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The Authority Of The Court And The Peril Of Politics
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Book Synopsis The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics by : Stephen Breyer
Download or read book The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics written by Stephen Breyer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sitting justice reflects upon the authority of the Supreme CourtÑhow that authority was gained and how measures to restructure the Court could undermine both the Court and the constitutional system of checks and balances that depends on it. A growing chorus of officials and commentators argues that the Supreme Court has become too political. On this view the confirmation process is just an exercise in partisan agenda-setting, and the jurists are no more than Òpoliticians in robesÓÑtheir ostensibly neutral judicial philosophies mere camouflage for conservative or liberal convictions. Stephen Breyer, drawing upon his experience as a Supreme Court justice, sounds a cautionary note. Mindful of the CourtÕs history, he suggests that the judiciaryÕs hard-won authority could be marred by reforms premised on the assumption of ideological bias. Having, as Hamilton observed, Òno influence over either the sword or the purse,Ó the Court earned its authority by making decisions that have, over time, increased the publicÕs trust. If public trust is now in decline, one part of the solution is to promote better understandings of how the judiciary actually works: how judges adhere to their oaths and how they try to avoid considerations of politics and popularity. Breyer warns that political intervention could itself further erode public trust. Without the publicÕs trust, the Court would no longer be able to act as a check on the other branches of government or as a guarantor of the rule of law, risking serious harm to our constitutional system.
Book Synopsis The Court and the World by : Stephen Breyer
Download or read book The Court and the World written by Stephen Breyer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original, far-reaching, and timely book, Justice Stephen Breyer examines the work of the Supreme Court of the United States in an increasingly interconnected world, a world in which all sorts of activity, both public and private—from the conduct of national security policy to the conduct of international trade—obliges the Court to understand and consider circumstances beyond America’s borders. Written with unique authority and perspective, The Court and the World reveals an emergent reality few Americans observe directly but one that affects the life of every one of us. Here is an invaluable understanding for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
Download or read book Active Liberty written by Stephen Breyer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant new approach to the Constitution and courts of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.For Justice Breyer, the Constitution’s primary role is to preserve and encourage what he calls “active liberty”: citizen participation in shaping government and its laws. As this book argues, promoting active liberty requires judicial modesty and deference to Congress; it also means recognizing the changing needs and demands of the populace. Indeed, the Constitution’s lasting brilliance is that its principles may be adapted to cope with unanticipated situations, and Breyer makes a powerful case against treating it as a static guide intended for a world that is dead and gone. Using contemporary examples from federalism to privacy to affirmative action, this is a vital contribution to the ongoing debate over the role and power of our courts.
Book Synopsis Regulation and Its Reform by : Stephen Breyer
Download or read book Regulation and Its Reform written by Stephen Breyer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On its Surface, this book is aimed at the topical issue of regulatory reform. But underneath it strives to go beyond the topical, seeking to analyze regulation as a distinct discipline and to help teach it as a separate subject.
Book Synopsis Breaking the Vicious Circle by : Stephen Breyer
Download or read book Breaking the Vicious Circle written by Stephen Breyer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking the Vicious Circle is a tour de force that should be read by everyone who is interested in improving our regulatory processes. Written by a highly respected federal judge, who obviously recognizes the necessity of regulation but perceives its failures and weaknesses as well, it pinpoints the most serious problems and offers a creative solution that would for the first time bring rationality to bear on the vital issue of priorities in our era of limited resources.
Download or read book A Mere Machine written by Anna Harvey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Anna Harvey reports evidence showing that the Supreme Court is in fact extraordinarily deferential to congressional preferences in its constitutional rulings.
Book Synopsis How Judges Think by : Richard A. Posner
Download or read book How Judges Think written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning. Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.
Book Synopsis Judicial Monarchs by : William J. Watkins, Jr.
Download or read book Judicial Monarchs written by William J. Watkins, Jr. and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who has the final say on the meaning of the Constitution? From high school to law school, students learn that the framers designed the Supreme Court to be the ultimate arbiter of constitutional issues, a function Chief Justice John Marshall recognized in deciding Marbury v. Madison in 1803. This provocative work challenges American dogma about the Supreme Court's role, showing instead that the founding generation understood judicial power not as a counterweight against popular government, but as a consequence, and indeed a support, of popular sovereignty. Contending that court power must be restrained so that policy decisions are left to the people's elected representatives, this study offers several remedies--including term limits and popular selection of the Supreme Court--to return the American people to their proper place in the constitutional order.
Book Synopsis The Behavior of Federal Judges by : Lee Epstein
Download or read book The Behavior of Federal Judges written by Lee Epstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.
