His approach was thoroughly historical, building as it did on the work of his mentor and predecessor, Edward S. In keeping with this book's theme, this chapter focuses primarily on the ways that Mason's work reflected an institutionalist perspective and how it provided a foundation on which the new historical-institutionalist scholars have built. He not only explored the relationships among the justices but also the connections between the Court and the other institutions of the federal government. As Clyde Spillenger wrote, Mason revealed the Supreme Court 'as a human and political institution' (1993, 723).

Mason's biographies moved far beyond traditional doctrinal analysis to examine in rich detail the historical, political, and institutional contexts in which his justices operated and explored the links between those contexts and judicial decision making. In 1964 he extended his examination of the Court as a political institution with his study of the office of the chief justice in William Howard Taft: Chief Justice. His award-winning Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1946) and Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (1956) not only offered a myriad of detail about the early lives and developing ideas of those justices but explored the inner dynamics of the Court, revealing the extent to which it operated as a political institution. Indeed, in the 1960s Mason was often considered to be the preeminent judicial biographer in the country. He is best known, however, for his pioneering studies in judicial biography. He published twenty-two books in addition to a vast number of articles. American Constitutional Law (Mason and Beaney 1954) was the textbook in my first constitutional law course.1 Then, as a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara a few years later, I read Free Government in the Making (1949) in Gordon Baker's course in American political thought.2 A number of years passed before I realized that those two books represented only a small portion of Mason's work. I first encountered Alpheus Thomas Mason's work when I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s.

Brandeis by Alpheus Thomas Mason