Powerful, comprehensive, unanswerable scholarship. Read this book at your own risk if you would like to believe the U.S. Supreme Court has the authority to strike down the death penalty.

It's hard to believe it's been nearly 25 years since Harvard Law Professor Raoul Berger wrote his treatise on impeachment. It was then, in those turbulent years of constitutional crisis, the definitive, stabilizing voice of reason. The rock-solid scholarly research allowed calmer minds to reach beyond the excitement of the moment, and to solemnly deliberate whether the actions of our President constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors" as that phrase was intended by the Constitution.

Today's crisis is no less susceptible to emotional conclusions, absent the foundations of law. Republicans and Democrats alike will form conclusions based upon political expediency, and upon what they perceive the will of the public to be. But those political winds have no place in Professor Berger's analysis. Here you will find the inescapable truth of sound legal research.

I had occasion to dine with both Professor Berger and his friend Archibald Cox some 13 years after the last attempt to impeach a sitting President. We talked about politics, and the law. Politics change from week to week, swirling like the wind. But the law gives us a rock to cling to in the most treacherous of storms. Professor Berger's work remains a rock of reason today.

As the title indicates, this book is yet another examination of the meaning of the 14th Amendment, with a specific focus on the so-called "incorporation" theory which holds that the Amendment makes the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. Berger is a well-known proponent of "original understanding" in constitutional interpretation, and his view is that the 14th Amendment was meant to have a very narrow meaning, that modern judicial exegesis of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses is without historical foundation, and that the Amendment was not meant to apply the Bill of Rigths to the states. His most developed arguments on the historical evidence are given in a previous work, "Government by Judiciary," which is quite possibly the most excoriated book in the history of constitutional law. The present book is partly a response to some of Berger's critics and then a rehashing of some of the historical evidence. Though one is forced to feel some sympathy for Berger, who has always come across as somewhat of a maverick scholar, his works usually end up being somewhat historically myopic, failing to look at events in their proper overall context. This book is no exception. A better place to look for an examination of the 14th Amendment and incorporation is Akhil Amar's "The Bill of Rights," a more subtle and challenging treatment of the subject.

Berger was politically a liberal, meaning that he favored centralized government control of the lives of the citizenry. He was an honest liberal, however, and, based on his sound scholarship, rejected the self-defeating notion of a constitution which is "living," i.e. a written law which is not law, but whim. Predictably, Berger was reviled by his fellow liberals. This is despite the fact that he was praised highly for books on impeachment and executive privilege which, by mere coincidence, were published when Nixon was being run out of Washington. Born in Russia, brought to the U.S. as a boy, Berger did not publish a book until age 68. His work on the 14th Amendment is a masterpiece of American legal scholarship.