Book Synopsis Equal Justice by : Frederick Wilmot-Smith
Download or read book Equal Justice written by Frederick Wilmot-Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical and legal argument for equal access to good lawyers and other legal resources. Should your risk of wrongful conviction depend on your wealth? We wouldn’t dream of passing a law to that effect, but our legal system, which permits the rich to buy the best lawyers, enables wealth to affect legal outcomes. Clearly justice depends not only on the substance of laws but also on the system that administers them. In Equal Justice, Frederick Wilmot-Smith offers an account of a topic neglected in theory and undermined in practice: justice in legal institutions. He argues that the benefits and burdens of legal systems should be shared equally and that divergences from equality must issue from a fair procedure. He also considers how the ideal of equal justice might be made a reality. Least controversially, legal resources must sometimes be granted to those who cannot afford them. More radically, we may need to rethink the centrality of the market to legal systems. Markets in legal resources entrench pre-existing inequalities, allocate injustice to those without means, and enable the rich to escape the law’s demands. None of this can be justified. Many people think that markets in health care are unjust; it may be time to think of legal services in the same way.
Book Synopsis Making Our Democracy Work by : Stephen Breyer
Download or read book Making Our Democracy Work written by Stephen Breyer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Supreme Court is one of the most extraordinary institutions in our system of government. Charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution, the nine unelected justices of the Court have the awesome power to strike down laws enacted by our elected representatives. Why does the public accept the Court’s decisions as legitimate and follow them, even when those decisions are highly unpopular? What must the Court do to maintain the public’s faith? How can the Court help make our democracy work? These are the questions that Justice Stephen Breyer tackles in this groundbreaking book. Today we assume that when the Court rules, the public will obey. But Breyer declares that we cannot take the public’s confidence in the Court for granted. He reminds us that at various moments in our history, the Court’s decisions were disobeyed or ignored. And through investigations of past cases, concerning the Cherokee Indians, slavery, and Brown v. Board of Education, he brilliantly captures the steps—and the missteps—the Court took on the road to establishing its legitimacy as the guardian of the Constitution. Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution’s text or to the eighteenth-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circumstances—an approach that will best demonstrate to the public that the Constitution continues to serve us well. The Court, he believes, must also respect the roles that other actors—such as the president, Congress, administrative agencies, and the states—play in our democracy, and he emphasizes the Court’s obligation to build cooperative relationships with them. Finally, Justice Breyer examines the Court’s recent decisions concerning the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, contrasting these decisions with rulings concerning the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He uses these cases to show how the Court can promote workable government by respecting the roles of other constitutional actors without compromising constitutional principles. Making Our Democracy Work is a tour de force of history and philosophy, offering an original approach to interpreting the Constitution that judges, lawyers, and scholars will look to for many years to come. And it further establishes Justice Breyer as one of the Court’s greatest intellectuals and a leading legal voice of our time.
Book Synopsis Justice on the Brink by : Linda Greenhouse
Download or read book Justice on the Brink written by Linda Greenhouse and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gripping story of the Supreme Court’s transformation from a measured institution of law and justice into a highly politicized body dominated by a right-wing supermajority, told through the dramatic lens of its most transformative year, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times—with a new preface by the author “A dazzling feat . . . meaty, often scintillating and sometimes scary . . . Greenhouse is a virtuoso of SCOTUS analysis.”—The Washington Post In Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect. In a page-turning narrative, she recounts the twelve months when the court turned its back on its legacy and traditions, abandoning any effort to stay above and separate from politics. With remarkable clarity and deep institutional knowledge, Greenhouse shows the seeds being planted for the court’s eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, expansion of access to guns, and unprecedented elevation of religious rights in American society. Both a chronicle and a requiem, Justice on the Brink depicts the struggle for the soul of the Supreme Court, and points to the future that awaits all of us.
