Available as a single volume or as part of the 10 volume set Supreme Court in American Society

From renowned political theorist James MacGregor Burns, an incisive critique of the overreaching power of an ideological Supreme Court For decades, Pulitzer Prize-winner James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. In Packing the Court, he turns his eye to the U.S. Supreme Court, an institution that he believes has become more powerful, and more partisan, than the founding fathers ever intended. In a compelling and provocative narrative, Burns reveals how the Supreme Court has served as a reactionary force in American politics at critical moments throughout the nation's history, and concludes with a bold proposal to rein in the court's power.

The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.

Explores the relationship between the legitimacy, the efficacy, and the decision-making of national and transnational constitutional courts.

Published here with a new chapter covering judgements from 1993 to 1995, Raw judicial power? is established as the definitive analysis of the powerful forces shaping the United States Supreme Court today. Robert J. McKeever analyses the approach of the Court to the most pressing contemporary social issues, such as capital punishment, abortion, race and affirmative action, gender equality and religion, sex and politics. He shows how social policy initiatives in the US have often come from the judicial rather than the legislative branch of government, leading to charges that the Supreme Court has been exercising 'raw judicial power'. He examines the policy decisions the Court has made, and argues that the Court has increasingly jettisoned traditional notions of constitutional interpretation in order to tackle the conflicts in contemporary American society. Students of American politics, constitutional law and social policy will all find this book invaluable.