Andrew Kent was mentioned in a Faculty Lounge post about his article on Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White.
Similarly, Fordham Law Professor Andrew Kent’s article on Justice White’s service during the Civil War – for the Confederacy – also draws in many ways on traditional themes and methods. It invites comparison to early biographies of Justice Holmes like The Yankee from Mount Olympus and more recently biographies like G. Edward White’s Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self, not just because White served with Holmes in both the Civil War (though on opposite sides) and on the United States Supreme Court. Kent delves how White’s experience during the Civil War was a formative experience for White. This long-neglected topic helps us see hidden connections between the Confederacy and early twentieth century legal thought. And in that regard, Kent’s article intervenes in a vibrant question of US historiography: the role of the Supreme Court in the reconciliation between Union and Confederacy. We have heard much of late about the legacy of the Civil War during Jim Crow; Justice White opens up new and important perspective on the role of constitutional law in reconciliation. These two articles, thus, reflect the journal’s commitment to traditional topics and to exploring new questions about those topics.