Barry Friedman

The Will of the People (eBook, ePUB)

How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In recent years, the justices of the Supreme Court have ruled definitively on such issues as abortion, school prayer, and military tribunals in the war on terror. They decided one of American history's most contested presidential elections. Yet for all their power, the justices never face election and hold their offices for life. This combination of influence and apparent unaccountability has led many to complain that there is something illegitimate-even undemocratic-about judicial authority.

In The Will of the People, Barry Friedman challenges that claim by showing that the Court has always been subject to a higher power: the American public. Judicial positions have been abolished, the justices' jurisdiction has been stripped, the Court has been packed, and unpopular decisions have been defied. For at least the past sixty years, the justices have made sure that their decisions do not stray too far from public opinion.

Friedman's pathbreaking account of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court-from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Rehnquist court in 2005-details how the American people came to accept their most controversial institution and shaped the meaning of the Constitution.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Seitenzahl: 624
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. September 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781429989954
• Artikelnr.: 39948644

Autorenporträt

Barry is the author of Jacob Fishman's Marriages, Funny You Should Mention It, Road Comic, Four Days And Year Later, The Joke Was on Me, Jack Sh*t: Volume One Voluptuous Bagels and Other Concerns of Jack Friedman, the first his three-volume collection of life with his nonagenarian father. Barry is an essayist, reporter, standup comedian, and political columnist, his work has appeared in Esquire, where he has co-hosted "The Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce" (Pierce in fact gave him the name "Friedman of the Plains"); The Progressive Populist; Inside Media; The Las Vegas Review-Journal; and the AAPG EXPLORER, a magazine for petroleum geologists, which is mostly noteworthy because he knows little about petroleum geology and has hurt himself pumping his own gas. Barry was also "Fletcher Cronie #1 or #2" (there is still some debate) in "Weird Al" Yankovic's UHF .Barry hates being referred to in the third person.