Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a well-informed, perceptive, and absorbing biography of a titan of American history.”
Yet he also demonstrates how a pragmatic leader like Marshall, who fought in the Continental Army as a teenager and served as secretary of state before becoming the nation’s fourth chief justice in 1801, was able to forge compromises that defended the Constitution against populists and preserved the Supreme Court’s independence from and authority over a powerful president and legislative branch. Similarly, in Without Precedent, Paul shows that politics in the time of the Founding Fathers was no less dirty than it is today. His first book, Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution, which was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Washington Post, exposed the role of deception in the success of the American Revolution. Paul is a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of California Hastings Law School in San Francisco. How this cousin and rival of Thomas Jefferson helped establish the court’s authority and promote a strong federal government, despite his humble beginnings and many political adversaries, is the story that Joel Richard Paul, F82, tells in his new book, Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times. John Marshall became one of the most influential chief justices of the United States Supreme Court, even though he had completed just one year of grammar school and six weeks of law school.
0 kommentar(er)
