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Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism. By Stuart Streichler. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 271. $37.50, ISBN 0-8139-2342-5.)
Justice Benjamin R. Curtis is best known today for his dissent in the 1857 Dred Scott case. Curtis blasted Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's proslavery opinion in what is widely considered one of the landmark dissenting opinions in the history of the Court. Yet even as scholars have made a great deal of the dissent, the constitutional thinking of Curtis himself has been mostly neglected. In this important new book, Stuart Streichler finally gives Benjamin Curtis the sustained scholarly attention he deserves and makes a persuasive case that we need both to rethink the traditional understanding of Curtis's dissent and to restore him as one of the leading constitutional thinkers of his era.
The book is less a chronological biography and more an intellectual history of Curtis and his approach to the Constitution....