The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics

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Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674269365
Total Pages : 113 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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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.

Concurring Opinion Writing on the U.S. Supreme Court

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Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143843068X
Total Pages : 163 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Concurring Opinion Writing on the U.S. Supreme Court by : Pamela C. Corley

Download or read book Concurring Opinion Writing on the U.S. Supreme Court written by Pamela C. Corley and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-03-24 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of concurrent opinion writing by Supreme Court justices.

The Crown and the Courts

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674249585
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Crown and the Courts by : David C. Flatto

Download or read book The Crown and the Courts written by David C. Flatto and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scholar of law and religion uncovers a surprising origin story behind the idea of the separation of powers. The separation of powers is a bedrock of modern constitutionalism, but striking antecedents were developed centuries earlier, by Jewish scholars and rabbis of antiquity. Attending carefully to their seminal works and the historical milieu, David Flatto shows how a foundation of democratic rule was contemplated and justified long before liberal democracy was born. During the formative Second Temple and early rabbinic eras (the fourth century BCE to the third century CE), Jewish thinkers had to confront the nature of legal authority from the standpoint of the disempowered. Jews struggled against the idea that a legal authority stemming from God could reside in the hands of an imperious ruler (even a hypothetical Judaic monarch). Instead scholars and rabbis argued that such authority lay with independent courts and the law itself. Over time, they proposed various permutations of this ideal. Many of these envisioned distinct juridical and political powers, with a supreme law demarcating the respective jurisdictions of each sphere. Flatto explores key Second Temple and rabbinic writings—the Qumran scrolls; the philosophy and history of Philo and Josephus; the Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash, and Talmud—to uncover these transformative notions of governance. The Crown and the Courts argues that by proclaiming the supremacy of law in the absence of power, postbiblical thinkers emphasized the centrality of law in the people’s covenant with God, helping to revitalize Jewish life and establish allegiance to legal order. These scholars proved not only creative but also prescient. Their profound ideas about the autonomy of law reverberate to this day.

Curbing the Court

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107188415
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Curbing the Court by : Brandon L. Bartels

Download or read book Curbing the Court written by Brandon L. Bartels and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains when, why, and how citizens try to limit the Supreme Court's independence and power-- and why it matters.

No Place for Ethics

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1683933249
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (839 download)

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Book Synopsis No Place for Ethics by : T. Patrick Hill

Download or read book No Place for Ethics written by T. Patrick Hill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of law—law simply because so ordered—as something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful. To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.

Supreme Inequality

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735221529
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis Supreme Inequality by : Adam Cohen

Download or read book Supreme Inequality written by Adam Cohen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.

The Right to Privacy

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Author :
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN 13 : 3732645487
Total Pages : 42 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (326 download)

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Book Synopsis The Right to Privacy by : Samuel D. Brandeis, Louis D. Warren

Download or read book The Right to Privacy written by Samuel D. Brandeis, Louis D. Warren and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: The Right to Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis

Courts, Judges, and Politics

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 738 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Courts, Judges, and Politics by : Walter F. Murphy

Download or read book Courts, Judges, and Politics written by Walter F. Murphy and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Deciding to Decide

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674042063
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Deciding to Decide by : H. W. Perry

Download or read book Deciding to Decide written by H. W. Perry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the nearly five thousand cases presented to the Supreme Court each year, less than 5 percent are granted review. How the Court sets its agenda, therefore, is perhaps as important as how it decides cases. H. W. Perry, Jr., takes the first hard look at the internal workings of the Supreme Court, illuminating its agenda-setting policies, procedures, and priorities as never before. He conveys a wealth of new information in clear prose and integrates insights he gathered in unprecedented interviews with five justices. For this unique study Perry also interviewed four U.S. solicitors general, several deputy solicitors general, seven judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and sixty-four former Supreme Court law clerks. The clerks and justices spoke frankly with Perry, and his skillful analysis of their responses is the mainspring of this book. His engaging report demystifies the Court, bringing it vividly to life for general readers--as well as political scientists and a wide spectrum of readers throughout the legal profession. Perry not only provides previously unpublished information on how the Court operates but also gives us a new way of thinking about the institution. Among his contributions is a decision-making model that is more convincing and persuasive than the standard model for explaining judicial behavior.

