Many hoped or feared that Antonin Scalia’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 1986 would guarantee a conservative counter-revolution that would reverse the liberal jurisprudence of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and which was continued to some extent under the Burger Court though the influence of Justice William Brennan. In addition, President Reagan described Scalia’s nomination as part of a project to remake the role of the Court, promote an interpretive approach of o...

This book examines the judicial opinions and criminal justice policy impact of Justice John Paul Stevens, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most prolific opinion author during his 35-year career on the nation’s highest court. Although Justice Stevens, a Republican appointee of President Gerald Ford, had a professional reputation as a corporate antitrust law attorney, he immediately asserted himself as the Court’s foremost advocate of prisoners’ rights and Miranda rights when he arrived at the Court...

This book illuminates the decision-making processes of the US Supreme court through an examination of several prisoners' rights cases. In 1964, the Supreme Court declined to hear prisoners’ claims about religious freedom. In 2014, the Supreme Court heard a case that led to the justices’ unanimous endorsement of a Muslim prisoner’s religious right to grow a beard despite objections from prison officials. In the fifty-year span between those two events, the Supreme Court developed the law co...

First Published in 1997. Organised in a easily readable format this book on the Supreme Court and punishment takes the reader through the sentencing and incarceration issues that have been so controversial and yet, so relatively unchanged over the years.

This book examines the criminal justice decisions of the Rehnquist Court era through analyses of individual justices' contributions to the development of law and policy. The Rehnquist Court era (1986-2005) produced a period of opportunity for the U.S. Supreme Court's judicial conservatives to reshape constitutional law concerning rights in the criminal justice process. It was an era in which the Court produced many hotly-debated decisions concerning such issues as capital punishment, searc...

The Supreme Court is one of the most extraordinary institutions in our system of government. Charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution, the nine unelected justices of the Court have the awesome power to strike down laws enacted by our elected representatives. Why does the public accept the Court’s decisions as legitimate and follow them, even when those decisions are highly unpopular? What must the Court do to maintain the public’s faith? How can the Court help make ...

The first full-scale biography of the Supreme Court's most provocative—and influential—justiceIf the U.S. Supreme Court teaches us anything, it is that almost everything is open to interpretation. Almost. But what's inarguable is that, while the Court has witnessed a succession of larger-than-life jurists in its two-hundred-year-plus history, it has never seen the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.Combative yet captivating, infuriating yet charmin...

"Illuminating. . . . [Tribe and Matz] offer well-crafted overviews of key cases decided by the Roberts Court [and] chart the Supreme Court's conservative path." — Chicago TribuneFrom Citizens United to its momentous rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has profoundly affected American life. Yet the court remains a mysterious institution, and the motivations of the nine men and women who serve for l...

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.

Over the last few decades, the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts have undergone a dramatic shift to the right, the result of a determined effort by right-wing lawmakers and presidents to reinterpret the Constitution by reshaping the judiciary. Conservative activist justices have narrowed the scope of the Constitution, denying its protections to millions of Americans, exactly as the lawmakers who appointed and confirmed these jurists intended. Basic long-standing principles of ...

The sixth edition of the classic and concise account of the US Supreme Court, its history, and its place in American politics.For more than fifty years, Robert G. McCloskey's classic work on the Supreme Court's role in constructing the US Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation's highest court.As in prior editions, McCloskey's original text remains unchanged. In his historical interpretation, he argues that the streng...

The Constitution was designed to limit government power and protect individuals from the tyranny of majorities and interest-group politics. But those protections are meaningless without judges who are fully committed to enforcing them, and America’s judges have largely abdicated that responsibility. All too often, instead of judging the constitutionality of government action, courts simply rationalize it, as the Supreme Court did in upholding the Affordable Care Act, which represented the ...