William M. Wiecek's "The Dark Past"

William M. Wiecek is Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, where he was appointed the Congdon Professor of Public Law, with a joint appointment in the history department of the Maxwell School. He is the author of The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 and The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886-1937, among other titles.

Wiecek applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Dark Past: The US Supreme Court and African Americans, 1800―2015, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses three cases decided by the United States Supreme Court dealing with the power of Congress to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. Page 99 restates the general theme of the book, which is that the Court has been disappointing in its failure to protect the rights and opportunities of Black Americans.

Yes, from this page the reader will get a correct idea of what the book is about. The Page 99 Test is a good shortcut to the overall thesis of the book.

The test works in the case of this one book because it will give the reader a good idea of what she is getting into if she reads it. Aside from the general thesis noted above, she will learn that the book is academic; that it is about judicial doctrine as expounded in judicial decisions; that it attempts to convey that doctrine by brief descriptions of the cases and the problems they seek to resolve; that the book is strictly historical, not directly about current events (though, like all history, its goal is to use the past to explain the present).

Learn more about The Dark Past at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue