Charles Evans Hughes

The standard biography, and a deserving winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. Pusey — a Washington Post editorialist who had Hughes's cooperation and his papers — tells the whole improbable arc across two volumes: the Baptist minister's prodigy son; the New York lawyer whose insurance and utility investigations made him governor; the associate justice who resigned in 1916 to run for president and lost California, and the White House, by fewer than four thousand votes; the secretary of state of the disarmament era; and the return to the center chair in 1930. It is admiring and a little stately, but thorough, fair, and superbly documented — the essential life, and the place any serious reading of Hughes begins. Macmillan, two volumes.

The best book on the epic of 1937, told as a dual biography of the two men at its center. James Simon — who has written parallel studies of Jefferson and Marshall, Lincoln and Taney — sets Roosevelt's assault on the Court against Hughes's cool defense of it, and makes the court-packing fight a genuine constitutional drama. The liveliest way into Hughes's second tenure. Simon & Schuster.

The compact one-volume life, in Little, Brown's Library of American Biography, by the diplomatic historian Dexter Perkins. Less exhaustive than Pusey but shrewd on Hughes as a type — the high-minded Republican statesman — and the best short introduction to the whole career. Little, Brown.

The study of Hughes the diplomat — his years as Harding and Coolidge's Secretary of State, the Washington Naval Conference, and the 'illusions' Glad argues shaped an idealistic American approach to a dangerous world. The standard account of the great career between his two turns on the Court. University of Illinois Press.

The scholarly study of the launching pad — Hughes's rise from the gas and insurance investigations that made his name to two terms as a progressive Republican governor of New York, battling his own party's machine. The fullest account of the reformer before the robes. Cornell University Press.

The standard study of Hughes the jurist — Samuel Hendel's analysis of the constitutional record across both tenures, from the Progressive-era associate justice to the Chief who steered the Court through 1937. The book for the jurisprudence that the biographies narrate. King's Crown Press.

The best account of the 1937 crisis Hughes had to manage — the collision between Roosevelt's New Deal and the Four Horsemen, the court-packing plan, and the sudden shift of doctrine that made the plan unnecessary. Leuchtenburg, the leading historian of the era, is superb on Hughes's generalship: the Chief Justice's public letter that helped sink the packing plan, the timing of West Coast Hotel and Jones & Laughlin, and the question historians still argue — whether the 'switch' was principle, politics, or coincidence. The indispensable setting for Hughes's second tenure. Oxford University Press.

Hughes in his own words — the candid notes he wrote for his family, edited by David Danelski and Joseph Tulchin, covering the whole career with the reticence and precision that were his hallmark. The essential primary source, and the documentary spine of Pusey's biography. Harvard University Press.

Hughes's own book on the institution he would soon lead again — the Columbia lectures he gave in the interval between his two tenures, a lucid insider's account of the Court's history, methods, and self-inflicted wounds (Dred Scott, the Legal Tender reversal). Quietly prophetic, given the crisis that awaited him in 1937. Columbia University Press.

Hughes's greatest opinion, and one of the foundation stones of the First Amendment. A Minnesota law let the state padlock a scandal sheet as a 'public nuisance'; Hughes held for a 5–4 Court that this was a prior restraint on the press, and that the central purpose of the free-press guarantee is to bar exactly such advance censorship. The doctrine of Near — that the government may almost never stop publication before the fact — runs straight to the Pentagon Papers case forty years later. A landmark, and free online.

The opinion that buried the Lochner era. Upholding a state minimum-wage law for women, Hughes wrote for the Court that liberty of contract is not absolute and that the Constitution permits reasonable regulation in the public interest — overruling Adkins v. Children's Hospital and abandoning forty years of judicial resistance to economic legislation. Handed down in the middle of Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing fight, it was the heart of the 'switch in time,' the moment the constitutional revolution turned. Read it against Peckham's Lochner (§56). Free online.

A quiet crack in the wall of segregation. Hughes wrote for the Court that Missouri, which had no law school for Black students, could not satisfy 'separate but equal' by paying Lloyd Gaines's tuition to study out of state — it had to provide an equal facility within the state. A narrow ruling, but the first of the NAACP's graduate-education victories that Thurgood Marshall (§96) would build, step by step, into Brown. Free online.

The first comprehensive Hughes biography in over seventy years — since Pusey won the Pulitzer in 1952. Reitano's Hughes is the great structural reformer of the Progressive age: investigator, governor, justice, presidential nominee, Secretary of State, and the Chief Justice who steered the Court through the New Deal storm. The modern one-volume life this shelf has waited decades for. University Press of Kansas.

The Holmes Devise volume on Hughes's chief justiceship — the fullest scholarly account of the Court that faced down FDR, absorbed the constitutional revolution of 1937, and invented modern rights jurisprudence in footnote four. The institutional companion to the biographies. Cambridge University Press.