Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional Investigations.

Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional Investigations (1955) is a work of constitutional history and political analysis by Telford Taylor, the Harvard-educated lawyer and Brigadier General who served as chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg successor trials and went on to become one of the most distinguished legal scholars of his generation as Professor of Law at Columbia University. Published at the height of the McCarthy era, when the investigative powers of Congress were being wielded with an aggressiveness that alarmed civil libertarians and constitutional scholars in equal measure, the book was a timely and authoritative intervention — tracing the history of congressional investigations from their origins in the English House of Commons through colonial and early American constitutional history and on to the committee investigations of the mid-twentieth century that provided Taylor's immediate occasion. Taylor starts with the history of legislative investigations, going back beyond the traditional jumping-off point of the investigation of General St. Clair for his failure to quell the Indians, and presents a thorough sketch of the origins of such investigations in the House of Commons, with his treatment of colonial and early congressional history being notably exhaustive, situating the McCarthy investigations not as aberrations but as the most recent expression of a congressional investigative tradition with deep and complicated constitutional roots.