First edition. Small 8vo. [12], 114 pp. Original blue cloth, spine and front cover lettered in silver, dust jacket (neat contemporary ownership inscription to front free endpaper, otherwise internally clean; jacket toned and slightly edge worn, with some minor rubbing to tips of spine panel and area of loss to lower edge of rear panel, still a very good copy overall). Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1937.
The book contains Frankfurter’s contribution to the Weil lectures on American citizenship, ‘a clear exposition of the various interpretations of the commerce clause - the power conferred upon Congress to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states - under three great chief justices’ (jacket blurb). A Harvard professor of law from 1914 to 1939, Frankfurter was ‘a strong advocate of civil liberties but favoured judicial self-restraint and non-intervention by the court in political issues’ (Walker, Oxford Companion to Law, p. 488).
