During the first two and half post-Civil War decades, most of the United States (other than the South) underwent tremendous economic growth and social change and endured severe boom and bust cycles during which social tensions among the classes intensified. The American legal system largely bent to accommodate the interests of the most powerful economic interests. In a long series of cases, the Supreme Court used the Commerce, Due Process (5th and 14th Amendments) and Contract Clauses of the Constitution to protect commercial interests against state interference.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field dominated judicial thinking during the first 20 years after the end of the Civil War. He saw the courts as a neutral force, whose principal function was to level the economic playing field so that the private and public sectors could cooperate in the public interest. He sought, said McCurdy (1975), through his 'public-use' doctrine to impose "constitutional limitations on the exercise of the state's inherent powers" (255). Some constitutional scholars, such as Thomas Cooley (1868), constructed a theory of jurisprudence which preached non-i

ntervention by the courts into private property rights which he held to be sacrosanct (341). Law professor Christopher Langdell (1880) used the case method of instruction to enable students to gain "mastery . . . of certain [immutable and rational] principles and doctrines" (716). Roscoe Pound later decried this type of legal philosophy as mechanical jurisprudence, unresponsive to societal needs. Pound (1931) said: "Law is more than a body of devices for business purposes, just as it is more than a body of rules for the guidance of courts" (npn).

From the standpoint of blacks, women, workers, farmers and minorities generally, the Court's decisions were disappointing. In Hall v. DeCuir (1877), the Court used the Commerce Clause to strike down a Louisiana statute which had outlawed racial segregation in public transportation. In the Civil Rights cases, (1883), the Court construed the 14th Amendment narrowly to limit the power of Congress to prevent racial discrimination in public accommodations by the states. These decisions, and later ones, such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which involved a Louisiana statute which segregated the races on trains and which was upheld by the Court on states rights grounds so long as the separate facilities were roughly equal, reflected the dominant thinking of that era and not only in the South.

Holmes, Oliver W. The Common Law (1881). In Law and Jurisprudence, eds. (nfn)Presser & (nfn)Zainalden, 720-729. 3d Ed. St. Paul: West Publishing, 1995.

Gitlow v. New York (1925). In American Legal History, eds. (nfn)Hall & (nfn)Weicek, 418. 2d Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

In practice, rulings of the high court were often pragmatic and took many twists and turns. Despite its predilection toward the protection of private property and liberty of contract, the Court permitted the states a fair degree of latitude in the exercise of their police powers. In Munn v. Illinois