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“Sometimes the Otter and Sometimes the Hound”: Political Power and Legal Legitimacy in American History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

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Abstract

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Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1983 

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References

1 Friedman, Leon, Political Power and Legal Legitimacy: A Short History of Political Trials, 30 Antioch Rev. 157 (1970); Richard B. Morris, Fair Trial: Fourteen Who Stood Trial from Ann Hutchinson to Alger Hiss (rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1967).Google Scholar

2 Raoul Berger, Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

3 Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, at 469–564, 593–618 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Clarence C. Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution 2–29 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1938); Arthur Bestor, Jr., The American Civil War as a Constitutional Crisis, 69 Am. Hist. Rev. 327 (1964). Not all scholars would agree with this assessment. See, for a contrary view, Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1968); Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

4 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).Google Scholar

5 On constitutionalism in American history and its ideological implications see Belz, Herman, New Left Reverberations in the Academy: The Antipluralist Critique of Constitutionalism, 36 Rev. Pol. 265 (1974); Scheiber, Harry N., American Constitutional History and the New Legal History: Complementary Themes in Two Modes, 68 J. Am. Hist. 337 (1981); Charles Mcllwaine, Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern (rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1947).Google Scholar

6 On the Rule of Law see Robert Paul Wolff, ed., The Rule of Law (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971).Google Scholar

7 Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice 35 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

8 Dworkin, Ronald, What Is the Rule of Law, 30 Antioch Rev. 151 (1970). See also David Potter, Social Cohesion and the Crisis of Law, in David M. Potter, History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter 390 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

9 John T. Noonan, Jr., Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks 3–28, 152–70 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976).Google Scholar

10 See, e.g., Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties in the United States 248 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979).Google Scholar

11 On this theme see Theodore L. Becker, ed., Political Trials xi-xvi, 241–44 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1971).Google Scholar

12 Michal R. Belknap, ed., American Political Trials (Contributions in American History, No. 94) (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982).Google Scholar

13 The most important work on political justice in the modern world is Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). See also Becker, supra note 11; Hakman, Nathan, Political Trials in the Legal Order: A Political Scientist's Perspective, 21 J. Pub. L. 73 (1972); id., Old and New Left Activity in the Legal Order: An Interpretation, 27 J. Soc. Issues 105, 105–21 (1971). The best bibliography of writing is in Belknap, supra note 12, at 287–300.Google Scholar

14 Belknap is, if anything, too concerned with definition. His introduction reviews at length the various categorical definitions put forward by Kirchheimer, Becker, and others. His own broad yet convoluted definition obscures rather than clarifies the relationship between political and criminal trials. Belknap observes:. One may properly apply the term “political trial” to any trial or impeachment that immediately affects or is intended to affect the structure, personnel, or policies of government, that is the product of or has its outcome determined by political controversy, or that results from the efforts of a group within society having control of the machinery of government to use the courts to disadvantage its rivals in a power struggle which is not itself immediately political or to preserve its own economic or social position. Belknap, supra note 12, at 6. Would not, e.g., Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954), fit this definition? I think so, yet that litigation is seldom portrayed as a political trial. Perhaps a somewhat wiser course in this matter, to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, would be to adopt the position that we know a political trial when we see it. On the trial court litigation in the Brown case, see Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality 287–542 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975).Google Scholar

15 Belknap, supra note 12, at 14.Google Scholar

16 Id. at ix.Google Scholar

17 Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic 69–108 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West 73–106 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Charles H. Martin, The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Michal R. Belknap, Cold War Political Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party and American Civil Liberties (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977).Google Scholar

18 Paul Finkelman, The Zenger Case: Prototype of a Political Trial, in Belknap, supra note 12, at 21; Stanley N. Katz, ed., A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger 1–32 (2d ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

19 Finkelman, supra note 18, at 40.Google Scholar

20 Leonard W. Levy, Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1964).Google Scholar

21 Steven R. Boyd, Political Choice—Political Justice: The Case of the Pennsylvania Loyalists, in Belknap, supra note 12, at 43, 54; Daniel Novak, The Pullman Strike Cases: Debs, Darrow, and the Labor Injunction, in Belknap, supra note 12, at 129.Google Scholar

22 Felix Frankfurter & Nathan Greene, The Labor In junction (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930); Arnold M. Paul, Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law: Attitudes of Bar and Bench, 1887–1895 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).Google Scholar

23 Wesser, Robert F., Conflict and Compromise: The Workmen's Compensation Movement in New York, 1890s-1930, 12 Labor Hist. 34 (1971).Google Scholar

24 Harold Josephson, Political Justice During the Red Scare: The Trial of Benjamin Gitlow, in Belknap, supra note 12, at 153, 171.Google Scholar

25 Leo P. Ribuffo, United States v. McWilliams: The Roosevelt Administration and the Far Right, in Belknap, supra note 12, at 201; United States v. McWilliams, 54 F. Supp. 791 (D.D.C. 1944).Google Scholar

26 James W. Ely, Jr., The Chicago Conspiracy Case, in Belknap, supra note 12, at 263.Google Scholar

27 Mark L. Levine, George C. MacNamee, & Daniel Greenberg, eds., The Tales of Hoffman xi-xxiv (New York: Bantam Books, 1970); David J. Danelski, The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, in Becker, supra note 12, at 134–80.Google Scholar

28 Ely, supra note 26, at 282.Google Scholar

29 As quoted in Stanley I. Kutler, ed., The Dred Scott Decision: Law or Politics? 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967).Google Scholar

30 On the growth of the national security state see Athan Theoharris, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Houston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), and on the impact of the development of American bureaucracy on the legal culture see William E. Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900, at 113–55 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

31 Belknap, supra note 12, at 16.Google Scholar

32 Stanley I. Kutler, Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); id., Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1971).Google Scholar

33 See, e.g., Alistair Cook, A Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss (2d ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968); Walter Schneir & Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest, (2d ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973); George Marion, The Communist Trial: An American Crossroads (2d ed. New York: Fair-play Publishers, 1950). A more sophisticated view of events is given in Allen Weinstein's Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), and Belknap, supra note 17.Google Scholar

34 Kutler, supra note 12, at xii.Google Scholar

36 Id. at 29.Google Scholar

37 Id. at 58.Google Scholar

38 Id. at 87.Google Scholar

39 Id. at 151.Google Scholar

40 Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958).Google Scholar

41 Kutler, supra note 12, at 182.Google Scholar

42 Id. at 244.Google Scholar

43 E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act 260 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).Google Scholar

44 Kutler, supra note 12, at 245.Google Scholar

45 Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade 22 (New York: Atheneum, 1966). I am indebted to Theodore Becker for calling my attention to this quotation. See Becker, supra note 11, at xi.Google Scholar