A Candle in the Darkness

Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West (St. Paul), 2012608 pp., $49.95, cloth.These are dark days for American law. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts, in what was a stark betrayal of his oath to uphold the...

What’s the Supreme Court Supposed to Do?

The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789–2008 by Lucas A Powe, Jr. Harvard University Press (Cambridge and London), 432 pages, paper $19.95, 2011. Sometime in 2012 the United States Supreme Court will issue its most important opinion in the twenty-first century...

The First Thing We Do . . .

Unrestrained: Judicial Excess and the Mind of the American Lawyer by Robert F. Nagel. Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, N.J.) 148 pp., $39.95 cloth, 2008   Robert F. Nagel, the Ira C. Rothgerber, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of...

Who Gets it Right? Liberals or Originalists?

The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions by Kermit Roosevelt III. Yale University Press (New Haven and London), 272 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2006. By the celebrated “switch in time that saved nine” in 1937, the United States Supreme Court,...

Making Good Republicans

The American Republic: Primary Sources edited by Bruce Frohnen. The Liberty Fund, Inc. (Indianapolis, Indiana), 752 pp., $25.00 cloth, $12.00 paper, 2002.   WHAT SHOULD BE TAUGHT to American undergraduates and law students to make them good republicans? The...