This introduction to the symposium on Keith J. Bybee's All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not provides a brief synopsis of the book's main argument and identifies some of the unsettled questions generated by the author's innovative treatment of courtesy, hypocrisy, and law.

This essay develops an understated argument in Stuart Scheingold's The Political Novel (2010), namely, how narratives of estrangement serve to empower re-imagination without reinforcing the false promises of modernism. I argue that Scheingold's earlier work in The Politics of Rights and on cause lawyering provides guidance for understanding the character of empowerment to which Scheingold points in his latest work. In addition, I examine three film narratives that treat the “mournful legacy of the twentieth century”—Pan's Labyrinth, Life Is Beautiful, and Everything Is Illuminated. Emergent in these narratives, I suggest, is a way that storytellers point to empowerment by highlighting the largely overwhelming constraints that limit the agency promised by modernism and the strategic, though contingent, choices characters make to confront and cope with their own estrangement.

This paper examines the extent to which Pennsylvania county courts are prepared to implement the judicial bypass provision of the state's abortion statute. Under the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act it is illegal for physicians to perform abortions on pregnant minors without parental consent. The constitutionality of this requirement has been upheld, but only when states provide a mechanism allowing a minor to bypass parental involvement. The Pennsylvania statute includes a judicial bypass provision that is formally consistent with legal precedent. However, based on a study of how county courts respond to inquiries into the judicial bypass procedure, this paper demonstrates that most courthouses are not prepared to implement or provide accurate information on bypass proceedings. Since the constitutionality of parental involvement requirements is conditioned on the availability of a bypass option, the paper argues that the courts' lack of readiness poses a significant threat to the rights of pregnant minors.