| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Walter F. Pratt, Jr. The Supreme Court under Edward Douglass White, 1910–1921. (Chief Justiceships of the United States Supreme Court.) Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xx, 296. $39.95.

The practice of using chief justices to define periods in Supreme Court history is an imperfect device at best, and to his credit Walter F. Pratt, Jr. does not try to inflate the significance of his thoughtful study. "I cannot argue," he tells us, "that the White Court crafted a distinctive identity for itself" (p. xviii). Instead, he seeks to explore the gradual and nuanced processes of judicial change as the Court moved from the problems and assumptions of nineteenth-century jurisprudence to those of the twentieth. 1

Pratt adopts a chronological approach, examining in sequence each of the eleven terms over which Edward Douglass White presided. He seeks to capture the general flavor of each: relevant social and political background, contributions of individual justices, the size and content of the docket, and the Court's ordinary as well as famous cases. The advantages and disadvantages of the approach are apparent. On the positive side, it roots the Court firmly in a slowly evolving context and suggests a variety of possible interconnections between its decisions and contemporaneous but doctrinally unrelated matters, whether internal or external to the Court. On the negative side, it tends to obscure major developments and to diffuse Pratt's general arguments. Such an approach demands a substantial concluding chapter which, unfortunately, is lacking. . . .

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