This is the first full-scale history of two of the nation's most important courts: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (often called the nation's "second most important court") and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The Court of Appeals has become the undisputed chief tribunal for administrative law in the United States and is the court to which Presidents often look when appointing Supreme Court justices. The District Court has become the principal venue for oversight of the executive branch of the federal government. Morris considers the factors that have influenced the development of each court; portrays the most influential of their judges; and considers the most important decisions and cases lines of each court.

The Kentucky-born son of a Baptist preacher, with an early tendency toward racial prejudice, Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge (1894-1949) became one of the Court's leading liberal activists and an early supporter of racial equality, free speech, and church-state separation. Drawing on more than 160 interviews, John M. Ferren provides a valuable analysis of Rutledge's life and judicial decisionmaking and offers the most comprehensive explanation to date for the Supreme Court nominations of Rutledge, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. Rutledge was known for his compassion and fairness. He opposed discrimination based on gender and poverty and pressed for expanded rights to counsel, due process, and federal review of state criminal convictions. During his brief tenure on the Court (he died following a stroke at age fifty-five), he contributed significantly to enhancing civil liberties and the rights of naturalized citizens and criminal defendants, became the Court's most coherent expositor of the commerce clause, and dissented powerfully from military commission convictions of Japanese generals after World War II. Through an examination of Rutledge's life, Ferren highlights the development of American common law and legal education, the growth of the legal profession and related institutions, and the evolution of the American court system, including the politics of judicial selection.

The controversial 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the "business of base ball" was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. In Baseball on Trial, legal scholar Nathaniel Grow defies conventional wisdom to explain why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time. Currently a billion dollar enterprise, professional baseball teams crisscross the country while the games are broadcast via radio, television, and internet coast to coast. The sheer scope of this activity would seem to embody the phrase "interstate commerce." Yet baseball is the only professional sport--indeed the sole industry--in the United States that currently benefits from a judicially constructed antitrust immunity. How could this be? Drawing upon recently released documents from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Grow analyzes how the Supreme Court reached this seemingly peculiar result by tracing the Federal Baseball litigation from its roots in 1914 to its resolution in 1922, in the process uncovering significant new details about the proceedings. Grow observes that while interstate commerce was measured at the time by the exchange of tangible goods, baseball teams in the 1910s merely provided live entertainment to their fans, while radio was a fledgling technology that had little impact on the sport. The book ultimately concludes that, despite the frequent criticism of the opinion, the Supreme Court's decision was consistent with the conditions and legal climate of the early twentieth century.

Leadership on the Federal Bench: The Craft and Activism of Jack Weinstein considers the ways a particularly gifted federal judge seized the opportunities available to district judges to influence the results of the cases before him, and employed the tools available to him to make policy having a national impact. In the book, author Jeffrey Morris considers the ways in which the judge, Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York, has been limited by his position. This book adds to the slim literature about the policy-making role of district judges applying the work of legal historians, political scientists and those trained in the law. Focusing upon an admitted judicial activist - perhaps the most famous, innovative and controversial district judge sitting today - the book permits a close look at activism at the trial level. Leadership on the Federal Bench: The Craft and Activism of Jack Weinstein begins by analyzing the job of a federal district judge and why it is profitable to study Judge Weinstein. Related topics include Weinstein's background before appointment to the bench; the political and legal environment within which Weinstein has judged and the characteristics of the district in which he sat and its possible impact on him. Part of the book focuses on Weinstein's judicial output for each of his four decades on the bench. Cases are drawn from a diverse number of areas, among them the areas of civil rights, freedom of speech, search and seizures, organized crime and political corruption cases, evidence and procedure. Finally, conclusions are made on the role of district courts, judicial activism in general, along with a summary of Judge Weinstein's career.

An award-winning historian's pathbreaking book uses federal education policy from the Great Society to Reagan's New Morning to demonstrate how innovative policies become entrenched irrespective of who occupies the White House.