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From The Countermajoritarian Difficulty To Juristocracy And The Political Construction Of Judicial Power, Mark A. Graber Jan 2006

From The Countermajoritarian Difficulty To Juristocracy And The Political Construction Of Judicial Power, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Does It Really Matter? Conservative Courts In A Conservative Era, Mark A. Graber Jan 2006

Does It Really Matter? Conservative Courts In A Conservative Era, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the likelihood that conservative federal courts in the near future will be agents of conservative social change. In particular, the paper assesses whether conservative justices on some issues will support more conservative policies than conservative elected officials are presently willing to enact and whether such judicial decisions will influence public policy. My primary conclusion is that, as long as conservatives remain politically ascendant in the elected branches of government, the Roberts Court is likely to influence American politics at the margins. The new conservative judicial majority is likely to be more libertarian than conservative majorities in the …


Iredell Reclaimed: Farewell To Snowiss's History Of Judicial Review, Gerald F. Leonard Jan 2006

Iredell Reclaimed: Farewell To Snowiss's History Of Judicial Review, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

Even after the publication of Larry Kramer's The People Themselves, the early history of judicial review suffers from the unfortunate influence of Sylvia Snowiss's Judicial Review and the Law of the Constitution. Snowiss misread, among other things, James Iredell's foundational argument in 1786 for the inevitability and necessity of judicial review. Snowiss claimed that early understandings of judicial review conceptualized it not as a legal doctrine but as a doctrine of political and revolutionary resistance. In fact, however, Iredell argued for judicial review as a straightforward, legalistic consequence of popular sovereignty. In Iredell's influential account, the transition from the British …