Volume 1, Number 3 · September 26, 1963
Legal Lights
By Mark DeWolfe Howe
The Occasions of Justice: Essays Mostly on Law
by Charles L. Black Jr.
Macmillan, 231 pp., $5.00
Perspectives in Constitutional Law
by Charles L. Black Jr.
Prentice-Hall, 118 pp., $3.95
An eminent historian of American religious thought has said of New England's Great Awakening in the 1740's that it was 'an uprising of the common people who declared that what Harvard and Yale graduates were teaching was too academic.' Some future historian of American law may some day suggest that during the middle decades of the twentieth century there occurred a similar Great Awakening on the secular front—a massive stirring in constitutional law known to its contemporaries as 'activism.' It will be pointed out, perhaps, that in that second Great Awakening, as in the first, the revulsion of the revivalists was against the legalistic teachings of Harvard's graduates (those Old Lights, Thayer, Hand, and Frankfurter)—teachings which an activist New Light scornfully described as 'the New Higher Criticism of the Supreme Court.' So vivid may the analogies seem that an ardent scholar of the future may search the archives of the 1960's in the hope that he will find one Justice calling another an 'Arminian' or some Harvard professor calling his opposite number at Yale an 'Enthusiast.' The search may not go wholly unrewarded.
Review, 1272 words
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