Download or read book A History of the Supreme Court written by the late Bernard Schwartz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-02-23 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the first Supreme Court convened in 1790, it was so ill-esteemed that its justices frequently resigned in favor of other pursuits. John Rutledge stepped down as Associate Justice to become a state judge in South Carolina; John Jay resigned as Chief Justice to run for Governor of New York; and Alexander Hamilton declined to replace Jay, pursuing a private law practice instead. As Bernard Schwartz shows in this landmark history, the Supreme Court has indeed travelled a long and interesting journey to its current preeminent place in American life. In A History of the Supreme Court, Schwartz provides the finest, most comprehensive one-volume narrative ever published of our highest court. With impeccable scholarship and a clear, engaging style, he tells the story of the justices and their jurisprudence--and the influence the Court has had on American politics and society. With a keen ability to explain complex legal issues for the nonspecialist, he takes us through both the great and the undistinguished Courts of our nation's history. He provides insight into our foremost justices, such as John Marshall (who established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, an outstanding display of political calculation as well as fine jurisprudence), Roger Taney (whose legacy has been overshadowed by Dred Scott v. Sanford), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and others. He draws on evidence such as personal letters and interviews to show how the court has worked, weaving narrative details into deft discussions of the developments in constitutional law. Schwartz also examines the operations of the court: until 1935, it met in a small room under the Senate--so cramped that the judges had to put on their robes in full view of the spectators. But when the new building was finally opened, one justice called it "almost bombastically pretentious," and another asked, "What are we supposed to do, ride in on nine elephants?" He includes fascinating asides, on the debate in the first Court, for instance, over the use of English-style wigs and gowns (the decision: gowns, no wigs); and on the day Oliver Wendell Holmes announced his resignation--the same day that Earl Warren, as a California District Attorney, argued his first case before the Court. The author brings the story right up to the present day, offering balanced analyses of the pivotal Warren Court and the Rehnquist Court through 1992 (including, of course, the arrival of Clarence Thomas). In addition, he includes four special chapters on watershed cases: Dred Scott v. Sanford, Lochner v. New York, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade. Schwartz not only analyzes the impact of each of these epoch-making cases, he takes us behind the scenes, drawing on all available evidence to show how the justices debated the cases and how they settled on their opinions. Bernard Schwartz is one of the most highly regarded scholars of the Supreme Court, author of dozens of books on the law, and winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. In this remarkable account, he provides the definitive one-volume account of our nation's highest court.

Download or read book The Agenda written by Ian Millhiser and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, until the present, Congress enacted hardly any major legislation outside of the tax law President Trump signed in 2017. In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled much of America's campaign finance law, severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, permitted states to opt-out of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, weakened laws protecting against age discimination and sexual and racial harassment, and held that every state must permit same-sex couples to marry. This powerful unelected body, now controlled by six very conservative Republicans, has and will become the locus of policymaking in the United States. Ian Millhiser, Vox's Supreme Court correspondent, tells the story of what those six justices are likely to do with their power. It is true that the right to abortion is in its final days, as is affirmative action. But Millhiser shows that it is in the most arcane decisions that the Court will fundamentally reshape America, transforming it into something far less democratic, by attacking voting rights, dismantling and vetoing the federal administrative state, ignoring the separation of church and state, and putting corporations above the law. The Agenda exposes a radically altered Supreme Court whose powers extend far beyond transforming any individual right--its agenda is to shape the very nature of America's government, redefining who gets to have legal rights, who is beyond the reach of the law, and who chooses the people who make our laws.

Download or read book The U S Supreme Court A Very Short Introduction written by Linda Greenhouse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-18 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring For 30 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse chronicled the activities of the U.S. Supreme Court and its justices as a correspondent for the New York Times. In this Very Short Introduction, she draws on her deep knowledge of the court's history and of its written and unwritten rules to show readers how the Supreme Court really works. Greenhouse offers a fascinating institutional biography of a place and its people--men and women who exercise great power but whose names and faces are unrecognized by many Americans and whose work often appears cloaked in mystery. How do cases get to the Supreme Court? How do the justices go about deciding them? What special role does the chief justice play? What do the law clerks do? How does the court relate to the other branches of government? Greenhouse answers these questions by depicting the justices as they confront deep constitutional issues or wrestle with the meaning of confusing federal statutes. Throughout, the author examines many individual Supreme Court cases to illustrate points under discussion, including Marbury v. Madison, the seminal case which established judicial review; District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which struck down the District of Columbia's gun-control statute and which was, surprisingly, the first time in its history that the Court issued an authoritative interpretation of the Second Amendment; and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which repudiated the right to abortion the Court had recognized nearly fifty years earlier in Roe v. Wade (1973). To add perspective, Greenhouse also compares the Court to foreign courts, revealing interesting differences. For instance, no other country in the world has chosen to bestow life tenure on its judges. The third edition of Greenhouse's Very Short Introduction tracks the changes in the Court's makeup over the past decade, including the landmark decisions of the Obama and Trump eras and the emergence of a conservative supermajority. A superb overview packed with telling details, this volume offers a matchless introduction to one of the pillars of American government.

