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Justice Stephen Field

Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age

Paul Kens

392 pages, 12 illustrations, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-0817-1, $39.95

Book Cover ImageOutspoken and controversial, Stephen Field served on the Supreme Court from his appointment by Lincoln in 1863 through the closing years of the century. No justice had ever served longer on the Court, and few were as determined to use the Court to lead the nation into a new and exciting era. Paul Kens shows how Field ascended to such prominence, what influenced his legal thought and court opinions, and why both are still very relevant today.

One of the famous gold rush forty-niners, Field was a founder of Marysville, California, a state legislator, and state supreme court justice. His decisions from the state bench and later from the federal circuit court often placed him in the middle of tense conflicts over the distribution of the land and mineral wealth of the new state. Kens illuminates how Field's experiences in early California influenced his jurisprudence and produced a theory of liberty that reflected both the ideals of his Jacksonian youth and the teachings of laissez-faire economics.

During the time that Field served on the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation went through the Civil War and Reconstruction and moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy in which big business dominated. Fear of concentrated wealth caused many reformers of the time to look to government as an ally in the preservation of their liberty. In the volatile debates over government regulation of business, Field became a leading advocate of substantive due process and liberty of contract, legal doctrines that enabled the Court to veto state economic legislation and heavily influenced constitutional law well into the twentieth century. In the effort to curb what he viewed as the excessive power of government, Field tended to side with business and frequently came into conflict with reformers of his era.

Gracefully written and filled with sharp insights, Kens' study sheds new light on Field's role in helping the Court define the nature of liberty and determine the extent of constitutional protection of property. By focusing on the political, economic, and social struggles of his time, it explains Field's jurisprudence in terms of conflicting views of liberty and individualism. It firmly establishes Field as a persuasive spokesman for one side of that conflict and as a prototype for the modern activist judge, while providing an important new view of capitalist expansion and social change in Gilded Age America.

"Paul Kens has done a masterful job of making Stephen Field and his jurisprudence understandable, and he has done so in a lucid and indeed at times elegant manner."--Melvin I. Urofksy, author of A March of Liberty

"Literate, perceptive, and impressively researched, this book clarifies long-ambiguous aspects of the meaning of liberty in the Lincoln-McKinley presidential decades."--Harold M. Hyman, author of A More Perfect Union

"A major contribution to our understanding of the jurisprudence of the late nineteenth century."--James W. Ely, Jr., author of The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888–1910

"This is history of American political thought, of law and economic development, and of law and politics, as well as a study of judicial activism. It is an absolutely essential revision of what we know about Field and laissez-faire."--Martin Shapiro, author of Who Guards the Guardians

"A fine study of one of our most interesting and important justices. What is especially valuable is Kens' placement of the issues addressed by Field in their social and political contexts. The chapters on California are especially vivid and illuminating."--Sanford Levinson, author of Constitutional Faith

"An incisive analysis of an extremely complex man and the law he helped mold. Fresh, informed, and persuasive."--Gordon Bakken, author of Practicing Law in Frontier California

PAUL KENS is associate professor of political science and history at Southwest Texas State University and the author of Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial and Judicial Power and Reform Politics: The Anatomy of Lochner v. New York. In 1996 the Supreme Court Historical Society awarded him the Hughes-Gossett Award for Historical Excellence for the best article published in its journal.