Law and Judicial Duty

“In Law and Judicial Duty, Hamburger provides by far the most comprehensive historical account of the ideal of judicial duty that undergirded our framers’ construction of the federal judiciary.”—Michael W. McConnell, First Things

“Hamburger is an accomplished and assiduous legal historian, and his book is a work of imposing scholarship… The history that Hamburger has excavated is genuinely fascinating, and it may alter the terms of debate among constitutional theorists, preoccupied as many of them are with origins… [It’s] a pleasure to read, and that is in part because of the enormous labor that its author poured into it. Clearly it was a labor of love… Philip Hamburger has not only greatly enriched legal history, but he has enabled us to see, if not what the judges of old actually thought, let alone what unconscious thoughts and emotions motivated them, then at least how they wished to be seen; and that is an important part of a proper understanding of judicial behavior, ancient and modern.”—Richard A. Posner, New Republic

“A work of exemplary scholarship that sheds abundant new light on a complex and controversial subject.”—Charles F. Hobson, editor of The Papers of John Marshall

“Law and Judicial Duty is legal history on a grand scale. The book will reshape the scholarly debate about the origins and nature of judicial review.”—R. Kent Newmyer, author of John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court