The Schoolhouse Gate

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525566961
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis The Schoolhouse Gate by : Justin Driver

Download or read book The Schoolhouse Gate written by Justin Driver and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school stu­dents, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades. Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un­authorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compul­sory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer—these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation. Justin Driver maintains that since the 1970s the Supreme Court has regularly abdicated its responsibility for protecting students’ constitutional rights and risked trans­forming public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court’s decisions in recent decades would conclude that the following actions taken by educators pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporal punishment on students without any proce­dural protections, searching students and their possessions without probable cause in bids to uncover violations of school rules, random drug testing of students who are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing student speech for the view­point it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have upheld a wide array of dubious school actions, including degrading strip searches, repressive dress codes, draconian “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies, and severe restrictions on off-campus speech. Driver surveys this legal landscape with eloquence, highlights the gripping personal narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor students’ rights threatens our basic constitutional order. This magiste­rial book will make it impossible to view American schools—or America itself—in the same way again.

Tainted Witness

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231543441
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Tainted Witness by : Leigh Gilmore

Download or read book Tainted Witness written by Leigh Gilmore and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt? Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

The Most Dangerous Branch

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Author :
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 1524759929
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (247 download)

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Book Synopsis The Most Dangerous Branch by : David A. Kaplan

Download or read book The Most Dangerous Branch written by David A. Kaplan and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the bestselling tradition of The Nine and The Brethren, The Most Dangerous Branch takes us inside the secret world of the Supreme Court. David A. Kaplan, the former legal affairs editor of Newsweek, shows how the justices subvert the role of the other branches of government—and how we’ve come to accept it at our peril. With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court has never before been more central in American life. It is the nine justices who too often now decide the controversial issues of our time—from abortion and same-sex marriage, to gun control, campaign finance and voting rights. The Court is so crucial that many voters in 2016 made their choice based on whom they thought their presidential candidate would name to the Court. Donald Trump picked Neil Gorsuch—the key decision of his new administration. Brett Kavanaugh—replacing Kennedy—will be even more important, holding the swing vote over so much social policy. Is that really how democracy is supposed to work? Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and dozens of their law clerks, Kaplan provides fresh details about life behind the scenes at the Court—Clarence Thomas’s simmering rage, Antonin Scalia’s death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s celebrity, Breyer Bingo, the petty feuding between Gorsuch and the chief justice, and what John Roberts thinks of his critics. Kaplan presents a sweeping narrative of the justices’ aggrandizement of power over the decades—from Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore to Citizens United, to rulings during the 2017-18 term. But the arrogance of the Court isn’t partisan: Conservative and liberal justices alike are guilty of overreach. Challenging conventional wisdom about the Court’s transcendent power, The Most Dangerous Branch is sure to rile both sides of the political aisle.

The People’s Courts

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674055483
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (554 download)

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Book Synopsis The People’s Courts by : Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Download or read book The People’s Courts written by Jed Handelsman Shugerman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, almost 90 percent of state judges have to run in popular elections to remain on the bench. In the past decade, this peculiarly American institution has produced vicious multi-million-dollar political election campaigns and high-profile allegations of judicial bias and misconduct. The People’s Courts traces the history of judicial elections and Americans’ quest for an independent judiciary—one that would ensure fairness for all before the law—from the colonial era to the present. In the aftermath of economic disaster, nineteenth-century reformers embraced popular elections as a way to make politically appointed judges less susceptible to partisan patronage and more independent of the legislative and executive branches of government. This effort to reinforce the separation of powers and limit government succeeded in many ways, but it created new threats to judicial independence and provoked further calls for reform. Merit selection emerged as the most promising means of reducing partisan and financial influence from judicial selection. It too, however, proved vulnerable to pressure from party politics and special interest groups. Yet, as Shugerman concludes, it still has more potential for protecting judicial independence than either political appointment or popular election. The People’s Courts shows how Americans have been deeply committed to judicial independence, but that commitment has also been manipulated by special interests. By understanding our history of judicial selection, we can better protect and preserve the independence of judges from political and partisan influence.

