New from Texas Tech University Press:
Arnon Gutfield, Treasure State Justice: Judge George M. Bourquin, Defender of the Rule of Law (Feb. 2014). From the Press:
Few works reveal anything about the role of federal judges in the early
twentieth-century American West. Arnon Gutfeld fills that void by
analyzing the major issues and dilemmas those judges faced as the West
moved rapidly from frontier justice to twentieth-century legal
realities. George M. Bourquin served as Federal District judge in
Montana from 1912 to 1934. He dared to issue rulings that captured
national attention and aroused the ire of the Department of Justice.
During the mass fear and hysteria of World War I and the Red Scare, he
was one of very few judges to defend individual liberty. His decision in
the Ves Hall Case elicited a knee-jerk reaction from Washington--the
notorious Anti-Sedition Act of 1918.
A Jeffersonian
conservative-libertarian—in the tradition of Edmund Burke—Bourquin
believed the Constitution to be the sole barrier between civilization
and barbarism. Especially important were his decisions in labor, Native
American, and immigration issues.Coinciding with the
federal government’s largest role over the destiny of the American West,
Bourquin’s judicial career provides a unique opportunity to examine the
great impact that the legal system and a very unusual judge had in the
post-territorial frontier period.
