The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights. The Court has restricted who has standing to sue, expanded the immunity of governments and government ...

Both historically and in the present, the Supreme Court has largely been a failureIn this devastating book, Erwin Chemerinsky—“one of the shining lights of legal academia” (The New York Times)—shows how, case by case, for over two centuries, the hallowed Court has been far more likely to uphold government abuses of power than to stop them. Drawing on a wealth of rulings, some famous, others little known, he reviews the Supreme Court’s historic failures in ...

An unprecedented work of civil rights and legal history, Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court has enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses through its decisions over the last half-century.Police are nine times more likely to kill African-American men than they are other Americans—in fact, nearly one in every thousand will die at the hands, or under the knee, of an officer. As eminent constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky ...

Throughout American history, views on the proper relationship between the state and religion have been deeply divided. And, with recent changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, First Amendment law concerning religion is likely to change dramatically in the years ahead. In The Religion Clauses, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, two of America's leading constitutional scholars, begin by explaining how freedom of religion is enshrined in the First Amendment through two pr...

From 1953 to 1969, Earl Warren served as chief justice of the US Supreme Court. During that time, the Warren Court made a number of historically important decisions involving anti-miscegenation laws (Loving v. Virginia), the right to privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut), and, perhaps most important, racial segregation (Brown v. Board of Education).In The Warren Court and Democratic Constitution, Horwitz highlights the radical shift in traditional ju...

Why originalism is a flawed, incoherent, and dangerously ideological method of constitutional interpretationOriginalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Three of the Supreme Court’s nine justices explicitly embrace the originalist approach, as do increasing numbers of judges ...

Expert guidance for navigating the difficult new issues around free speech rights in higher educationIn their earlier book, Free Speech on Campus, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman argued that colleges and universities should permit the expression of the widest possible range of views. Nearly ten tumultuous years later, many issues have arisen that this simple principle does not adequately address. To what extent must an institution provide expensive se...

The Supreme Court’s October 2023 Term was filled with blockbuster decisions that will have a dramatic effect on the law and on people’s lives. The Court created broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken by a president, dramatically limited the power of federal administrative agencies, clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment, and empowered cities to use the criminal law against the unhoused. This concise book reviews the key decisions of October Term 2022 and th...

"[A] clear, cogent, passionate and persuasive" account of how constitutional rights have been restricted by "disturbing decisions of the Supreme Court" (Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post ).The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matt...

Why originalism is a flawed, incoherent, and dangerously ideological method of constitutional interpretationOriginalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Three of the Supreme Court's nine justices explicitly embrace the originalist approach, as do increasing numbers of judges ...

The 2016 presidential election profoundly reshaped the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump's selection of three justices - Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett - created a solid six-justice conservative majority. The impact was seen a year ago in October Term 2021, Justice Barrett's first full term. The Court overruled Roe v. Wade, dramatically increased the protection for gun rights, found a First Amendment right for a high school football coach to pray publicly on the f...

No Democracy Lasts Forever argues that the Constitution has become a threat to American democracy and must be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided.Deeply troubled by the Constitution's inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy. Pointing out that just fifte...