Conner, Henry G. John Archibald Campbell: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court 1853-1861. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920. viii, 310 pp. Reprint available October 2004 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-445-2. Cloth. $85. * An Alabama attorney raised in Georgia, Campbell [1811-1889] was appointed to the court by Franklin Pierce. He resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy, eventually serving as its Assistant Secretary of War. He became a successful attorney in New Orleans during Reconstruction and his eminence brought him before the Supreme Court many times. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) he argued that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited state encroachment on economic liberty. Although his argument failed in a 5-to-4 decision, the court reversed itself twenty years later. "An excellent piece of biographical and historical work.": Dictionary of American Biography 4:352.
In this, the first biography of Archibald Campbell Tait since his son-in-law, Randall Davidson’s in 1891, John Witheridge tells the story of how a Scottish outsider became Queen Victoria’s favourite Archbishop of Canterbury, and the most powerful since Laud in the seventeenth century. Following his childhood in Edinburgh and education at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford, Witheridge describes how Tait’s life was shaped by faith, duty and diligence, as well as by harrowing experiences of illness and death. Tait was never content to be an ecclesiastical dignitary, but was ready to intervene and give a lead in the many conflicts, theological and political, that defined his fourteen years at Lambeth. While not always successful, Tait’s leadership of the Church during a period of controversy at home and challenge overseas, bravely accomplished against a background of personal tragedy, makes him a landmark figure in the history of the Church of England.
Provides a penetrating analysis of US Supreme Court justice John McKinley Steven P. Brown rescues from obscurity John McKinley, one of the three Alabama justices, along with John Archibald Campbell and Hugo Black, who have served on the US Supreme Court. A native Kentuckian who moved in 1819 to northern Alabama as a land speculator and lawyer, McKinley was elected to the state legislature three times and became first a senator and then a representative in the US Congress before being elevated to the Supreme Court in 1837. He spent his first five years on the court presiding over the newly created Ninth Circuit, which covered Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. His was not only the newest circuit, encompassing a region that, because of its recent settlement, included a huge number of legal claims related to property, but it was also the largest, the furthest from Washington, DC, and by far the most difficult to traverse. While this is a thorough biography of McKinley’s life, it also details early Alabama state politics and provides one of the most exhaustive accounts available of the internal workings of the antebellum Supreme Court and the very real challenges that accompanied the now-abandoned practice of circuit riding. In providing the first in depth assessment of the life and Supreme Court career of Justice John McKinley, Brown has given us a compelling portrait of a man active in the leading financial, legal, and political circles of his day.
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