The History of the Supreme Court of the United States

Alexander M. Bickel (d. 1974) was one of the foremost historians of the United States Supreme Court and the Constitution. A native of Romania, Bickel graduated from Harvard with honors and then worked on the U.S. Supreme Court as law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter. Bickel was a frequent contributor to Commentary, The New Republic, and the New York Times, and published extensively on constitutionalism, Burkean thought, citizenship, and the freedom of speech. Bickel taught as a professor at Yale Law School from 1956 until his death in 1974. Benno Schmidt is a leading scholar of the First Amendment, the history of race relations in American law, and the history of the Supreme Court. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Schmidt was President of Yale University from 1986–92. Schmidt served as law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren and began his academic career at Columbia Law School in 1969. In 1973, he became one of the youngest tenured professors in the university's history, and served as the Dean of Columbia Law School before his presidency at Yale. He now also serves as Chairman of the Council on Aid to Education, of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, and of Edison Schools.

1. Mr Taft rehabilitates the court; 2. The rule of reason; 3. The fate of social legislation, 1910–14; 4. Appointment cycles; 5. The fate of social legislation, 1914–21: federal; 6. The fate of social legislation, 1914–21: state; 7. Federal administration and the federal specialties; 8. The heyday of Jim Crow; 9. The Peonage cases: the Supreme Court and the 'wheel of servitude'; 10. Black disenfranchisement from the KKK to the Grandfather Clause.