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This book on the Supreme Court during the Chief Justiceship of
Edward Douglass White (1910-21) covers an important aspect of
American history during the Progressive Era. This was a time when
the role of the Supreme Court was debated with a passion rarely
exceeded in our history. In its constitutional, antitrust,
regulatory, and race-relations decisions, the Supreme Court found
itself at the heart of the most important economic and political
questions of the day. This was a time when some of the most
brilliant jurists in American history sat on the Court: Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr.; Louis D. Brandeis; and Charles Evans Hughes,
to name a few. This book sets the Supreme Court in the midst of the
political, economic, and social turmoil of one of the most
important periods of American history.
This classic book on the role of the Supreme Court in our democracy
traces the history of the Court, assessing the merits of various
decisions along the way. Eminent law professor Alexander Bickel
begins with Marbury vs. Madison, which he says gives shaky support
to judicial review, and concludes with the school desegregation
cases of 1954, which he uses to show the extent and limits of the
Court's power. In this way he accomplishes his stated purpose: "to
have the Supreme Court's exercise of judicial review better
understood and supported and more sagaciously used." The book now
includes new foreword by Henry Wellington. Reviews of the Earlier
Edition: "Dozens of books have examined and debated the court's
role in the American system. Yet there remains great need for the
scholarship and perception, the sound sense and clear view
Alexander Bickel brings to the discussion.... Students of the court
will find much independent and original thinking supported by wide
knowledge. Many judges could read the book with profit." -Donovan
Richardson, Christian Science Monitor "The Yale professor is a law
teacher who is not afraid to declare his own strong views of legal
wrongs... One of the rewards of this book is that Professor Bickel
skillfully knits in quotations from a host of authorities and,
since these are carefully documented, the reader may look them up
in their settings. Among the author's favorites is the late Thomas
Reed Powell of Harvard, whose wit flashes on a good many pages."
-Irving Dillard, Saturday Review Alexander M. Bickel was professor
of law at Yale University.
"This short but provocative volume... is a fitting testimony to the
author's extraordinary, though tragically brief, career as a
constitutional scholar, lawyer and teacher. In just a hundred and a
half literate pages, we are treated to vintage Bickel insight into
every major political issue of the decade, from the civil rights
movement, to the Warren Court, through the frenetic university
upheavals, and-inevitably-to Watergate.... A tapestry woven by a
master of subtle color and texture."-Alan M. Dershowitz, New York
Times Book Review "Presents the core of [Bickel's] legal and
political philosophy.... In the five essays that compose this
volume Bickel explores the relationship between morality and law,
examining the role of the Constitution and Supreme Court in our
political process, the nature of citizenship, the First Amendment,
civil disobedience, and the moral authority of the intellectual....
All will be stimulated by Bickel's thoughtful message."
-Perspective "[Bickel] wrote with astonishing clarity. It takes no
legal training to understand his thinking about the law. Nor does
it take a willingness to agree with him. All that's required of the
reader of this important 'little' book is a concern that rivals
Bickel's about the future of American society." -Newsweek "An
illuminating, often a moving book, with all of Professor Bickel's
rare ability to bring law to life in vivid words."-Anthony Lewis
Alexander M. Bickel, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School,
taught at Yale from 1956 until his death in 1974.
Timeless questions about the role of the Supreme Court in the
American political and legal system are raised in the late
Alexander Bickel's characteristically astute analysis of the work
of the Warren Court. He takes issue with the Court's view that its
role should be to move the American polity in the direction of
perfect equality and expresses his preference for "a more faithful
adherence to the method of analytical reason, and a less confident
reliance on the intuitive capacity to identify the course of
progress." First published in 1970, this book made news with its
prediction that the Court's best-known decision, in Brown v. Board
of Education, might be headed for "irrelevance." Bickel charged the
Court, particularly in its segregation and reapportionment cases,
with being irrational, inconsistent, and even incoherent and argued
that its decisions would lead to unwise centralization of
government. He explored the limitations on the role of the court in
stimulating social progress and concluded that the Warren Court had
intervened in matters of social policy where the political process,
not judicial action, should apply. "Process is what especially
concerned him - the relationship between the legal and the
political process in a country where the two are uniquely
intermixed. If he criticized something done by the courts for the
stated purpose of speeding school desegregation, that did not mean
that he favored state-imposed racial discrimination; in fact he
abhorred it. He was concerned, rather, about trying to solve
complicated problems by legal formulas instead of leaving them to
the give-and-take of the political process." -- Anthony Lewis
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