| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age. By Paul Kens . (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. viii, 376 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-7006-0817-6.)

Stephen J. Field has fascinated legal historians for generations. As associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1863 to 1897, Field personified the late-nineteenth-century judiciary's conservative defense of property and wealth. This emphasis emerged in the leading controversies of the era, such as regulation of the railroads, civil rights and substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, and state regulation of property "affected with a public purpose." Yet there have been comparatively few comprehensive biographical treatments. Carl Swisher's 1930 volume argued that Field wrote laissez-faire economics into the Constitution. His characterization stuck until the 1970s, when Charles McCurdy's work rehabilitated Field by placing his jurisprudence in the context of its formative political tradition: Jacksonian democracy and the lasting influence of free labor ideology. McCurdy, Michael Les Benedict, Howard Gillman, Lucy Salyer, and others now see Field's jurisprudence as the expression of long-standing intellectual commitments to liberty and restrained government. . . .

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