Robert C. Post is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He served as the sixteenth Dean of Yale Law School from 2009 to 2017. He specializes in constitutional law, with particular emphasis on the First Amendment. His book For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (with Matthew W. Finkin) has become the standard reference text for the meaning of academic freedom in the United States.

'A tour de force! Robert Post has produced an extraordinary account of the final decade of pre-New Deal constitutionalism and the birth of the modern Supreme Court. The Taft Court sets the stage and introduces its characters in a manner that would make an epic novelist envious. Post satisfies the most fastidious reader's desire for an encyclopedic treatment and comprehensive documentation while also ensuring that the unfolding of the story is compelling and eminently readable. And why should it not be compelling? Post reconstructs a period that has tremendous relevance for our time, with new conservative majorities working to expand the Court's power to better act as a conservative bulwark, the intrusion of justices into high-stakes national politics, and deeply divisive competing visions within the Court on the fundamentals of constitutionalism and the nature of American democracy.' Howard Gillman, Chancellor, University of California, Irvine

• Prologue Mr. Taft Takes Charge; Part I: Constructing the Taft Court: Appointments; 1. John Hessin Clarke and George Sutherland; 2. William Rufus Day and Pierce Butler; 3. Mahlon Pitney and Edward Terry Sanford; 4. Joseph McKenna and Harlan Fiske Stone; Part II: The Holdover Justices; 5. Oliver Wendell Holmes; 6. Willis Van Devanter; 7. James Clark McReynolds; 8. Louis Dembitz Brandeis; Part III: The Incomparable Chief Justiceship of William Howard Taft; 9. Taft's Health; 10. Taft as a Justice; 11. Myers v. United States; 12.The Conference of Senior Circuit Court Judges; 13. Reshaping the Supreme Court; 14. The Changing Role of Chief Justice; 15. The Chief Justice as Chancellor; 16. Lobbying for Judicial Appointments; 17. Creating a New Supreme Court Building; Part IV: The Taft Court as an Institution; 18. Judicial Opinions during the Taft Court; 19. Dissent during the Taft Court; 20. The Authority of the Taft Court; Part V: Social and Economic Legislation; 21. 'Everything Is on Edge': World War I and the American State; 22. Cabining the Constitutional Implications of the War; 23. Diminishing Judicial Deference; 24. Adkins v. Children's Hospital; 25. Price Fixing and Property Affected with a Public Interest; 26. The Protected Realm of Freedom; 27. Ratemaking and Judicial Legitimacy; Part VI: The Positive Law of Prohibition; 28. Prohibition, the Taft Court, and the Authority of Law; 29. Prohibition and Dual Sovereignty; 30. Prohibition and Normative Dualism; 31. Prohibition and Positive Law; 32. Prohibition and Law Enforcement; 33. Olmstead v. United States; Part VII: Federalism and the American People; 34. Federalism and World War I; 35. Dual Sovereignty and Intergovernmental Tax Immunities; 36. Normative Dualism and Congressional Power; 37. The Dormant Commerce Clause and the National Market; 38. National Judicial Power and the American People; Part VIII: Labor, Equal Protection, and Race; 39. Labor and the Jurisprudence of Individualism; 40. Labor and the Construction of the National Market; 41. Government by Injunction; 42. Truax v. Corrigan; 43. The Equal Protection Clause and Race; Epilogue Chief Justice Taft Exits the Scene.