This work, part of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, tells the story of the Chief Justiceship of former President William Howard Taft, one of President Warren G. Harding’s four appointments to the Court. Harding had campaigned on the slogan of returning the country to normalcy, after the second administration, and experiments with state planning, of President Woodrow Wilson, especially after Wilson brought America into the First World War. Taft’s Justiceship overlapped with much of the period of Prohibition (January 17, 1920–December 5, 1933).

As Post vividly shows, key aspects of the Taft Court were the conscious effort to complete the construction of a national and indeed continental-wide market, and the restoration of Lochnerism, named after the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York. Lochner began the process of overturning as unconstitutional state and federal laws limiting the working day and regulating labor, as a violation of workers freedom of contract, in the eyes of the Court. The Court’s pro-business ethos in the Roaring Twenties arguably facilitated the radical inequality and Wall Street excess leading to the Great Depression, setting the stage for the titanic battles in the years to follow over the struggle for the New Deal during the resurgence of the labor movement. Here, the Supreme Court was at the center of the maelstrom, at it is once again today under the second Presidency of Donald Trump.

Post expertly illuminates the competing legal narratives at play during this period, one grounding the law in customary practices, the second in material prosperity, the third in the democratic project, and the fourth in the need for order in the context of a never-ending struggle for survival between different groups. The first was epitomized by Associate Justice James Clark McReynolds, famous for his bigotry, including racism, antisemitism, and sexism, which Post copiously documents. McReynold’s view of the law was as a kind of spontaneous ordering of the social world, replete with supposed natural inequalities; and thus, quite congenial with judicial review, or judge-made law, striking down the ephemeral “passions” of democratic legislation, and related assertions of equality. The emphasis on material prosperity was associated especially with Taft, who saw the accumulation of capital as equivalent to progress and civilization. This differed radically from the democratic jurisprudence of Louis Brandeis, known for his opposition to the Wall Street Money Trust grouped around the House of Morgan. Brandeis’s appointment to the Court in 1916 by President Wilson inspired fierce opposition from the Eastern Establishment, Taft among them. As Post shows, Brandeis adumbrated key aspects of the philosophy Morton Horwitz (Reference Horwitz2025) has expertly assessed in which questions of dignity, moral agency, free speech, and democracy as a practical experiment and ethical ideal, and the Constitution as a “living organism,” were crucial guards against the dangers of the administrative state. The fourth narrative was that of law as necessary to regulate the constant struggle for survival among competing groups.

The Taft Court was also animated by a common law vision of the Fourteenth Amendment, albeit radically out of place in an America torn by intensified class conflict and racial violence. This followed the period when Wilson’s ostensible war for democracy abroad turned into a war on democracy, free speech, radicalism, and race-mixing at home. Here, the Court crucially aided employers in their battle to control the workplace. To this end, the Court’s strong support for the labor injunction, which often outlawed strikes, is expertly chronicled, helping lead to Republican Senator Robert LaFollete’s 1924 Presidential campaign against Our Judicial Oligarchy, as the book for which he wrote the introduction was titled (Roe Reference Roe1912).Footnote ¹ Taft’s theorizing of, and support for such injunctions went back to his work as an appellate federal judge in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, and the Court’s support for capital was so extreme that it ultimately led to the passage of the 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act under President Herbert Hoover, taking away the ability of the federal Courts to issue such injunctions. In the area of race relations, the Taft Court upheld American apartheid, notably in the South.

Though only 1 of 13 justices constituting the Taft Court, Taft is reported to have played an important role in Harding’s other three appointments. Combined with his role as Chief Justice, Taft was thus the indispensable man in the Court’s right turn, creating one of the most pro-business Courts in the nation’s history, especially after La Follette’s 1924 Presidential defeat. More important than anything else, though, and as ably documented herein, Taft created the modern-day Supreme Court, escaping from the tutelage of Congress through garnering a new building. Under Taft, the Court began choosing its own docket, thereby acquiring increasing power over the federal courts, and in shaping federal law. The backlash against the Court would only come full swing during the battle against The Nine Old Men, as Allen and Pearson (Reference Pearson and Allen1937) chronicled, under Charles Evan Hughes (1930–1941), whose appointment as Chief Justice was successfully urged by Taft.

The Taft Court is a critical and voluminous work, with footnotes often longer than the text. Filled with well-selected quotes, it is a fascinating portrayal of America’s first Gilded Age, and an essential reference work for those living through its second, still ongoing. More than anyone else, Post has rescued the Court during this period from historical oblivion, while showing how much of our modern day 21st-century Supreme Court owes to William Howard Taft. The length makes it encyclopedic, and daunting for the reader, but the payoff is rich. One’s most fervent hope would be that readers disprove one of the epigraphs of the book, by Antonio Gramsci, “History teaches, but it has no pupils.” There is much to be learned here, and acted upon, if we are to make a better nation, world, and future.