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38 J. Sup. Ct. Hist. v (2013)

handle is hein.journals/jspcth38 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky This issue of the Journal, like its predecessors, shows the great variety of topics that fall under the rubric of Supreme Court History. While there are two articles dealing with specific cases-both from the Society's Silverman Lecture series-others are about the impact of cases on individuals, an attack on the integrity of a member of the Court, and an examination of why dissent became more common during the years of the so-called Roosevelt Court. Your editors are always interested in receiving articles about the Court and its members in the nineteenth century-especially the lesser-known ones. So we perked up when Daniel J. Wisniewski sent us a piece on Robert Cooper Grier that met both criteria- nineteenth-century and lesser-known. For the most part there have been very few scandals involving the Court, and only one member has ever resigned due to allegations of misconduct. But as Wisniewski points out, these charges were rife in 1854 and 1855 when opponents were gunning to get Grier off the Court. As I have mentioned before, I am currently working on a book on dissent on the High Court, and when I began my work a few years ago most ofthe material I found was descriptive rather than analytic. There were plenty of articles about dissent rates, but very few about why Justices dissented. Everybody assumed it resulted from their disagreement with the majority opinion. It is, however, far more complicated. From John Marshall through William Howard Taft the culture of the Court favored institutional unity: during the thirty years that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., sat on the Court, for example, nine out of every ten cases came down unanimously. One of the things I want to understand is why this culture fell apart, and so I was elated when we received the article from Pamela Corley, Amy Steigerwalt, and Artemus Ward on the disintegration of consensus in the Roosevelt Court. As readers who follow the Court you will all find this very interesting, I found it far more than that, in that it suggests how much more there is to explore about dissent. We all know that Supreme Court deci- sions affect lives, not just those of the populace at large, but also small groups and v

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