History of the Supreme Court of the United States

The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-1835 comprises the third and fourth volumes of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States. G. Edward White completes the series’ coverage of the Marshall Court, tracing the last two decades of John Marshall’s term as Chief Justice. White describes the intellectual climate of the Marshall Court’s work and analyzes the Court’s decisions. Throughout, White stresses that the Marshall Court, despite its much-celebrated influence, must be seen as part of a unique cultural period when the heritage of the Revolution confronted the radical political, demographic, and intellectual changes of the nineteenth century. The Marshall Court itself was also unique and unlike the modern Court in that it used an informal set of deliberative procedures that gave the justices’ personal predilections more influence in the Court’s rulings than at any other time in Supreme Court history.