In his preface, Earl M. Maltz lists three primary objectives for Slavery and the Supreme Court. First, he seeks to provide a single-volume, comprehensive treatment of the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions relating to slavery, including the context for each case and the reasoning behind the justices' opinions. Maltz also hopes “to provide insights into the trajectory of the Court's slavery-related jurisprudence more generally” (xix) by tracing the Court's decisions alongside the changing political atmosphere during the antebellum years. Finally, Maltz uses the slavery-related decisions to test and evaluate the Court's role in shaping the nation's most divisive political debates.

Slavery and the Supreme Court provides an overview of the Court's slavery-related jurisprudence and includes background material on slavery, the Supreme Court, and antebellum politics. For the general reader, Maltz provides sketches of the escalating sectional crisis, brief biographies of the justices, and more detailed analyses of the arguments and opinions in each case. For the specialist, Maltz interweaves his argument about the role of the Court throughout the overview, but especially in two short assessment chapters and in the conclusion.

Maltz positions his work against scholars he terms “neoabolitionists,” including Don E. Fehrenbacher and Paul Finkelman, whom he characterizes as arguing that the Supreme Court, especially when Roger Taney was Chief Justice, “consistently and unfairly elevated the interests of slaveowners over the rights of those who were held in bondage” (xix). In contrast, Maltz regards the justices as more balanced in their opinions. Using biographical information and a close reading of the justices' opinions in their slavery-related cases, he argues that sound legal reasoning and precedent influenced the justices more frequently than personal beliefs and politics.

Maltz divides his work into five chronological parts that detail the personnel on the Court, the national political climate around the issue of slavery, and the Court's slavery-related decisions during each time period. The first two parts argue that until the mid-1840s, the Court remained hesitant to involve itself directly in the growing national crisis over slavery. Part I examines the Marshall Court's jurisprudence, including cases about the international slave trade, such as The Antelope, and the case of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, which established the authority of the Supreme Court to decide federal law. Part II, “The Age of Accommodation,” characterizes the late 1830s and early 1840s as a time when the justices sought to avoid making decisions that would contribute to rising sectional tensions. For example, in The United States v. The Amistad, Maltz portrays the justices as willing to put aside their varying views on slavery to issue a decision that “followed their more general views on the dictates of justice and conventional legal analysis” (67). In the early 1840s, Maltz interprets the Court's slavery-related decisions as promoting compromises and avoiding direct involvement in national conflicts over issues like the control of the domestic slave trade and the recovery of fugitive slaves from northern states.

The final three parts detail the Court's shift from accommodation to intervention, as the justices attempted to use their decisions to ease sectional tensions and resolve national debates. Part III, “The Conflict Escalates, 1843–1853,” examines the controversy over slavery's future in the territories acquired by the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, as well as the continuing conflict over the issue of recapturing fugitive slaves. As antislavery activists sought to use the courts to mount challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court responded by becoming increasingly sectional in its decisions. Even so, Maltz stresses that the Court's decisions in this era were in line with earlier jurisprudence, and therefore “the Southern victories during this period should not be overstated” (173).

Part IV, “The Sectionalization of American Politics, 1853–1859,” investigates the background, arguments, and opinions in the cases of Ableman v. Booth and Dred Scott v. Sandford. By the mid-1850s, Maltz argues, the Court shifted from a tendency to avoid embroiling itself in sectional issues to an effort to definitively resolve sectional conflicts through its decisions. Part V, “The Isolated Court,” looks at the election of 1860 and its fallout, when the Court became increasingly divided and pro-Southern, thereby isolating itself from the new Republican administration. Maltz concludes with an evaluation of the lessons we should take from the example of the Supreme Court's slavery-related jurisprudence. He argues that, although the Court tried to relieve sectional tensions by finding workable compromises, the Court's failure to resolve the conflicts over slavery reflect the limits of judicial power to solve political crises.

Although Maltz goes to great lengths to portray the Court's decisions as based more on sound legal reasoning than the pro-Southern sympathies of the majority of the justices, he is quick to ascribe antislavery sentiment as a primary motivator in the decisions of justices who opposed slavery, like Justice McLean. Some scholars will undoubtedly disagree with Maltz's argument that the Court strove to maintain sectional balance and avoid interjecting itself into the political controversies of the period. The crisis over slavery infused every aspect of the national government in the antebellum years, and the Supreme Court justices were not immune to its influence.