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Request Search for Missing Book -Request Repository Item ... Computing Services Publications Strategic Plan Research Guides Law School Computing Staffing Survey What's New Amicus Briefs- Newsletter Featured Acquisitions Featured Acquisitions - September 2005 Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era : At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism by Stuart Streichler Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2005 Balcony During a career as both a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, Benjamin R. Curtis addressed practically every major constitutional question of the mid-nineteenth century, making judgments that still resonate in American law. Aside from a family memoir written by his brother over one hundred years ago, however, no book-length treatment of Curtis exists. Now Stuart Streichler has filled this gap in judicial biography, using CurtisâÂÂs life and work as a window on the most serious constitutional crisis in American history, the Civil War. Curtis was the lead attorney for President Andrew Johnson in the SenateâÂÂs impeachment trial, where he delivered the pivotal argument, and his was an influential voice in the pervasive constitutional struggle between states and the federal government. He is best remembered, however, for dissenting in the Dred Scott case, in which he disputed Chief Justice TaneyâÂÂs proslavery ruling that no black person could ever become a citizen of the United States. In the wake of the decision, Curtis resigned from the court, the only justice in the Supreme CourtâÂÂs history to do so on grounds of principle. Yet he also clashed with BostonâÂÂs abolitionists over enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and he opposed the Emancipation Proclamation. | |
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