Most scholars include Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) in their list of truly important Supreme Court decisions. There are exceptions. Michael Klarman argues that Gibbons “had little concrete effect,” and he is arguably correct because Gibbons did not have the same sort of immediate, profound impact as decisions like Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which tore apart settled albeit indefensible understandings about the social order, or Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), which laid the foundations for vigorous and far-reaching enforcement of landmark civil rights legislation. There is nevertheless little doubt that this Marshall Court ruling looms large in a nation within which the commerce clause has become perhaps the single most important one in the Constitution.

In Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic, Tom Cox characterizes Gibbons as a “triumph for American commercial development” (187) that “continues to resonate” in an era of “technological change, commerce, and social upheaval” (193). His history of the events that led to the decision is lengthy and detailed, and his accounts of the individuals who invented American steamboat technology, developed it in a new nation, and both secured and contested the state-granted monopolies that followed are intriguing. In his hands, the story of Gibbons is the story of determined and all-too-human inventors, entrepreneurs, judges, and politicians whose actions reflected a complex mix of idealism and sheer profiteering. Figures such as Robert Fulton, and chancellors Robert R. Livingston and James Kent come alive in these pages, not always in ways that flatter them. This is as it should be, for Gibbons was indeed “a conflict that bordered at times on melodrama,” one involving “powerful families, public campaigns, and private intrigue” (181). Prodigious research and meticulous detail are the strengths of this book. The resulting narrative is exhaustive and potentially definitive, and Cox succeeds admirably in supporting two of the three elements of significance he postulates in his preface: the personalities that shaped “financial interests and social status in the tumultuous” early years of the nation, and the ways these individuals and the alliances they formed “used the state and federal court systems to advance their economic interests” (xiv).

He is less successful in establishing clearly his third point of emphasis, the nature and significance of Gibbons as “an important [legal] precedent” (xiv). His discussion of Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion for the Court, and Justice William Johnson's concurring opinion, occupy a scant seven pages. That is not necessarily a flaw in a work whose primary purpose is to place the decision in the contexts of the period and events within which it was decided. But his treatment of the debate between Marshall and Johnson about the exact nature of the federal commerce power, in particular the extent to which it even allows the states to regulate, strikes me as incomplete given its importance. Moreover, he confines his discussion of the Taney Court's resolution of the exclusive-concurrent power dispute, Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), to a single sentence, observing only that “the ‘Cooley doctrine’ provided a baseline for determining federal commerce clause cases from the 1850s to the 1930s,” without ever spelling out exactly what that doctrine actually is.

Modern commerce-clause doctrine is firmly grounded in Gibbons, and it was important for all of the reasons Cox identifies. But, the Court's take on these matters was then and remains now much more complex than one would realize given Cox's account. The Rehnquist Court's “New Federalism” decisions, for example, were not holdings dictated by “state laws [that] already provided gun control [United States v. Lopez (1995)] and rape prevention [United States v. Morrison (2000)], making federal laws based on the commerce clause unnecessary.” Rather, they reflected the majority's assumption that the federal commerce power extended only to “economic activities,” a characterization well worth examining in the light of John Marshall's expansive definition of commerce in Gibbons and, although arguably tangential to Cox's discussion, at odds with what the Court actually said in key precedents such as Wickard v. Filburn (1942).

For me the ultimate test of a book is whether I learned from it and whether it held my attention. Cox succeeds admirably on the first count, deepening my understanding of the individuals and events that shaped a seminal decision and the economic and technological development of the nation. He is less successful on the second, often providing so much detail that the narrative thread is lost, at least for someone whose primary frame of reference is the law. This is nevertheless a book that anyone interested in the period, the Court, and this decision should read, even if Cox does not tell us just who, in the wake of Gibbons, had the insight (cheek, perhaps?) to name their steamboat the Chief Justice Marshall and, in response to a victory in yet another lawsuit, provide “state legislators and lobbyists … a free jaunt … complete with food and drink” (179) on what I trust was a suitably magisterial vessel. The Great Chief Justice, devoted as he was to fine cuisine and fine beverages, surely would have approved.