A Court Divided
A Court Divided

Author: Mark V. Tushnet

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780393058680

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In this authoritative reckoning with the eighteen-year record of the Rehnquist Court, Georgetown law professor Mark Tushnet reveals how the decisions of nine deeply divided justices have left the future of the Court; and the nation; hanging in the balance. Many have assumed that the chasm on the Court has been between its liberals and its conservatives. In reality, the division was between those in tune with the modern post-Reagan Republican Party and those who, though considered to be in the Court's center, represent an older Republican tradition. As a result, the Court has modestly promoted the agenda of today's economic conservatives, but has regularly defeated the agenda of social issues conservatives; while paving the way for more radically conservative path in the future.

Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court
Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court

Author: Thomas R. Marshall

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780791473481

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Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court offers the most thorough evidence yet in favor of the U.S. Supreme Court representing public opinion. Thomas R. Marshall analyzes more than two thousand nationwide public opinion polls during the Rehnquist Court era and argues that a clear majority of Supreme Court decisions agree with public opinion. He explains that the Court represents American attitudes when public opinion is well informed on a dispute and when the U.S. Solicitor General takes a position agreeing with poll majorities. He also finds that certain justices best represent public opinion and that the Court uses its review powers over the state and federal courts to bring judicial decision making back in line with public opinion. Finally, Marshall observes that unpopular Supreme Court decisions simply do not endure as long as do popular decisions. Book jacket.

The Will of the People
The Will of the People

Author: Barry Friedman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2009-09-29

Total Pages: 623

ISBN-13: 1429989955

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In recent years, the justices of the Supreme Court have ruled definitively on such issues as abortion, school prayer, and military tribunals in the war on terror. They decided one of American history's most contested presidential elections. Yet for all their power, the justices never face election and hold their offices for life. This combination of influence and apparent unaccountability has led many to complain that there is something illegitimate—even undemocratic—about judicial authority. In The Will of the People, Barry Friedman challenges that claim by showing that the Court has always been subject to a higher power: the American public. Judicial positions have been abolished, the justices' jurisdiction has been stripped, the Court has been packed, and unpopular decisions have been defied. For at least the past sixty years, the justices have made sure that their decisions do not stray too far from public opinion. Friedman's pathbreaking account of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court—from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Rehnquist court in 2005—details how the American people came to accept their most controversial institution and shaped the meaning of the Constitution.

Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court
Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court

Author: Thomas R. Marshall

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0791478815

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Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court offers the most thorough evidence yet in favor of the U.S. Supreme Court representing public opinion. Thomas R. Marshall analyzes more than two thousand nationwide public opinion polls during the Rehnquist Court era and argues that a clear majority of Supreme Court decisions agree with public opinion. He explains that the Court represents American attitudes when public opinion is well informed on a dispute and when the U.S. Solicitor General takes a position agreeing with poll majorities. He also finds that certain justices best represent public opinion and that the Court uses its review powers over the state and federal courts to bring judicial decision making back in line with public opinion. Finally, Marshall observes that unpopular Supreme Court decisions simply do not endure as long as do popular decisions.

The U.S. Supreme Court and New Federalism
The U.S. Supreme Court and New Federalism

Author: Christopher P. Banks

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0742535045

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Constitutional scholars Christopher P. Banks and John C. Blakeman offer the most current and the first book-length study of the U.S. Supreme Court's "new federalism" begun by the Rehnquist Court and now flourishing under Chief Justice John Roberts. While the Rehnquist Court reinvorgorated new federalism by protecting state sovereignty and set new constitutional limits on federal power, Banks and Blakeman show that in the Roberts Court new federalism continues to evolve in a docket increasingly attentive to statutory construction, preemption, and business litigation

The Partisan
The Partisan

Author: John A. Jenkins

Publisher: Public Affairs

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1586488872

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Follows Rehnquist's career as a young lawyer in Arizona through his journey to Washington though the Warren and Burger courts to his twenty-year tenure as a Supreme Court Chief Justice who favored government power over individual rights.

Like a Loaded Weapon
Like a Loaded Weapon

Author: Robert A. Williams

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2005-11-10

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1452907560

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Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned “like a loaded weapon” in the Supreme Court’s Indian law decisions. Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall’s foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to justify the denial of important rights of property, self-government, and cultural survival to Indians. Building on the insights of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Frantz Fanon, Williams argues that racist language has been employed by the courts to legalize a uniquely American form of racial dictatorship over Indian tribes by the U.S. government. Williams concludes with a revolutionary proposal for reimagining the rights of American Indians in international law, as well as strategies for compelling the current Supreme Court to confront the racist origins of Indian law and for challenging bigoted ways of talking, thinking, and writing about American Indians. Robert A. Williams Jr. is professor of law and American Indian studies at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. A member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, he is author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest and coauthor of Federal Indian Law.