A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan by David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman Jr.

Reviewed by: A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan by David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman Jr. Paul Moreno David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman Jr. A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. Pp. 372. Photographs. Hardback: $44.99. With this fine volume of judicial history, David Chardavoyne (whom I've worked with for the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society) has helped abate the envy that those of us in the Western District of Michigan have for the Eastern District. Chardavoyne wrote a fine history of the Eastern District in 2012 and that district has its own historical journal. A Lincoln Legacy is a comprehensive and encyclopedic account of the origins and development of this Grand Rapids-based federal court. It contains biographical information about all its judges, for example, which contain historical context that provides a fine background for the entire book. It also describes, with excellent photographs, the various buildings that have housed Western District courts over the years. This will be of interest not just to anyone who has worked in the legal world of the Wolverine State but also to anyone interested in its general history. But A Lincoln Legacy is much more than an encyclopedia. Readers will enjoy its stories most of all. Given the rise of American and global "juristocracy"—the ever-greater power of courts in our world—every citizen should know something about how courts and judges operate, and Chardavoyne tells many interesting tales. American courts have grown with the country. The decision to divide the state of Michigan into two districts (this is the "Lincoln legacy") is a story in itself. The fact that the Court's first case was U.S. v. One Piece of Ingrain Carpeting and Thirteen Yards of Gray Cloth tells us something about what federal courts do, and about the relative youth of the state in the 1860s. Baseball fans will enjoy Chardavoyne's account of the 1914 Federal League antitrust suit against catcher William Killefer, who had "jumped" from the Philadelphia Phillies to the new Federal League Chi-Feds and then jumped back when the Phillies made a counteroffer. Judge Clarence William Sessions is said to have upheld the notorious "reserve clause" that bound baseball players to their team owners in near-involuntary servitude. The reverse is closer to the truth. Sessions held against the Chi-Feds only because they did not meet the "clean hands" requirement in equity suits. In fact, he said in an obiter dictum that the clause would be unenforceable as an "executory contract … a contract to make a contract." (93) But it [End Page 143] would be over a half-century before the de facto enforcement of the reserve clause would end. Chardavoyne tells many fascinating stories about the enforcement of national prohibition in Michigan in the 1920s. The Eighteenth Amendment placed a tremendous burden on the federal courts, especially in Michigan, whose proximity to Canada made it a highway for rum-runners. It also met with serious resistance all over the country. Iron City's State Attorney Martin McDonough told the Scalucci brothers—restauranteurs and vintners whom the feds were prosecuting—that if the Feds returned they were free to "open fire on them." The T-Men in turn sought to arrest the Scaluccis for "rebellion." Authorities in Washington were able to arrange a compromise and avoid another civil war. Another valuable vignette concerns Judge Fred Morton Raymond's creative adaptation of the common law to prevent the guilty from escaping justice in a case involving the search of infamous bank-robber John Dillinger's automobile. The home front in World War II is nicely illustrated in the Office of Price Administration's enforcement of price-fixing and rationing. Post-Warren Court judicial activism at the district-court level is seen in liberal stalwart Noel Porter Fox, whose clerk "likened him to a modern-day chancellor in a court of equity, doing what was 'right' instead of what some might characterize as technically legal." (138) Many other features of and stores...

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