Alone Atop the Hill

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Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820347981
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Alone Atop the Hill by : Alice Dunnigan

Download or read book Alone Atop the Hill written by Alice Dunnigan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Booker proposes the republication of Alice Allison Dunnigan's original, unedited autobiography A Black Woman's Experience: From School House to White House (unavailable except as a collector's item). Alice Dunnigan (1906-1983) was the first African American woman to break the color and gender barriers of national journalism. During her time as a journalist, she reported for the Louisville Defender and Chicago Defender, and was a member of the Negro Associated Press. Dunnigan has been inducted into the Kentucky Hall of Fame for Journalism (1982) and for Human Rights (2010), and in 2013 was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. The original autobiography was self-published and quite long, thus failing to gain the wide readership it might have; Booker aims to make Dunnigan's story available once more and highly readable for a general audience. She has edited from its original 673 pages into a flowing, compelling narrative of approximately 234 pages (71,000 words)"--

Confirmation Bias

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Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 006304059X
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (63 download)

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Book Synopsis Confirmation Bias by : Carl Hulse

Download or read book Confirmation Bias written by Carl Hulse and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of the machinations following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and their damaging effects, is “a gripping tale of insider Washington” (The Boston Globe). In this book, the Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times provides a richly detailed, news-breaking, and conversation-changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death—using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital. The embodiment of American conservative jurisprudence, Scalia cast an expansive shadow over the Court for three decades. His unexpected death in February 2016 created a vacancy that precipitated a pitched political fight that would change not only the tilt of the court, but the course of American history. It would help decide a presidential election, fundamentally alter longstanding protocols of the Senate, and transform the Supreme Court—which has long held itself as a neutral arbiter above politics—into another branch of the federal government riven by partisanship. In an unheard-of development, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a confirmation hearing. Not one Republican in the Senate would meet with him. Scalia’s seat would be held open until Donald Trump’s nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, was confirmed in April 2017. Hulse tells the story of this battle to control the Court through exclusive interviews with McConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and other top officials, Trump campaign operatives, court activists, and legal scholars, as well as never-before-reported details. Confirmation Bias provides much-needed context, revisiting the judicial wars of recent decades to show how they led to our current polarization. He examines the politicization of the federal bench and the implications for public confidence in the courts, and takes us behind the scenes to explore how many long-held democratic norms and entrenched bipartisan procedures have been erased across all three branches of government. Includes a new afterword “An absorbing, if dispiriting, look at the maneuverings of inside players like McConnell and Donald McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, and outside advocates like Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who appears to have steered judicial selection as much as anyone in the White House.” —The Washington Post

My Grandfather's Son

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Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0063235927
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (632 download)

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Book Synopsis My Grandfather's Son by : Clarence Thomas

Download or read book My Grandfather's Son written by Clarence Thomas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time.

The Supreme Court in a Separation of Powers System

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136657797
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (366 download)

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Book Synopsis The Supreme Court in a Separation of Powers System by : Richard Pacelle

Download or read book The Supreme Court in a Separation of Powers System written by Richard Pacelle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. Supreme Court is not a unitary actor and it does not function in a vacuum. It is part of an integrated political system in which its decisions and doctrine must be viewed in a broader context. In some areas, the Court is the lead policy maker. In other areas, the Court fills in the gaps of policy created in the legislative and executive branches. In either instance, the Supreme Court’s work is influenced by and in turn influences all three branches of the federal government as well as the interests and opinions of the American people. Pacelle analyzes the Court’s interaction in the separation of powers system, detailing its relationship to the presidency, Congress, the bureaucracy, public opinion, interest groups, and the vast system of lower courts. The niche the Court occupies and the role it plays in American government reflect aspects of both the legal and political models. The Court has legal duties and obligations as well as some freedom to exercise its collective political will. Too often those studying the Court have examined it in isolation, but this book urges scholars and students alike to think more broadly and situate the highest court as the "balance wheel" in the American system.