The Most Dangerous Branch

The former legal affairs editor of Newsweek takes us inside the secret world of the Supreme Court and shows how the justices subvert the role of the other branches of government—and how we’ve come to accept it at our peril. Never before has the Court been more central in American life. It is now the nine justices who too often decide the biggest issues of our time—from abortion and same-sex marriage to gun control, campaign finance, and voting rights. The Court is so crucial that many voters in 2016 made their choice based on whom they thought their presidential candidate would name to the Court. Donald Trump picked Neil Gorsuch—the key decision of his new administration. The newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh—replacing Anthony Kennedy—is even more important, holding the swing vote over so much social policy. With the 2020 campaign underway, and with two justices in their ’80s, the Court looms even larger. Is that really how democracy is supposed to work? Based on exclusive interviews with the justices, Kaplan provides fresh details about life behind the scenes at the Court: the reaction to Kavanaugh’s controversial arrival, the new role for Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas's simmering rage, Antonin Scalia's death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's celebrity, Breyer Bingo, and the petty feuding between Gorsuch and the chief justice. Kaplan offers a sweeping narrative of the justices’ aggrandizement of power over the decades—from Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore to Citizens United. (He also faults the Court for not getting involved when it should—for example, to limit partisan gerrymandering.) But the arrogance of the Court isn't partisan: Conservative and liberal justices alike are guilty of overreach. Challenging conventional wisdom about the Court's transcendent power, as well as presenting an intimate inside look at the Court, The Most Dangerous Branch is sure to rile both sides of the political aisle.

Judges on the Supreme Court of Canada are guided by reason and principle - or so most Canadians think. In The Most Dangerous Branch Robert Martin argues that the court has changed from acting on principles to acting on values, allowing it to impose its own personal preferences. As judges are not elected, Martin argues, they should not be permitted to set the social agenda, amend legislation, amend the constitution, or attack democracy and democratic institutions.The Most Dangerous Branch shows that the Supreme Court has done exactly this in dealing with abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality, and Quebec secession through decisions that were guided not by reasoned understanding of the principles of law but by the values of judges - values they, as unelected representatives of the Canadian state, had no right to impose. Martin shows that Supreme Court judges have adopted an orthodoxy of moral relativism and identity politics that he likens to a secular state religion. This orthodoxy denies the possibility of objectivity about human endeavour and regards social reality as "constructed." While purporting to be concerned with the plight of the oppressed, it is actually based on profound condescension. Martin believes that the "theocracy" which dominates the Supreme Court of Canada is subverting democracy and the rule of law. In The Most Dangerous Branch he calls on Canadians to take back their country.

This classic book on the role of the Supreme Court in our democracy traces the history of the Court, assessing the merits of various decisions along the way. Eminent law professor Alexander Bickel begins with Marbury vs. Madison, which he says gives shaky support to judicial review, and concludes with the school desegregation cases of 1954, which he uses to show the extent and limits of the Court’s power. In this way he accomplishes his stated purpose: “to have the Supreme Court’s exercise of judicial review better understood and supported and more sagaciously used.” The book now includes new foreword by Henry Wellington.Reviews of the Earlier Edition:“Dozens of books have examined and debated the court’s role in the American system. Yet there remains great need for the scholarship and perception, the sound sense and clear view Alexander Bickel brings to the discussion.... Students of the court will find much independent and original thinking supported by wide knowledge. Many judges could read the book with profit.” -Donovan Richardson, Christian Science Monitor“The Yale professor is a law teacher who is not afraid to declare his own strong views of legal wrongs... One of the rewards of this book is that Professor Bickel skillfully knits in "ations from a host of authorities and, since these are carefully documented, the reader may look them up in their settings. Among the author’s favorites is the late Thomas Reed Powell of Harvard, whose wit flashes on a good many pages.” -Irving Dillard, Saturday ReviewAlexander M. Bickel was professor of law at Yale University.

Jay Sekulow—one of America’s most influential attorneys—explores a post Obama landscape where bureaucracy has taken over our government and provides a practical roadmap to help take back our personal liberties. Jay Sekulow is on a mission to defend Americans’ freedom. The fact is that freedom is under attack like never before. The threat comes from the fourth branch of government—the biggest branch—and the only branch not in the Constitution: the federal bureaucracy. The bureaucracy imposes thousands of new laws every year, without a single vote from Congress. The bureaucracy violates the rights of Americans without accountability—persecuting adoptive parents, denying veterans quality healthcare, discriminating against conservatives and Christians for partisan purposes, and damaging our economy with job-killing rules. Americans are bullied by the very institutions established to protect their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our nation’s bureaucrats are on an undemocratic power trip. But Sekulow has a plan to fight back. We can resist illegal abuse, we can reform a broken system, and we can restore American democracy. This book won’t just tell you how to win, it will show you real victories achieved by Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice. Unless we can roll back the fourth branch of govern­ment—the most dangerous branch—our elections will no longer matter. Undemocratic is a wake-up call, a call made at just the right time—before it’s too late to save the democracy we love.

When the Supreme Court's effectively decided the presidential election of 2000, it decision illustrated a classic question in American politics: what is the appropriate role for the Supreme Court? The dilemma is between judicial activism, the Court's willingness to make significant changes in public policy, and judicial restraint, the Court's willingness to confine the use and extent of its power. While the Framers of the Constitution felt that the judiciary would be the "least dangerous branch" of government, many have come to the conclusion that courts govern America, a notion at odds with democratic government.Richard Pacelle traces the historical ebb and flow of the Court's role in the critical issues of American politics: slavery, free speech, religion, abortion, and affirmative action. Pacelle examines the arguments for judicial restraint, including that unelected judges making policy runs against democratic principles, and the arguments for judicial activism, including the important role the court has played as a protector of minority rights. Pacelle suggests that there needs to be a balance between judicial activism and restraint in light of the constraints on the institution and its power. Stimulating and sure to generate discussion, The Supreme Court in American Politics is a concise supplemental text for American Government and Judicial Politics course.

“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

“Meticulously researched and engagingly written . . . a comprehensive indictment of the court’s rulings in areas ranging from campaign finance and voting rights to poverty law and criminal justice.” —Financial Times A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.

Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.