Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790-1890, The

The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790-1890. By Timothy S. Huebner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. xiii, 263 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-8203-2101-X.

Timothy Huebner's The Southern Judicial Tradition examines the development of southern jurisprudence and legal thought in the nineteenth century through detailed case studies of six judges who served on southern state supreme courts: Spencer Roane (Virginia),John Catron (Tennessee),Joseph H. Lumpkin (Georgia),John Hemphill (Texas), Thomas Ruffin (North Carolina), and George W. Stone (Alabama). The author asserts that these half-dozen jurists represented southern judgeship generally and that their careers and judicial dispositions represent a composite picture of the nineteenth-century legal mind. Five of Huebner's subjects served before the Civil War, so his generalizations about southern jurisprudence are far stronger for the antebellum period than for the postwar era. In discussing the antebellum judges, Huebner underscores the significance of judicial responses to the burning questions of the age-namely nullification, Indian removal, corporate development and railroads, slavery, and secession.

Huebner's sketch of George W. Stone is an important entry in this volume and holds particular relevance for readers interested specifically in Alabama history. Stone, who sat on Alabama's supreme bench from 1856 until 1865 and again from 1876 until 1894, is the only one of Huebner's subjects who held judicial office during and after the Civil War. His career therefore sheds light on the Confederate legal system, Reconstruction politics, and postbellum racial readjustment. During the war Stone refrained from militant states'-rights arguments that hampered the South's war effort. For example, he upheld the legality of Confederate conscription in strong centrist tones. His post-Redemption jurisprudence, meanwhile, defended the traditional racial order, as when he sustained parts of Alabama's Black Code against attacks based on the civil rights guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Based on his six case studies, Huebner draws several conclusions about southern legal traditions in the nineteenth century. He finds these traditions to have been "consistent with national judicial thinking" and thoroughly grounded in the broader development of American legal culture (p. 2). In fact, according to Huebner, only on "the question of race" did "the record of the southern judiciary differ substantially from that of northern judges" (p. 8). This conclusion seems surprising because it tends to undermine Huebner's general claims of sectional distinctiveness. From this perspective the lone "southern judicial tradition" seems to have been a defense of slavery and white supremacy.

This troubling inconsistency notwithstanding, Huebner has produced a valuable work. His greatest contribution comes in illustrating the general utility and broad applicability of legal history. This volume should appeal to anyone interested in the southern past, not merely to a shallow pool of forensic specialists. Huebner forcefully demonstrates that the appellate judicial process speaks volumes about American social, political, and economic history. In sum, Huebner has produced the best kind of legal history-one that does not portray judges and lawyers in isolation but instead places the legal process in the mainstream of the American experience.

ERIC TSCHESCHLOK Miles College

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 2002
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