The People's Court
Lawrence Douglas February 5, 2007 - 11:22am
The Most Democratic Branch
How the Courts Serve America
Jeffrey Rosen
Oxford University Press, $25, 256 pp.
Alexander Bickel, the great scholar of the Supreme Court, famously called the power of judicial review “counter-majoritarian.” Nowhere does the Constitution explicitly grant the Supreme Court the power to declare law unconstitutional. More to the point, the practice is hard to square with the idea of democratic governance. After all, democracies are supposed to vest law-making power in legislative majorities that are electorally...
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