After describing the backgrounds and roles of the Justices on the Hughes Court, the chapter examines several theories about how courts decide cases. The theories counterpose “formulas” to ideas about social needs, with Hughes, Felix Frankfurter, and Benjamin Cardozo offering versions of the latter. The theories are linked to broader conceptions of American government articulated by Herbert Croly and Arthur Bentley.

The Conclusion sumamrizes the book’s theme that constitutional law when Hughes retired was substantially different from what it had been when he was appointed Chief Justice, but that the transformation was more incremental and less complete than the term “Revolution of 1937” suggests.

This chapter uses examples from the United States to sketch these and other aspects of toweringness as a relational concept. It examines toweringness as a relation between one judge and his or her colleagues, using brief case studies from the New Deal era, which show judges as dependent upon the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, and a case study of the relation between William J Brennan and Earl Warren, showing an aspect of a court’s bureaucratic or institutional organization with a discussion of law clerks and opinion-drafting, and as subject to re-evaluation using Felix Frankfurter as an example.

This chapter gives the highlights of Holmes's final years. It describes the circumstances leading up to his death in 1935. It also gives some of the details of his funeral. It ends with Chief Justice Hughes's description of Holmes’s life as one of rare beauty.