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11 W. Legal Hist. 101 (1998)
The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888-1910

handle is hein.journals/wlehist11 and id is 107 raw text is: procedures, while the following chapter shows the failure of this criticism in bringing about even modest changes to the judicial barriers. The last chapter shows what happened when the Bureau of Immigration, an administrative instrument, was left alone to implement immigration laws that continued to deny aliens' rights. Lucy Salyer has made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of how legal alien residents gradually came to lose their constitutional rights in the United States. What is stunning to most of us who have studied the legal history of Asian immigration to America is that executive justice continued to function for so long; it was executive justice that left American citizens of Japanese ancestry unprotected by the Constitution during World War II because they seemed to be like Japanese enemy aliens. Hyung-chan Kim Western Washington University The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888-1910, by James W. Ely, Jr. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995; 248 pp., illustrations, bibliography, table of cases, index; $49.95, cloth. Only John Marshall and Roger B. Taney have served longer as chief justice than Melville W. Fuller. Despite Fuller's long tenure, the reputation of the Fuller court has never been a particularly lustrous one. The consensus among historians has ranked the Fuller court among the worst, and Fuller himself fares no better, often being dismissed with deroga- tory remarks. Against this backdrop, James W. Ely, Jr. has undertaken the valuable and challenging project of reassessing the court's work during Fuller's tenure and, in a number of areas, making the case that the traditional criticisms are unjustified or at least overstated. This is the first volume in a contemplated series, with each book in the series examining one or more chief justiceships. Herbert A. Johnson, the general editor of the series, in his preface to Ely's volume describes Ely's approach as mildly revisionist (p. x), but that is an unfairly bland description of a forceful book. Ely takes on Fuller's critics at every turn, and-if one accepts his conclusions-more than a mild revision of the prevailing view of Fuller's era is called for. Ely argues that the jurisprudence of the Fuller years may be seen as pointing toward modern American society (p. 214) and that the Fuller court made an enduring contribution to WINTra/SarINa 1998 BOOK REVIEws 101

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