Law, Morality And The Judge: Robert M. Cover\u27s Justice Accused

The intellectual world of the nineteenth century judge was one in which the two main concerns relevant to our topic here were what the judge\u27s role ought to be in the evolution of law in a democratic society, and whether a recognition and application of \u27natural law\u27 was ever appropriate to a legal system. Professor Cover reviews exhaustively the eighteenth and nineteenth century sources from which American judges drew their ideas on these subjects, and studies practically all of the antebellum slavery litigation to discover how judges actually applied these doctrines in the context of slavery cases. What he comes up with is a sort of intellectual profile of the antislavery judge, and how he thought