The History of the Supreme Court of the United States

1941-1953 marked the emergence of legal liberalism, in the divergent activist efforts of Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. The war and early Cold War years of the Court in reality marked the birth of the constitutional order that dominated American public law in the later twentieth century. That legal outlook emphasized judicial concern for civil rights, civil liberties, and reaction to the emergent national security state. This book recounts the history of United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually overlooked years between the constitutional revolution that occurred in the 1930s and Warren-Court judicial activism in the 1950s.