February 09, 2007

Books

The People's Court

The Most Democratic BranchHow the Courts Serve AmericaJeffrey RosenOxford University Press, $25, 256 pp.

Lawrence Douglas

  Alexander Bickel, the great scholar of the Supreme Court, famously called the power of judicial review “counter-majoritarian.” Nowhere does the Constitution explicitly grant the Supreme Court the power to declare law unconstitutional. More to the point, the practice is hard to square with the idea of democratic governance. After all, democracies are supposed to vest (...)


 

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