On the Value of History: A Review of A.C. Pritchard & Robert B. Thompson’s A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court

A.C. Pritchard and Bob Thompson have written a splendid history of securities law decisions in the Supreme Court. Their book is exemplary because of its detailed use of the long unpublished papers of Supreme Court justices, including those of Harry Blackmun, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter and Lewis F. Powell, primary sources which included correspondence with other Justices and law clerks as well as interviews with law clerks. The use of these primary sources recounted throughout the text and 67 pages of End Notes deepens our understanding of the intentions of the Justices and sharpens our understanding of the conflicts among the Justices concerning securities law. That the Justices of the Supreme Court throughout the last 90 years have episodically been at conflict with each other is not news.

But the intellectual content of these conflicts in the field of securities law can be more richly appreciated when the published differences in the cases are buttressed by Pritchard and Thompson’s detailed off-stage account of the background of the public decisions as revealed in the Justices’ papers.