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34 J. Sup. Ct. Hist. v (2009)

handle is hein.journals/jspcth34 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky The other day I was looking at the Court's docket for this year, and realized that while the specifics may have changed-there are more cases dealing with technology, for example- the heart of the docket is what it has been for more than eight decades: important ques- tions of constitutional and statutory interpre- tation. In the course of recent research, I read through some volumes of US. Reports for the mid-1920s, before the Judges' Bill of 1925 took force and reoriented the Court. While one would run across the occasional case that would have been important in any Term, a vast majority of the cases involved matters of pri- vate law or obscure state regulation. Chief Jus- tice William Howard Taft wanted to make the Court primarily a constitutional tribunal, and he succeeded brilliantly. It is hard to believe that a historian reading about the cases during the Rehnquist and Roberts eras would dismiss the vast majority of them as unimportant. The Court itself, of course, since the founding of the nation, has been critical to the successful operation of the great experi- ment, and this issue looks at some of those events in which the Court played a part. In some instances, it did so through expound- ing principles in a decision, and Thomas Cox examines one of the most important of those cases, Gibbons v. Ogden. Moreover, as histo- rians have understood for a long time, it is not only the jurisprudential issue that counts, but also how that decision plays out against the context of changing economic and social conditions. Mr. Cox does an admirable job of explicating this. The Supreme Court never ruled on the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but mat- ters arising under America's first internal se- curity act did come up before some of the lower courts. Given how active the judiciary is regarding current security measures, Arthur Garrison's examination of how judges treated the early laws is instructive. In the last issue of the Journal, we ran the first part of Theodore Vestal's exami- nation of how the Court during the Warren years engaged in public diplomacy, a role then somewhat alien to the Justices. Since then, of course, members of our High Court have be- come familiar figures as they travel overseas during the summer recess and speak to jurists v

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