The birth of the modern Constitution

"This book recounts the history of the United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually overlooked years between the constitutional revolution that occurred in the 1930s and Warren Court judicial activism in the 1950s. The years 1941-53 saw the emergence of legal liberalism, in the divergent activist efforts of Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. The Second World War and early Cold War years of the Court in reality marked the birth of the constitutional order that dominated American public law in the later twentieth century. That legal outlook emphasized judicial concern for civil rights and civil liberties, and reaction to the emergent national-security state."--book jacket.