For his history, Streichler provides chapter-length studies of legal controversies over fugitive slaves; the commerce clause; the due process clause; the Dred Scott case; presidential war powers, including the Emancipation Proclamation; and the Johnson impeachment trial. In each study, Streichler provides an adequate, if limited, sketch of the legal-historical context for Curtis's position and compares his assessment of Curtis's actions to those made by later constitutional scholars. Streichler's account is balanced, but his assessments of the significance of Curtis's actions are not always persuasive (e.g., 118, 199) and often seem focused on defending Curtis against modern constitutional scholars rather than placing him in an appropriate historical context (e.g., 107–8). Justice Curtis is nevertheless a generally interesting and often informative book about a complex, important, and little-understood figure in nineteenth-century law. It serves as a reasonable introduction to many of Streichler's topics, but is unlikely to be the last word on most of them.

     Why did Curtis escape the attention of modern legal biographers until Streichler rescued him? Several reasons suggest themselves. Justice Curtis seems to have fled political controversy on occasion; his resignation from the Court seemed to some like a "desertion" (149). His great dissent in Dred Scott seemed aberrational to others when viewed in the light of the remainder of his career. And Justice Curtis's "approach [to the constitution] was decidedly at odds with the revolutionary temper of the times" (210).

     Curtis sought to hold the middle ground at a time when the middle ground was collapsing around him, whether in Massachusetts on fugitive slavery, on the Taney Court, or during the Civil War when he became so disenchanted with Lincoln that he attacked the Emancipation Proclamation as an abuse of executive power and supported McClellan for president. Curtis was a man who—as Streichler shows—in Dred Scott championed the argument that the Constitution recognized at least some free African-Americans as citizens, but referred to them as "niggers" in "unquestionably racist" private correspondence where he deemed desirable the Fourteenth Amendment's provision limiting states' representation unless black suffrage was granted, because " . . . Southern niggers can not govern them ["the people"] without their consent . . . " (125–29; 205).

     Streichler seeks to show how Curtis sought to approach these disparate issues—with a commitment to "constitutionalism" and to "common law" constitutional adjudication. The book opens by sketching Curtis's Whig philosophy and dedication to the common law. Streichler's studies show that Curtis sought to confine each branch of the federal government—and that government itself—within what Curtis deemed its constitutional bounds. And there were other continuities in Curtis's career.

     Streichler's account suggests that Curtis was exceptionally sensitive to perceived abuses of power and attacked any institution he thought was abusing it. This included attacking the Taney Court majority's legitimacy in his Dred Scott dissent, and Lincoln. Nor was Curtis interested in popularity, as evidenced by his defense of Johnson, the slaveholder in Commonwealth v. Aves, and the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Curtis took hypertechnical or "superficial" positions on several important slavery-related issues (37, 65). Some accused him of "hallucination" and of acting at the most "inopportune moment" (167). Streichler concludes that Curtis "sometimes acted with a touch of arrogance" (210). He had "little sensitivity to the human face of the tragedy" of Civil War and Reconstruction (205). Curtis may have been an intellectual heir of Marshall and Story, but he was not their equal as a judicial statesman.

     In the end, one wishes that Streichler had made more effort to populate the constitutional "middle ground" with others like Curtis to provide a broader historical context for Curtis's actions. Was there a viable pre-Civil War legal and political "middle ground" on slavery and the Constitution, and who occupied it? Delineation of that middle ground should help to illuminate Curtis's and McLean's actions in Dred Scott. Streichler's position on whether they sought a fight is equivocal, but he thinks Curtis was searching for a middle ground on some issues there (122, 131–33). One suspects that more remains to be learned about Curtis and others like him who, like the English Constitutional Royalists in their day, sought unsuccessfully to defend the "great fortress of constitutional government" in a civil war era of constitutional revolution (197).