Life and Letters of Joseph Story: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University

by Joseph Story

From Story's vast correspondence his son William has selected those letters that describe his childhood and youth, education, life at the bar, and judicial and professorial life. Taken along with his various published treatises and his monumental work on the Constitution, Commentaries on the Constitution (1833), this assemblage illuminates the fine mind that was Story's.

1270 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

American lawyer who served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1811 to 1845. He is most remembered for his opinions in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and The Amistad case, and especially for his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States.
Story opposed Jacksonian democracy, saying it was "oppression" of property rights by republican governments when popular majorities began (in the 1830s) to restrict and erode the property rights of the minority of rich men. Historians agree that Justice Joseph Story reshaped American law—as much or more than Marshall or anyone else—in a conservative direction that protected property rights.