In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court

In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court PDF Author: Mark Tushnet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393073440
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Examines the initial years of the Roberts Court, covering the legal philosophies that have informed decisions on such major cases as the Affordable Care Act, the political structures behind appointments, and the struggle for dominance of the Court.

Uncertain Justice

Uncertain Justice PDF Author: Laurence Tribe
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805099093
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
An assessment of how the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is significantly influencing the nation's laws and reinterpreting the Constitution includes in-depth analysis of recent rulings and their implications.

The Roberts Court

The Roberts Court PDF Author: Marcia Coyle
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145162753X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
The Roberts Court, seven years old, sits at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Through four landmark decisions, Marcia Coyle, one of the most prestigious experts on the Supreme Court, reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the U.S. Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action. Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside account of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began—the personalities and conflicts that catapulted them onto the national scene—and how they ultimately exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United campaign case. Most dramatically, her analysis shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups are strategizing to find cases and crafting them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority. The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat at the struggle to lay down the law of the land.

A Court Divided

A Court Divided PDF Author: Mark V. Tushnet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393058680
Category : Constitutional law
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
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.

Business and the Roberts Court

Business and the Roberts Court PDF Author: Jonathan H. Adler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199859345
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Is the Roberts Court 'pro-business'? If so, what does this mean for the law and the American people? 'Business and the Roberts Court' provides a critical analysis of the Court's business-related jurisprudence, combining a series of empirical and doctrinal analyses of how the Roberts Court has treated business and business law.

The New Roberts Court, Donald Trump, and Our Failing Constitution

The New Roberts Court, Donald Trump, and Our Failing Constitution PDF Author: Stephen M. Feldman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331956451X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
This book traces the evolution of the constitutional order, explaining Donald Trump’s election as a symptom of a degraded democratic-capitalist system. Beginning with the framers’ vision of a balanced system—balanced between the public and private spheres, between government power and individual rights—the constitutional order evolved over two centuries until it reached its present stage, Democracy, Inc., in which corporations and billionaires wield herculean political power. The five conservative justices of the early Roberts Court, including the late Antonin Scalia, stamped Democracy, Inc., with a constitutional imprimatur, contravening the framers’ vision while simultaneously claiming to follow the Constitution’s original meaning. The justices believed they were upholding the American way of life, but they instead placed our democratic-capitalist system in its gravest danger since World War II. With Neil Gorsuch replacing Scalia, the new Court must choose: Will it follow the early Roberts Court in approving and bolstering Democracy, Inc., or will it restore the crucial balance between the public and private spheres in our constitutional system?

Taking Back the Constitution

Taking Back the Constitution PDF Author: Mark Tushnet
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030024598X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
How the Supreme Court's move to the right has distorted both logic and the Constitution What Supreme Court justices do is far more than just "calling balls and strikes." The Court has never simply evaluated laws and arguments in light of permanent and immutable constitutional meanings. Social, moral, and yes, political ideas have always played into the justices' impressions of how they think a case should be decided. Mark Tushnet traces the ways constitutional thought has evolved, from the liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society to the Reagan conservatism that has been dominant since the 1980s. Looking at the current crossroads in the constitutional order, Tushnet explores the possibilities of either a Trumpian entrenchment of the most extreme ideas of the Reagan philosophy, or a dramatic and destabilizing move to the left. Wary of either outcome, he offers a passionate and informed argument for replacing judicial supremacy with popular constitutionalism--a move that would restore to the other branches of government a role in deciding constitutional questions.

Weak Courts, Strong Rights

Weak Courts, Strong Rights PDF Author: Mark Tushnet
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400828155
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Unlike many other countries, the United States has few constitutional guarantees of social welfare rights such as income, housing, or healthcare. In part this is because many Americans believe that the courts cannot possibly enforce such guarantees. However, recent innovations in constitutional design in other countries suggest that such rights can be judicially enforced--not by increasing the power of the courts but by decreasing it. In Weak Courts, Strong Rights, Mark Tushnet uses a comparative legal perspective to show how creating weaker forms of judicial review may actually allow for stronger social welfare rights under American constitutional law. Under "strong-form" judicial review, as in the United States, judicial interpretations of the constitution are binding on other branches of government. In contrast, "weak-form" review allows the legislature and executive to reject constitutional rulings by the judiciary--as long as they do so publicly. Tushnet describes how weak-form review works in Great Britain and Canada and discusses the extent to which legislatures can be expected to enforce constitutional norms on their own. With that background, he turns to social welfare rights, explaining the connection between the "state action" or "horizontal effect" doctrine and the enforcement of social welfare rights. Tushnet then draws together the analysis of weak-form review and that of social welfare rights, explaining how weak-form review could be used to enforce those rights. He demonstrates that there is a clear judicial path--not an insurmountable judicial hurdle--to better enforcement of constitutional social welfare rights.

The Chief

The Chief PDF Author: Joan Biskupic
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093280
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic Chief Justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far. John Roberts was named to the Supreme Court in 2005 claiming he would act as a neutral umpire in deciding cases. His critics argue he has been anything but, pointing to his conservative victories on voting rights and campaign finance. Yet he broke from orthodoxy in his decision to preserve Obamacare. How are we to understand the motives of the most powerful judge in the land? In The Chief, award-winning journalist Joan Biskupic contends that Roberts is torn between two, often divergent, priorities: to carry out a conservative agenda, and to protect the Court's image and his place in history. Biskupic shows how Roberts's dual commitments have fostered distrust among his colleagues, with major consequences for the law. Trenchant and authoritative, The Chief reveals the making of a justice and the drama on this nation's highest court.

The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right

The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right PDF Author: Michael J. Graetz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476732515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
The magnitude of the Burger Court has been underestimated by historians. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards dotted the landscape, especially in the South. Nixon promised to transform the Supreme Court--and with four appointments, including a new chief justice, he did. This book tells the story of the Supreme Court that came in between the liberal Warren Court and the conservative Rehnquist and Roberts Courts: the seventeen years, 1969 to 1986, under Chief Justice Warren Burger. It is a period largely written off as a transitional era at the Supreme Court when, according to the common verdict, "nothing happened." How wrong that judgment is. The Burger Court had vitally important choices to make: whether to push school desegregation across district lines; how to respond to the sexual revolution and its new demands for women's equality; whether to validate affirmative action on campuses and in the workplace; whether to shift the balance of criminal law back toward the police and prosecutors; what the First Amendment says about limits on money in politics. The Burger Court forced a president out of office while at the same time enhancing presidential power. It created a legacy that in many ways continues to shape how we live today. Written with a keen sense of history and expert use of the justices' personal papers, this book sheds new light on an important era in American political and legal history.--Adapted from dust jacket.