Download or read book The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions written by Kermit Hall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-11 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Supreme Court has been the site of some of the great debates of American history, from child labor and prayer in the schools, to busing and abortion. The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions offers lively and insightful accounts of the most important cases ever argued before the Court, from Marbury v. Madison and Scott v. Sandford (the Dred Scott decision) to Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. This new edition of the Guide contains more than 450 entries on major Supreme Court cases, including 53 new entries on the latest landmark rulings. Among the new entries are Bush v. Gore, Nixon v. United States, Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights. Four decisions (Hamdi v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Rasu v. Bush, and Rumsfeld v. Padilla) are considered in a single essay entitled "Enemy Combatant Cases." Arranged alphabetically and written by eminent legal scholars, each entry provides the United States Reports citation, the date the case was argued and decided, the vote of the Justices, who wrote the opinion for the Court, who concurred, and who dissented. More important, the entries feature an informative account of the particulars of the case, the legal and social background, the reasoning behind the Courts decision, and the cases impact on American society. For this edition, Ely has added an extensive Further Reading section and revised the Case Index and Topical Index. For anyone interested in the great controversies of our time, this invaluable book is a must reada primer on the epic constitutional battles that have informed American life.

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.

Download or read book The U S Supreme Court written by Linda Greenhouse and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: « For thirty years, Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction, chronicled the activities of the justices as the Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times. In this concise volume, she draws on her deep knowledge of the court's history as well as of its written and unwritten rules to show the reader how the Supreme Court really works. »--

Download or read book US Supreme Court Opinions and their Audiences written by Ryan C. Black and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first study specifically to investigate the extent to which US Supreme Court justices alter the clarity of their opinions based on expected reactions from their audiences. The authors examine this dynamic by creating a unique measure of opinion clarity and then testing whether the Court writes clearer opinions when it faces ideologically hostile and ideologically scattered lower federal courts; when it decides cases involving poorly performing federal agencies; when it decides cases involving states with less professionalized legislatures and governors; and when it rules against public opinion. The data shows the Court writes clearer opinions in every one of these contexts, and demonstrates that actors are more likely to comply with clearer Court opinions.

Download or read book The Supreme Court in the American Legal System written by Jeffrey A. Segal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-08 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the American legal system, including a comprehensive treatment of the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite this treatment, the 'in' from the title deserves emphasis, for it extensively examines lower courts, providing separate chapters on state courts, the US District Courts, and the US Courts of Appeals. The book analyzes these courts from a legal/extralegal framework, drawing different conclusions about the relative influence of each based on institutional structures and empirical evidence. The book is also tied together through its attention to the relationship between lower courts and the Supreme Court. Additionally, Election 2000 litigation provides a common substantive topic linking many of the chapters. Finally, it provides extended coverage to the legal process, with separate chapters on civil procedure, evidence, and criminal procedure.

Download or read book The American Supreme Court written by Robert G. McCloskey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Robert McCloskey’s classic work on the Supreme Court’s role in constructing the U.S. Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation’s highest court. For this new fifth edition, Sanford Levinson extends McCloskey’s magisterial treatment to address the Court’s most recent decisions. As in prior editions, McCloskey’s original text remains unchanged. In his historical interpretation, he argues that the strength of the Court has always been its sensitivity to the changing political scene, as well as its reluctance to stray too far from the main currents of public sentiments. In two revised chapters, Levinson shows how McCloskey’s approach continues to illuminate developments since 2005, including the Court’s decisions in cases arising out of the War on Terror, which range from issues of civil liberty to tests of executive power. He also discusses the Court’s skepticism regarding campaign finance regulation; its affirmation of the right to bear arms; and the increasingly important nomination and confirmation process of Supreme Court justices, including that of the first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor. The best and most concise account of the Supreme Court and its place in American politics, McCloskey's wonderfully readable book is an essential guide to the past, present, and future prospects of this institution.

