The United States Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has been the site of some of the great debates of American history, from child labor and prayer in the schools, to busing and abortion. The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions offers lively and insightful accounts of the most important cases ever argued before the Court, from Marbury v. Madison and Scott v. Sandford (the Dred Scott decision) to Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. This new edition of the Guide contains more than 450 entries on major Supreme Court cases, including 53 new entries on the latest landmark rulings. Among the new entries are Bush v. Gore, Nixon v. United States, Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights. Four decisions (Hamdi v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Rasu v. Bush, and Rumsfeld v. Padilla) are considered in a single essay entitled "Enemy Combatant Cases." Arranged alphabetically and written by eminent legal scholars, each entry provides the United States Reports citation, the date the case was argued and decided, the vote of the Justices, who wrote the opinion for the Court, who concurred, and who dissented. More important, the entries feature an informative account of the particulars of the case, the legal and social background, the reasoning behind the Courts decision, and the cases impact on American society. For this edition, Ely has added an extensive Further Reading section and revised the Case Index and Topical Index. For anyone interested in the great controversies of our time, this invaluable book is a must reada primer on the epic constitutional battles that have informed American life.

When the first Supreme Court convened in 1790, it was so ill-esteemed that its justices frequently resigned in favor of other pursuits. John Rutledge stepped down as Associate Justice to become a state judge in South Carolina; John Jay resigned as Chief Justice to run for Governor of New York; and Alexander Hamilton declined to replace Jay, pursuing a private law practice instead. As Bernard Schwartz shows in this landmark history, the Supreme Court has indeed travelled a long and interesting journey to its current preeminent place in American life. In A History of the Supreme Court, Schwartz provides the finest, most comprehensive one-volume narrative ever published of our highest court. With impeccable scholarship and a clear, engaging style, he tells the story of the justices and their jurisprudence--and the influence the Court has had on American politics and society. With a keen ability to explain complex legal issues for the nonspecialist, he takes us through both the great and the undistinguished Courts of our nation's history. He provides insight into our foremost justices, such as John Marshall (who established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, an outstanding display of political calculation as well as fine jurisprudence), Roger Taney (whose legacy has been overshadowed by Dred Scott v. Sanford), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and others. He draws on evidence such as personal letters and interviews to show how the court has worked, weaving narrative details into deft discussions of the developments in constitutional law. Schwartz also examines the operations of the court: until 1935, it met in a small room under the Senate--so cramped that the judges had to put on their robes in full view of the spectators. But when the new building was finally opened, one justice called it "almost bombastically pretentious," and another asked, "What are we supposed to do, ride in on nine elephants?" He includes fascinating asides, on the debate in the first Court, for instance, over the use of English-style wigs and gowns (the decision: gowns, no wigs); and on the day Oliver Wendell Holmes announced his resignation--the same day that Earl Warren, as a California District Attorney, argued his first case before the Court. The author brings the story right up to the present day, offering balanced analyses of the pivotal Warren Court and the Rehnquist Court through 1992 (including, of course, the arrival of Clarence Thomas). In addition, he includes four special chapters on watershed cases: Dred Scott v. Sanford, Lochner v. New York, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade. Schwartz not only analyzes the impact of each of these epoch-making cases, he takes us behind the scenes, drawing on all available evidence to show how the justices debated the cases and how they settled on their opinions. Bernard Schwartz is one of the most highly regarded scholars of the Supreme Court, author of dozens of books on the law, and winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. In this remarkable account, he provides the definitive one-volume account of our nation's highest court.

This book examines whether and how the Office of the Solicitor General influences the United States Supreme Court. Combining archival data with recent innovations in the areas of matching and causal inference, the book finds that the Solicitor General influences every aspect of the Court's decision making process.

How oral arguments influence the decisions of Supreme Court justices.

Despite over two hundred years of experience with constitutional government, much remains unclear about the power of the political branches to curtail or re-define the judicial power of the United States. Uncertainty persists about the basis on which state courts and federal agencies may hear federal claims and the degree to which federal courts must review their decisions. Scholars approach these questions from a range of vantage points and have arrived at widely varying conclusions about the relationship between congressional and judicial power. Deploying familiar forms of legal analysis, and relying upon a new account of the Court's supremacy in relation to lower courts and tribunals, James Pfander advances a departmental conception of the judiciary. He argues that Congress can enlist the state courts, lower federal courts, and administrative agencies to hear federal claims in the first instance, but all of these tribunals must operate within a hierarchical framework over which the "one supreme Court" identified in the Constitution exercises ultimate supervisory authority. In offering the first general account of the Court as department head, Pfander takes up such important debates in the federal courts' literature as Congress's power to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction to review state court decisions, its authority to assign decision-making authority to state courts and non-Article III tribunals, its control over the doctrine of vertical stare decisis, and its ability to craft rules of practice for the federal system.

This volume presents a variety of both normative and descriptive perspectives on the use of precedent by the United States Supreme Court. It brings together a diverse group of American legal scholars, some of whom have been influenced by the Segal/Spaeth "attitudinal" model and some of whom have not. The group of contributors includes legal theorists and empiricists, constitutional lawyers and legal generalists, leading authorities and up-and-coming scholars. The book addresses questions such as how the Court establishes durable precedent, how the Court decides to overrule precedent, the effects of precedent on case selection, the scope of constitutional precedent, the influence of concurrences and dissents, and the normative foundations of constitutional precedent. Most of these questions have been addressed by the Court itself only obliquely, if at all. The volume will be valuable to readers both in the United States and abroad, particularly in light of ongoing debates over the role of precedent in civil-law nations and emerging legal systems.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring For 30 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse chronicled the activities of the U.S. Supreme Court and its justices as a correspondent for the New York Times. In this Very Short Introduction, she draws on her deep knowledge of the court's history and of its written and unwritten rules to show readers how the Supreme Court really works. Greenhouse offers a fascinating institutional biography of a place and its people--men and women who exercise great power but whose names and faces are unrecognized by many Americans and whose work often appears cloaked in mystery. How do cases get to the Supreme Court? How do the justices go about deciding them? What special role does the chief justice play? What do the law clerks do? How does the court relate to the other branches of government? Greenhouse answers these questions by depicting the justices as they confront deep constitutional issues or wrestle with the meaning of confusing federal statutes. Throughout, the author examines many individual Supreme Court cases to illustrate points under discussion, including Marbury v. Madison, the seminal case which established judicial review; District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which struck down the District of Columbia's gun-control statute and which was, surprisingly, the first time in its history that the Court issued an authoritative interpretation of the Second Amendment; and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which repudiated the right to abortion the Court had recognized nearly fifty years earlier in Roe v. Wade (1973). To add perspective, Greenhouse also compares the Court to foreign courts, revealing interesting differences. For instance, no other country in the world has chosen to bestow life tenure on its judges. The third edition of Greenhouse's Very Short Introduction tracks the changes in the Court's makeup over the past decade, including the landmark decisions of the Obama and Trump eras and the emergence of a conservative supermajority. A superb overview packed with telling details, this volume offers a matchless introduction to one of the pillars of American government.