Unusually, the author of this book is not a professional academic. His Honour David Lynch spent a career first at the English Bar and then on the bench as a circuit judge. In retirement he turned his attention to academic pursuits. He ultimately earned a Ph.D. with a dissertation from Liverpool John Moores University that became this book on federal circuit courts in the early American republic.

The aim of Judge Lynch's book is – in contrast to many prior studies of the period that focus on the US Supreme Court and particularly Chief Justice John Marshall – to assess the federal circuit courts. Judge Lynch does so by examining the work of four particular judges during 1801-1835, the tenure of Chief Justice Marshall that has received so much attention. Judge Lynch's four judges were not in fact circuit judges as such (these did not exist until 1869) but associate justices of the US Supreme Court who rode circuit for half the year, sitting with a district judge to constitute the circuit court. The justices chosen were Bushrod Washington, who served 1801–1829; H. Brockholst Livingston, 1807–1823; Joseph Story, 1811–1845; and Smith Thompson, 1823–1843. Judge Lynch read “1,255 circuit and 325 Supreme Court opinions of the four chosen justices in order to ascertain the influence the circuit court in American legal history”. He also read state court opinions of Justices Livingston and Thompson, both of whom served on the New York Supreme Court before they served on the US Supreme Court, resulting in consideration of a “total of 1,854 Supreme Court, circuit court and state court opinions handed down by Justices Washington, Livingston, Story and Thompson”. An admirable undertaking, without a doubt, especially in light of calls from American legal historians to examine inferior federal courts.

The book proceeds with an introductory chapter that explains and situates the work within existing literature, addresses the collegiate nature of the Supreme Court, and explains why these four justices were chosen. The second chapter considers the political situation of the period, the justices’ use of grand-jury charges as a quasi-political means of engaging the citizenry with a new federal government, the debates about circuit courts in constitutional ratification, the resultant jurisdiction of circuit courts, and how the justices began the task of creating a uniform federal law. Chapters three through six treat each justice individually, giving a short biography and considering, seriatim, each justice's opinions in circuit courts and then the Supreme Court. A conclusion summarises the book. Judge Lynch ultimately propounds the thesis that “the circuit court [w]as vital to the federal court system because, in those very early years, it was the circuit experience and not the Supreme Court which shaped United States law and prepared each justice for a more informed discharge of his duty on the nation's highest tribunal”. And “the success of the federal court system fed up from the ‘inferior’ circuit courts rather than down from the Supreme Court to the lower levels”.

There are good things in this book. Judge Lynch provides some valuable insights on the judicial method and sources of substantive law of his justices. He notes, for instance, a significant tendency to rely on English precedent, especially a tendency of Justice Story, as well as of Justices Washington and Thompson. He provides valuable detail on how the Marshall court operated, arguing that while the justices presented a united front in order to bolster the court's authority in its early days, this was not at the expense of meaningful deliberation behind closed doors. The Marshall court was, in Judge Lynch's view, no puppet court mouthing judgments of the Chief Justice even if it would seem so on first glance. Judge Lynch also infers from the similar subject matter between justices’ state- or circuit-court opinions and those authored for the Supreme Court that Chief Justice Marshall availed himself of justices’ substantive legal expertise when assigning opinions. An interesting picture also emerges of the difficulty of an early American justice's job, travelling hundreds or thousands of miles every year, before even railroad, to do legal work often without access to legal libraries. Each justice also receives a well-reasoned judicial biography. And the index is unusually full and detailed.

But the book is not without its problems. Small errors, some Judge Lynch's (e.g. claiming that the Year Books were written in Latin and that Sir William Holdsworth had been “Professor of Law at Cambridge University” before taking the Vinerian chair at Oxford), and numerous others the editors’ (e.g. referring to a grand-jury presentment “[i]n 1797” for a breach of “the Sedition Act of 1798”, and various instances of style), distract from the work. More significantly, the organisation of the book as a whole, which the summary of it above may exemplify, is problematic. For instance, sections on the origins and jurisdiction of the circuit courts, which readers need to introduce the central topic, inexplicably appear in the middle of chapter two. And the first two chapters, those that focus most on the central thesis of the book, are poorly integrated with the following biographical chapters. Indeed, most of the book does not seem entirely apropos of the central thesis. While chapters one and two, running to about 50 pages, both tend more or less to address the significance of circuit courts, chapters three through six, running to about 130 pages, are essentially judicial biographies of the four chosen justices. As four potted biographies they have some value. But whether they thereby establish something about the significance of circuit courts is another matter. And even as potted judicial biography they sometimes feel unsatisfying. Judge Lynch's methodical approach of presenting separately each justice's circuit court and Supreme Court opinions, while always allowing the reader to know what is under consideration, feels more like summary recitation than synthetic analysis systematically in aid of a broader argument.

One also wonders whether Judge Lynch's conclusions are not unduly influenced by his sample. The circuit-court opinions of these justices were, as set out above, far more numerous than their Supreme Court opinions. One might expect to get from sheer weight of numbers the impression that circuit courts really mattered. Judge Lynch provides little of the sort of nuanced consideration that demonstrates what in the opinions shows how circuit courts were particularly important. Is it not possible that more important legal issues were determined in the Supreme Court? Perhaps the opinions of Chief Justice Marshall, which Judge Lynch did not consider in this book, were highly significant? And what of the relative reception of circuit-court and Supreme Court opinions by the district courts? Most of Judge Lynch's attention seems directed to a descriptive exposition of what kind of judge each of the four men was, not how their opinions show that the circuit courts mattered. In the end, this reader was left feeling somewhat – though not totally – unconvinced by a thin argument.

Finally, there is an apparently unconsidered methodological problem in some of the work. Where Judge Lynch looks at the shaping of American law, his primary source is entirely appropriate: judicial opinions represent the internal substance of law that is under consideration. But at other times he strays outside pure law, and considers how judges do what they do, or occasionally hints at the significance of courts in the broader historical and political situation. In fact, some of his most interesting insights seem to come on questions external to law itself. For instance, Judge Lynch uses Chief Justice Marshall's letters to argue that he seemed like a judge looking for real guidance from his fellow judges rather than offering a fig leaf of participation to placate dominated colleagues. He also refers with effect to Justice Story's description of the Marshall court's decision-making process in a letter to a third party. He thus contributes to the debate about Justice Marshall, and generally suggests something about how judges go about their business. But such insight is external to the substance of law, and so not surprisingly derives from the external source of correspondence. Yet Judge Lynch never mentions correspondence where he reflects on his own method. One therefore wonders whether he was entirely alert to the methodological issues surrounding the use of different sources to answer different questions. That doubt haunts the reader throughout.

Despite its limitations, certain readers should consult this book. Scholars of early American law should assess for themselves the characterisations of the justices profiled herein, as well as that of the Marshall court as a whole. Anyone who might wish to opine on the book's central thesis about the significance of circuit courts, or indeed any inferior federal courts in early America, ought also to take note of it. While perhaps something of a missed opportunity given the significant labour devoted herein by an experienced jurist, the book still has value.