The Constitutional Law Lectures of John Marshall Harlan

John Marshall Harlan is widely regarded as one of the most important Supreme Court justices in American history. He served on the Court for thirty-four years (1877-1911) – one of the longest tenures of any justice in history. Harlan is best known for his racially liberal opinions at a time when the Supreme Court had little sympathy for claims of racial justice.

While serving as a Supreme Court justice, Harlan taught Constitutional Law at George Washington law school for twenty years. During the 1897-1898 academic year, one of Harlan's students transcribed all of Harlan's Constitutional Law lectures. The existence of these lectures is not widely known and they have never heretofore been published. This volume is comprised of Harlan's twenty-six Constitutional Law lectures, along with annotations and an introduction.

In these lectures, Harlan considers a wide range of constitutional law issues, including some that he never had occasion to address in his Supreme Court opinions. These lectures also present a much more complicated picture of Harlan's views on race than emerge from his judicial opinions. Though Harlan was a vigorous proponent of black rights, he viewed Anglo Saxons as the preeminent "race" in the United States, and believed that all other racial groups in the United States would eventually die out. Harlan's lectures reveal that he was profoundly troubled by the substantial immigration into the United States of non-Anglo Saxons, believing that many of these immigrants were criminals. He worried that these immigrants might subvert the nation's democratic traditions.

Viewed as a whole, the lectures provide rich insight into Harlan's thought and help provide a more complex portrait of one of the most important Supreme Court justices in American history.

This book is part of the Legal History Series, edited by H. Jefferson Powell, Duke University School of Law.