Connecticut Supreme Court History
Volume I (2006)

ON THE BIRTH OF THE CONNECTICUT SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Melvin I. Urofsky
Professor of History Emeritus, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Editor, Journal of Supreme Court History 

Until fairly recently, the history of the judiciary has consisted primarily of case law. In law schools, one sees the “history” of a particular doctrine as it develops from one case to the next. There were a few—very few—analytical biographies of justices, and a handful of case histories, of which the most famous—and still the best—is Anthony Lewis’s Gideon’s Trumpet. We did not have any systematic examination of the courts at any level that included ties between and among judicial backgrounds, political interests, case context, and the myriad other factors that historians would assume were necessary when trying to write any form of institutional history. One did not even have that at the case level. Generations of students in colleges and law schools have studied, in greater or lesser degree, landmarks such as Marbury v. Madison (1803), M’Culloch v. Maryland (1819), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), or even Brown v. Board of Education (1954) without any idea of whom William Marbury, James McCulloh, Dred Scott (much less John Sanford) or Linda Brown were. Nor did they know very much about the authors of these opinions. 

This all began to change in 1974 when Chief Justice Warren E. Burger began a discussion about what could be done to preserve the history of the United States Supreme Court, especially the records relating to its very early history, that is, before the era of the Great Chief Justice, John Marshall. These talks led to the organization of the Supreme Court Historical Society later that year. Over the last three decades the activities of the Society, now quartered in the handsome Opperman House a few blocks from the Marble Palace, have grown extensively. 

In addition to the multi-volume documentary history of the early Court, the Society sponsors a number of other activities designed to bring information about the Court to the public as well as to spread the ideas of the rule of law in a democratic society. There are lecture programs, publications, seminars for high school teachers, and a journal that, we believe, combines the best of good history and popular writing. It is doubtful if many of the founders of the Society three decades ago envisioned how robustly their child would grow. 

We are delighted to see that other judiciaries are now having their activities treated through historical organizations. On the federal level some of the Circuit Courts of Appeals have their own historical societies, of which the most active is that of the Ninth Circuit on the West Coast. There has not been that much activity on the state level, so that those of us involved in the enterprise of judicial history are delighted to see the birth of the Connecticut Supreme Court Historical Society, and to know that there will be a new journal carrying information about that state’s Supreme Court. 

As editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History, I am, of course, sensitive to the needs of such an organ and the role it plays in historical study. We historians love to do research and discover new things and write them up, but without an outlet for that work, our efforts would be in vain. Without journals in which to publish judicial history, the field would soon wither, because part of doing history is being able to share what we find with others.  

Journals are effective teaching tools, especially if they have a varied audience. The Journal of Supreme Court History reaches not only professional students of history, but scholars in law schools and, most importantly, our general membership. The Supreme Court Historical Society has several thousand members who are practicing attorneys or judges. They are learned in the law, but interested amateurs in history. They want to know more about the history of the high court, and I am always delighted when we get “fan letters” from these members telling us how much they enjoyed the latest issue. 

Why should we want to reach these people? Why shouldn’t we be satisfied if other scholars read and evaluate our work? After all, very few branches of history have journals that enjoy wide circulation, and even then the readership consists primarily of practitioners. 

The philosophy of the Society is that history matters, that we are better able to understand our present if we know what happened in the past. This is especially true regarding the judicial branch of government, which for too long has been seen primarily as a generator of decisions to be studied in law schools, and mentioned in passing in college history courses. 

What we have learned is that the judicial branch of the government has as important an effect on the lives of the American people as do the executive and legislative arms. One can think of no act of a president or Congress that had such an impact on American society as the Court’s striking down racial segregation. No act by any politician so affected the American political system as did the Court’s orders regarding reapportionment of state legislative districts. The Equal Rights Amendment may have failed, but women today enjoy legal equality thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s and 1980s. Nor is the Court a stranger to controversy. Decisions such as Dred Scott, the Income Tax Cases (1895), and more recently Roe v. Wade (1973) have generated intense public debate. 

These decisions involve far more than legal doctrines. They implicate social change, politics, economics, racial and gender issues, and they cannot be understood in the abstract. They are not simply applications of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, or interpretations of the reach of the Commerce Clause. I recall one time in law school when the teacher said that the property cases we were discussing had a very interesting history, but of course no one would be interested in that. I, of course, was, but he was right; my fellow students cared very little for the medieval English society that gave birth to those rules of property that we still follow. Another time, in constitutional history, the teacher casually dismissed the whole fight between Franklin Roosevelt and the Court as irrelevant. Only the cases and the doctrines they promulgated mattered. 

Historians, of course, have always known that history matters, and not just to those of us who do it for a living. The recent interest in popular history books, such as those written by David McCullough, indicates that there are many people who do want to know more about their past. Those of us in the field of judicial history should make sure that the stories of our courts are part of that interest. 

This is what we at the Supreme Court Historical Society are trying to do, and our publications, especially the Journal, play an essential role in that educational mission. We want our members, and the general public, to know more about the judicial branch in general, and the United States Supreme Court in particular. We want them to understand the Court, not in a narrow law school way, but as part of the broader sweep of American history. 

We hope that the journal Connecticut Supreme Court History will have a similar mission and an equally appreciative readership—professional historians, legal scholars, and an educated lay audience. We welcome you to the field, and hope that our ranks will soon be swelled by other societies and journals. The field is broad, and there is room aplenty for those who would seek to explore it.
 

Connecticut Supreme Court History, Vol. I | Publications