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The Taft Court offers the definitive history of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. Using untapped archival material, Robert C. Post engagingly recounts the ambivalent effort to create a modern American administrative state out of the institutional innovations of World War I. He shows how the Court sought to establish authoritative forms of constitutional interpretation despite the culture wars that enveloped prohibition and pervasive labor unrest. He explores in great detail how constitutional law responds to altered circumstances. The work provides comprehensive portraits of seminal figures such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Dembitz Brandeis. It describes William Howard Taft's many judicial reforms and his profound alteration of the role of Chief Justice. A critical and timely contribution, The Taft Court sheds light on jurisprudential debates that are just as relevant today as they were a century ago

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived

Intro -- Contents -- I. The Lectures -- 1. First Lecture: A Short History of Representation and Discursive Democracy -- 2. Second Lecture: Campaign Finance Reform and the First Amendment -- II. Commentary -- 3. Out-Posting Post - Lawrence Lessig -- 4. Legitimacy, Strict Scrutiny, and the Case Against the Supreme Court - Frank Michelman -- 5 Free Speech as the Citizen's Right - Nadia Urbinati -- 6. Citizens Deflected: Electoral Integrity and Political Reform - Pamela S. Karlan -- III. Response -- 7. Representative Democracy - Robert C. Post -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Commentators -- Index.

First Amendment defenders greeted the Citizens United ruling with enthusiasm, while electoral reformers recoiled in disbelief. Robert Post offers a constitutional theory that seeks to reconcile these sharply divided camps, and explains how the case might've been decided in a way that would preserve free speech and electoral integrity.