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No changes in the personnel of the Supreme Court occurred during the 1955 Term.Noteworthy among publications dealing with the Court and with constitutional law which appeared during the period under review were a first biography of James Wilson, a member of the original Court; symposia on the late Justice Roberts, the late Professor Thomas Reed Powell, and Justice Black; several interesting reappraisals of John Marshall; and additional installments of Professor Mason's important work on Justice Stone. A full scale critique of Charles Beard's interpretation of the Constitution was published, as well as a variety of writings on historical aspects of the Court, and on a wide range of problems of judicial practice and public law.

There was no change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1952 Term. But following the close of the Term, on September 8, 1953, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who had been appointed to the Court by President Truman in 1946, died unexpectedly at the age of 63. To replace him President Eisenhower gave a recess appointment to Governor Earl Warren of California on October 2. The new Chief Justice was sworn in on October 5.Two important developments in the constitutional law field during the period under review occurred outside the Court. One was the publication by the Government Printing Office, in 1953, of a newly revised annotatedConstitution of the United States, prepared by the Legislative Reference Service under the editorship of Edward S. Corwin. The annotations come down to June 30, 1952. The last annotated Constitution was published in 1938 under the editorship of W. C. Gilbert. The new work, an ample book of about 1400 large pages, is indispensable for students of American government.Noteworthy also was the appearance of the first two volumes of William Winslow Crosskey's monumental study of the American Constitution, under the title ofPolitics and the Constitution in the History of the United States.

The personnel of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1959 Term. From the point of view of the decisions rendered in the public law field, this was an undistinguished Term. Few of the constitutional cases are likely to hold an important place among the precedents, and a considerable number of well-argued decisions turned entirely upon private law questions. But there was no dearth of writing, during the period under review, about the Court as an institution and about the Justices who sit there.Note may be made at this point of the latest chapter in the long dispute over the so-called tidelands. In 1947 the Supreme Court had ruled that, as against the claims of California, the United States possessed paramount rights in lands underlying the Pacific Ocean seaward from the low-water mark. Similar rulings were made in 1950 as regards the claims of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. But with the enactment in 1953 of the Submerged Lands Act, the United States relinquished to the coastal states all of its rights in all lands beneath navigable waters within the three-mile limit, and in excess of that limit within state boundaries as they existed at the time a state became a member of the Union, or as theretofore approved by Congress. The limit of the grant was three leagues (about ten and one-half miles) in the Gulf of Mexico and three geographical miles in the Atlantic and Pacific. The actual extent of the claims of the coastal states involved in the question was therefore left to be settled by litigation.

The membership of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1953 Term. Chief Justice Vinson died on September 8, shortly before the opening of the Term. Governor Earl Warren of California was given a recess appointment by President Eisenhower on October 2, and was sworn in as the fourteenth Chief Justice on October 5. The Senate Judiciary Committee moved slowly, however, and the appointment did not reach the Senate until March 1, 1954, when it was confirmed by a voice vote without opposition.A week after the 1954 Term got under way Justice Robert H Jackson died, of a heart attack, on October 9, 1954, at the age of 62. For a man who had no law degree, Justice Jackson had done very well in the law. After a brilliant career as a lawyer in Jamestown, New York, he entered the government service in 1934 as General Counsel to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He was appointed Solicitor-General in 1938, Attorney-General in 1940, and was elevated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt in June, 1941. He served as chief American prosecutor at the Nürnberg trial of top Nazi war criminals. Though appointed with the reputation of being a liberal New Dealer, Justice Jackson was actually close to the very center of the Court in many cases where the Justices were sharply divided. He was one of the most gifted opinion-writers on the Court, with a flair for felicitous phrasing and well-turned epigrams. To take the place of Justice Jackson, President Eisenhower nominated, on November 8, 1954, Judge John Marshall Harlan, whom he had appointed the previous March to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Harlan, once a successful New York lawyer, is the grandson of the Justice Harlan who served with such distinction from 1877 to 1911.

Two changes in the personnel of the United States Supreme Court occurred during the 1956 Term. Justice Sherman Minton, appointed by President Truman in 1949, retired on October 15, 1956, at the age of sixty-five, for reasons of health. Prior to his appointment to the Court, Justice Minton had served as U. S. Senator from Indiana and had spent eight years on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. To take his place President Eisenhower gave a recess appointment to William Joseph Brennan, Jr., who took the oath of office on October 16, at the age of fifty. A native of Newark and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and of the Harvard Law School, he had served by appointment in 1949 on the New Jersey Superior Court, was advanced to the Appellate Division in 1950, and was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 1952. Justice Brennan was a Democrat, a Catholic, (the first since Justice Frank Murphy, who died in 1949), and the son of an Irish immigrant; and his appointment was announced just three weeks before the presidential election of 1956.

There were no changes in the personnel of the Court while it was in session, but the deaths of Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge during the summer adjournment marked the 1948 term as the last to be dominated by an overwhelmingly preponderant majority of judges appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Justice Murphy's death occurred on July 19, 1949, soon after the adjournment of the Court on June 27. He took his seat on the Court on February 5, 1940, as the successor to Pierce Butler. Justice Rutledge died on September 10. He was the last of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's appointees to the Supreme Court. He was appointed on February 11, 1943, to succeed James F. Byrnes. The passing of these jurists may have been the most significant events as regards constitutional interpretation that occurred during 1948–1949.