By Earl M. Maltz, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan. 362 pages, $40

The shame of two centuries of human bondage still troubles the American conscience. In “Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861,” Professor Earl M. Maltz of Rutgers University-Camden shows how our highest court handled slavery as a reality, not the remembered nightmare that we know. He does a good job with a work perhaps more likely to appeal to the legal scholar than to the casual, fireside reader.