Download or read book No Treason written by Lysander Spooner and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1870, this essay by the American anarchist and political philosopher Lysander Spooner is here reproduced. Described by Murray Rothbard as “the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written”, Spooner’s lengthy essay is still referenced by anarchists and philosophers today. In it, he argues that the American Civil War violated the US Constitution, thus rendering it null and void. An indispensable read for political historians both amateur and professional alike. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Book Synopsis The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices by : Bruce Allen Murphy
Download or read book The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices written by Bruce Allen Murphy and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1982 by Oxford University Press and featured in a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times, this book describes the relationship between Justice Louis D. Brandeis and then-Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter. While on the Court, Brandeis provided Frankfurter with funds to promote a variety of political reforms. The book sparked a debate about the ethics of extrajudicial activities by Supreme Court justices. “This book sets out an historical narrative of hitherto unknown, undiscovered, yet rather extensive political activities by two major, highly respected justices of the United States Supreme Court... It now appears that in one of the most unique relationships in the Court’s history, Brandeis enlisted Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, as his paid political lobbyist and lieutenant. Working together over a period of twenty-five years, they placed a network of disciples in positions of influence, and labored diligently for the enactment of their desired programs. This adroit use of the politically skillful Frankfurter as an intermediary enabled Brandeis to keep his considerable political endeavors hidden from the public. Not surprisingly, after his own appointment to the Court, Frankfurter resorted to some of the same methods to advance governmental goals consonant with his own political philosophy. As a result, history virtually repeated itself, with the student placing his own network of disciples in various agencies and working through this network for the realization of his own goals.” — Bruce Allen Murphy, in the Introduction to The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection “This study of the extrajudicial activities of two celebrated Justices of the Supreme Court makes a valuable and fascinating, if somewhat schizophrenic, book... Murphy has done a first-class job of research, supplementing his labors in the Brandeis and Frankfurter papers by extensive investigation in other manuscript collections and the Columbia University oral histories and by fruitful interviews with survivors... The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection is a useful book. It is useful because it makes us think hard about standards of judicial behavior... And it is useful because it makes us think realistically about the Court itself.” — Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The New York Times “The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection contains at once a great historical find and a thoughtful and, at times, brilliant essay on judicial propriety. This book deals superbly with questions not only of a citizen’s legitimate expectations for Supreme Court behavior but also of the broader role and hope for the performance of government... [Murphy] is a very reluctant muckraker who, after laying out the details, tries in a four-page conclusion to take much of it back, insisting that both the late justices ‘will survive as giants of twentieth-century America.’” — Bob Woodward, The Washington Post “[F]ascinating reading... a serious and commendable work of scholarship, a partial but engaging and persuasive portrait of the Washington political community for a good slice of the 20th century.” — Nelson W. Polsby, Commentary Magazine “A valuable study... the views of [Brandeis and Frankfurter] and their efforts to win acceptance for them have never been so searchingly studied and evaluated.” — Frank Freidel, The American Historical Review “Murphy has authored a solidly researched and important book... Murphy amply demonstrates both his thorough research abilities and his talent for weaving material together to produce a work that flows like a well-written mystery... [and] deserve[s] much credit... for assembling hitherto known and unknown facts and placing them in a useful perspective... an important work.” — Alan Betten, University of Baltimore Law Review “Murphy’s book persuasively demonstrates that Brandeis and Frankfurter never ceased to be the kind of men they were before they went to the bench-political men. Not that their behavior was unique or unprecedented. Murphy reminds readers that two-thirds of those who have sat on the highest court have engaged in ‘off-the-bench political activity’... Perhaps this book continues to stir emotions precisely because it establishes so convincingly the political effectiveness of two remarkable judges-men who have too long been esteemed as models of a pristine judicial probity that in our nation probably cannot exist.” — Victoria Schuck, The Wilson Quarterly
Book Synopsis The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy by : John Agresto
Download or read book The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy written by John Agresto and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy John Agresto traces the development of American judicial power, paying close attention to what he views as the very real threat of judicial supremacy. Agresto examines the role of the judiciary in a democratic society and discusses the proper place of congressional power in constitutional issues. Agresto argues that while the separation of congressional and judicial functions is a fundamental tenet of American government, the present system is not effective in maintaining an appropriate balance of power. He shows that continued judicial expansion, especially into the realm of public policy, might have severe consequences for America's national life and direction, and offers practical recommendations for safeguarding against an increasingly powerful Supreme Court. John Agresto's controversial argument, set in the context of a historical and theoretical inquiry, will be of great interest to scholars and students in political science and law, especially American constitutional law and political theory.
Book Synopsis How Rights Went Wrong by : Jamal Greene
Download or read book How Rights Went Wrong written by Jamal Greene and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PUBLISHERS PROSE AWARD FINALIST | “Essential and fresh and vital . . . It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race right. No peace, no justice.”—from the foreword by Jill Lepore, New York Times best-selling author of These Truths: A History of the United States An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice. You have the right to remain silent—and the right to free speech. The right to worship, and to doubt. The right to be free from discrimination, and to hate. The right to life, and the right to own a gun. Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they also are the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers. The resulting system of legal absolutism distorts our law, debases our politics, and exacerbates our differences rather than helping to bridge them. As renowned legal scholar Jamal Greene argues, we need a different approach—and in How Rights Went Wrong, he proposes one that the Founders would have approved. They preferred to leave rights to legislatures and juries, not judges, he explains. Only because of the Founders’ original sin of racial discrimination—and subsequent missteps by the Supreme Court—did courts gain such outsized power over Americans’ rights. In this paradigm-shifting account, Greene forces readers to rethink the relationship between constitutional law and political dysfunction and shows how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Book Synopsis Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness by : William Godwin
Download or read book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness written by William Godwin and published by . This book was released on 1798 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
