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Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating biography deserves a wide readership
Review: 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 a balanced view. It would be easy to characterize Field as an apologist for the wealthy establishment--and he was so characterized by contemporary critics. But that characterization was not correct. Field's logic led him to take politically unpopular stands, especially with respect to issues of race, immigration, and corporate power. His concern about the potential abuse of government caused him to defend a strong role for federal judicial oversight of state legislation--recognizing that state legislatures might be even more likely than Congress to adopt special-interest legislation.
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