The Law's Conscience is a history of equity in
Anglo-American juris-prudence from the inception of the
chancellor's court in medieval England to the recent civil rights
and affirmative action decisions of the United States Supreme
Court. Peter Hoffer argues that equity embodies a way of looking at
law, including constitutions, based on ideas of mutual fairness,
public trusteeship, and equal protection. His central theme is the
tension between the ideal of equity and the actual availability of
equitable remedies.
Hoffer examines this tension in the trusteeship constitutionalism
of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson; the incorporation of equity in
the first American constitutions; the antebellum controversy over
slavery; the fortunes of the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War;
the emergence of the doctrine of "Balance of Equity" in
twentieth-century public-interest law; and the desegregation and
reverse discrimination cases of the past thirty-five years.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the most important
equity suit in American history, and Hoffer begins and ends his
book with a new interpretation of its lessons.