| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Deak Nabers. Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American Literature, 1852–1867. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 239. $49.95.

Few topics have received so much attention from constitutional historians as the Fourteenth Amendment, whose guarantees of due process and equal protection have resisted efforts at definition for almost a century and a half. Deak Nabers comes at the problem from an intriguing new direction. He suggests that the Fourteenth Amendment was in some sense a poem (p. 198). What he seems to mean by this is that the amendment was less an effort to establish a novel mandate than to reorder and revitalize existing constitutional language. Baldly stated, the comparison with poetry may strike some readers as contrived or at least abstruse. Nabers shows that a major preoccupation of the era was in the malleability and variable efficacy of language, particularly legal language. His efforts to link that insight to John Bingham's drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment are plausible, and if nothing else, intriguing.

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