THE SUPREME COURT IN UNITED STATES HISTORY
VOLUME ONE
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
The history of the United States has been written not merely in the halls of Congress, in the Executive offices and on the battlefields, but to a great extent in the chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. "In the largest proportion of causes submitted to its judgment, every decision becomes a page of history,"[1] "In not one serious study of American political life," said Theodore Roosevelt at a dinner of the Bar in honor of Judge Harlan in 1902, "'will it be possible to omit the immense part played by the Supreme Court in the creation, not merely the modification, of the great policies, through and by means of which the country has moved on to her present position. . . . The Judges of the Supreme Court of the land must be not only great jurists, they must be great constructive statesmen, and the truth of what I say is illustrated by
- ↑ Attorney-General George W. Wickersham, in his address before the Bar of the Court, on the death of Chief Justice Fuller, 219 U. S. xv. Henry Adams' settlement in his Hulortf qf the Untied States (1890), IV, 205, that "history has nothing to do with law except to record the development of legal principles", is singularly inept, for the law as enounced by the Court has made much of the history of the country. See also HictoneaZ Lighte firom Judicial Deeieione, by Edward CahilU MiMgan Law Rewiaw (1906), VI.
