Hoffer, Hoffer, and Hull—an estimable team of historians who collaborated on Abortion Rights Controversy in American History: A Legal Reader—now offer The Supreme Court: An Essential History. There are many fine books already available on this subject, ranging from Lucas Powe's recent, idiosyncratic The Supreme Court and the American Elite to the comprehensive, Kermit Hall-edited Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States and Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions. The Supreme Court: An Essential History amounts to something more than Powe's narrative history and something less than Hall's desk references, with its shortcomings offset by a coherent interpretation of the subject rooted in the authors' belief that “legal history lies at the intersection of intellectual, social, cultural, economic, and political events.” A work with a scope this broad cannot address all concerns, and yet in the course of reviewing it one must advert, however reluctantly, to the things it does not do.

Hoffer, Hoffer, and Hull have organized their book into three parts, which correspond with the authors' periodization of Court history into three eras, and fifteen chapters, which cover all fifteen chief justiceships. The chapters all follow the same format: biographical information for each justice who served on that Court, a summary of that Court's “personality” under its Chief Justice, and subheadings that examine significant issues that Court addressed. This method of organization ensures that no Court receives short shrift—one of the authors' aims—but it also strikes me as formulaic and somewhat limiting.

In their chapter on the Rehnquist Court, this proves problematic because so many cases are referenced in less than forty pages. The authors do not have enough space to tell compelling personal stories—occasionally the names of individuals involved in the cases are mentioned—in the way that Peter Irons does in A People's History of the Supreme Court. The authors also do not have enough space to analyze these recent cases with the sort of thoroughness found in Erwin Chemerinsky's Constitutional Law hornbook. They do, however, have enough space to discuss the politicization of that Court while drawing a defensible but somewhat dubious comparison with the politicization of the Chase Court.

By contrast, their treatment of the Jay and Ellsworth Courts is quite compelling. Because those early Courts did far less than later ones, the authors' discussion of their significant decisions on tax, pensions, and admiralty law lends itself to thorough and relatively neutral analysis. Even their chapters on the Waite and Fuller Courts—Courts that made controversial, wrongheaded decisions that can, thanks to 150 years of hindsight, be made the cynosures of any analysis of those Courts' activities—are fairer and less judgmental than expected (although certain subheadings, such as “Uncivil Rites” in the Waite chapter, do betray a sense—perhaps unavoidable—of presentist condemnation).

As I read this book, its hybrid status—less than a reference, more than a narrative history—manifested itself in the form of slower progress on my part. I cannot imagine that many people will read it for hours at a time. Instead, I foresee it being pulled from shelves by individuals interested in lucid, accessible, and sufficiently detailed chapter summaries of the Court's work under its various chief justices. In that sense, The Supreme Court: An Essential History will have a certain kind of staying power and a certain kind of utility, which should satisfy the intentions of its authors. There are too many references to decisions about race and individual rights and not enough about procedure and federalism for my taste, but I suppose the former stories are the ones that compose the history of the Supreme Court that most excites the passions of laypeople. The book itself is not essential reading, but the story that dedicated readers will find contained within its pages assuredly is.