Download or read book Institutional Games and the U S Supreme Court written by James R. Rogers and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the past decade, the behavioral analysis of decisions by the Supreme Court has turned to game theory to gain new insights into this important institution in American politics. Game theory highlights the role of strategic interactions between the Court and other institutions in the decisions the Court makes as well as in the relations among the justices as they make their decisions. Rather than assume that the justices’ votes reveal their sincere preferences, students of law and politics have come to examine how the strategic concerns of the justices lead to "sophisticated" behavior as they seek to maximize achievement of their goals when faced with constraints on their ability to do so. In Institutional Games and the U.S. Supreme Court, James Rogers, Roy Flemming, and Jon Bond gather various essays that use game theory to explain the Supreme Court's interactions with Congress, the states, and the lower courts. Offering new ways of understanding the complexity and consequences of these interactions, the volume joins a growing body of work that considers these influential interactions among various branches of the U.S. government. Contributors: Kenneth A. Shepsle, Andrew De Martin, James R. Rogers, Christopher Zorn, Georg Vanberg, Cliff Carrubba, Thomas Hammond, Christopher Bonneau, Reginald Sheehan, Charles Cameron, Lewis A. Kornhauser, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Matthew Stephenson, Stefanie A. Lindquist, Susan D. Haire, Lawrence Baum

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.

Download or read book Supreme Disorder written by Ilya Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.

Download or read book The Chief written by Joan Biskupic and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court written by Aaron Epstein and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-28 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its importance to the life of the nation and all its citizens, the Supreme Court remains a mystery to most Americans, its workings widely felt but rarely seen firsthand. In this book, journalists who cover the Court—acting as the eyes and ears of not just the American people, but the Constitution itself—give us a rare close look into its proceedings, the people behind them, and the complex, often fascinating ways in which justice is ultimately served. Their narratives form an intimate account of a year in the life of the Supreme Court. The cases heard by the Surpreme Court are, first and foremost, disputes involving real people with actual stories. The accidents and twists of circumstance that have brought these people to the last resort of litigation can make for compelling drama. The contributors to this volume bring these dramatic stories to life, using them as a backdrop for the larger issues of law and social policy that constitute the Court’s business: abortion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, the right of privacy, crime, violence, discrimination, and the death penalty. In the course of these narratives, the authors describe the personalities and jurisprudential leanings of the various Justices, explaining how the interplay of these characters and theories about the Constitution interact to influence the Court’s decisions. Highly readable and richly informative, this book offers an unusually clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the most influential institutions in modern American life.

Download or read book Secret Lives of the Supreme Court written by Robert Schnakenberg and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drugs, Adultery, Bribery, Homosexuality, corruption—and the Supreme Court?!? Your high school history teachers never gave you a book like this one! Secret Lives of the Supreme Court features outrageous and uncensored profiles of America’s most legendary justices—complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright wacko facts. You’ll discover that: • Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. • Benjamin Cardozo likely died a virgin. • John Rutledge attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge. • John Marshall Harlan organized regular screenings of X-rated films. • Thurgood Marshall never missed an episode of Days of Our Lives. • Sandra Day O’Connor established the court’s first Jazzercise class. • And much, much more! With chapters on everyone from John Jay to Samuel Alito, Secret Lives of the Supreme Court tackles all the tough questions that other history books are afraid to ask: How many of these judges took bribes? How many were gay? And how could so many sink into dementia while serving on the highest court in the land? American history was never this much fun in school!

Download or read book The Supreme Court written by Lawrence Baum and published by CQ Press. This book was released on 2018-09-12 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connecting recent events to their effects on the courts, policy, and society, the Thirteenth Edition of The Supreme Court provides a brief yet comprehensive introduction to the U.S. Supreme Court. In successive chapters, the book examines major aspects of the Court, including the selection, backgrounds, and departures of justices; the creation of the Court′s agenda; the decision-making process and the factors that shape the Court′s decisions; the substance of the Court′s policies; and the Court′s impact on government and American society. Delving deeply into personalities and procedures, author Lawrence Baum provides a balanced explanation of the Court’s actions and the behavior of its justices as he reveals its complexity, reach, and influence. Updated with the most recent data displayed in a lively photo program, the new edition of this bestseller is one of the most engaging books on this subject available.

Download or read book Essential Supreme Court Decisions written by John R. Vile and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2010-12-28 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1954, this indispensable reference quickly became the gold standard for concise summaries of important U.S. Supreme Court cases. The only reference guide to Supreme Court cases organized both topically and chronologically within chapters so that readers understand how cases fit into a historical context, the 15th edition has been extensively revised to ensure that it remains the most up-to-date resource available. An essential resource for law students, lawyers, and everyone interested in our nation's Constitution and the Supreme Court decisions that explicate it.