Taney court’s most
famous decision:
Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1970. A good introduction to the statute that underlay Scott’s case.
_____. with Ward McAfee. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. McAfee, a former student of Fehrenbacher’s, completed the unfinished manuscript of this book after Fehrenbacher’s death.
Finkelman. Dred Scott V. Sandford: A Brief History With Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, c1997. Useful classroom text.
Graber, Mark A. Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Kaufman, Kenneth C. Dred Scott's Advocate: A Biography of Roswell M. Field. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
McGinty, Brian. Lincoln and the Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008.
Maltz, Earl M. Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery. Lawrence,
Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Online, you will, of course, find opinions for all of the cases mentioned in this essay on Findlaw and Oyez. The SCHS’s “Landmark Cases” section pays special attention to the Marbury, McCullough, and Dred Scott cases.
