Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age.

• Author: Grandy, Christopher

By Paul Kens

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Pp. viii, 376. $39.95.

Paul Kens has written a lively, entertaining, and scholarly intellectual biography of one of the most fascinating justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Stephen J. Field. Kens traces Field's career from his days as a young attorney just landed in gold-rush-crazed San Francisco in 1849, to his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court less than fourteen years later, and on to the end of the century. Along the way, Kens discusses the political and economic events that shaped the thinking of Field and those with whom he did intellectual battle. Throughout, the book deals with an issue central to law in the economic realm: Does the economic power with which society might legitimately be concerned stem from government alone, or do other, private sources of power warrant a governmental response? Field clearly answered this question in one way, whereas for much of their history Americans have answered it in another. It may be a question that, every generation or so, Americans must answer anew.

Kens provides an insightful and entertaining description of Field's rise to national prominence. Field arrived in San Francisco at the end of 1849 among the throngs looking to make their fortune in the gold fields. However, as the first chapter's title indicates, though a forty-niner, Field was no miner--he arrived with a bit of money and a law degree. Finding the prospects in San Francisco relatively bleak, Field soon moved closer to the gold fields by traveling to the site that later became Marysville, where he was elected alcalde. Within the year, he ran for office and was elected to the state assembly. He returned to private practice after one term, but in 1857 he was elected a justice of the California Supreme Court. In 1863, President Lincoln nominated Field to the U.S. Supreme Court, and, although Field twice sought the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, in 1880 and 1884, he served on the high bench for the rest of his working life, until 1897.

As he relates these events, Kens nicely weaves Field's story with the historical and political events of the time. The second chapter in particular takes up a number of themes that influenced Justice Field's thinking, including the political intrigues of California, the influence of Jacksonian thinking about economic power, the making of rough-and-tumble law in the mine fields, the interaction of Mexican and American laws with...