Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-25T07:21:11.161Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Law, Politics, and Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2011

J. Mitchell Pickerill
J. Mitchell Pickerill
Affiliation:
Washington State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Political scientists have long rejected the old law and politics dichotomy and recognize instead that law and court decisions are inherently political in numerous ways. Still, courts are not the same as executive and legislative institutions, and law is not simply a synonym for politics or policy. Law and courts are distinct and yet connected to political processes and policy outcomes in complex and nuanced ways. The question for law and courts scholars, then, is how and why do political actors (with seemingly increasing frequency) turn to law and the judiciary to influence public policy, and what are the impacts of infusing law and courts into the US political process? The three recent books under review help to answer these questions.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 357 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baker v. Carr 369 U.S. 186 (1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Clayton, Cornell W., and Pickerill, J. Mitchell. 2004. “Guess What Happened on the Way to the Revolution? Precursors to the Supreme Court's Federalism Revolution.” Publius 34(3): 85–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clayton, Cornell W., and Pickerill, J. Mitchell. 2006. “The Politics of Criminal Justice: How the New Right Regime Shaped the Rehnquist Court's Criminal Justice Jurisprudence.” Georgetown Law Journal 94(5): 1385–1425.Google Scholar
Gideon v. Wainwright 372 U.S. 335 (1963).Google Scholar
Gillman, Howard. 2002. “How Political Parties Can Use the Courts to Advance Their Agendas: Federal Courts in the United States, 1875–1891.” American Political Science Review 96(3): 511–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillman, Howard. 2008. “Courts and the Politics of Partisan Coalitions.” In The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics, ed. Whittington, Keith E., Keleman, R. Daniel, and Caldeira, Gregory. New York: Oxford University Press, 644–61.Google Scholar
Graber, Mark A. 1993. “The Nonmajoritarian Difficulty: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary.” Studies in American Political Development 7(1): 35–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graber, Mark A. 2005. “Constructing Judicial Review.” Annual Review of Political Science 8: 425–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Charles O. 1995. “A Way of Life and Law: Presidential Address, American Political Science Association.” American Political Science Review 89(1): 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kagan, Robert A. 2003. Adversarial Legalism: The Way of American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Klarman, Michael J. 2006. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lovell, George I. 2003. Legislative Deferrals: Statutory Ambiguity, Judicial Power, and American Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Luther v. Borden 48 U.S. 1 (1848).Google Scholar
McMahon, Kevin J. 2004. Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Company v. Oregon 223 U.S. 118 (1912).Google Scholar
Pickerill, J. Mitchell, and Clayton, Cornell W.. 2004. “The Rehnquist Court and the Political Dynamics of Federalism.” Perspectives on Politics 2(2): 233–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973).Google Scholar
Viscusi, W. Kip, ed. 2002. Regulation through Litigation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution and AEI Press.Google Scholar
Whittington, Keith E. 2005. “Interpose Your Friendly Hand: Political Supports for the Exercise of Judicial Review by the United States Supreme Court.” American Political Science Review 99(4): 583–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whittington, Keith E. 2007. Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar