This research paper summarizes and evaluates the above-cited book by Robert G. McCloskey and its updating after 1958 by Sanford Levinson. The book is a comprehensive, yet distilled, history of the decisions and jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court and its evolving role in interpreting the Constitution to meet changing conditions. The great strength of the book is its expository pithiness, its ability to condense the essentials of the Court's development in highly readable prose, a task at which McCloskey is more adept than Levinson. Its flaws flow from its aims which are at the same time too ambitious to permit abbreviated treatment of its subject matter and too limited to serve as the definitive analysis of the Court. Its major conclusions are well reasoned and supported.
McCloskey said that it was his goal to provide "a coherent view of what the Court is up to at any given time" (16). He does much more than that by explaining the reasons why the Court developed as it did within the unique concept of federal-state relationships which stemmed from the constitutional debates of 1787. He says that "from 1789 until the Civil War . . . the dominant interest of the Supreme Court was in the greatest of all questions left unsolved by the founders-the nation-state relationship" (17). He says that in many respects "the intentions of the framers [of the Constitution] were ambiguous," requiring the Court to interpret its meaning. McCloskey and Levinson reject the view of modern conservative revisionists that the Court should confine itself to consideration of the literal language and intent of the framers.
The Court's first task was to define its role, to establish the principle and scope of judicial review by the Court of laws enacted by Congress and the states and in particular its right to declare unconstitutional laws which in the view of a majority of the Court at any time conflicted with the Constitution. That principle...