American political history is often conceived as a series of stable eras, controlled by dominant party coalitions and demarcated by realigning elections, most often identified as those of 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932. Since there is a lag in the corresponding reconstitution of the Supreme Court, it is often deemed a countermajoritarian drag on the workings of electoral democracy. An examination of judicial review in relation to political eras shows that view to be correct only in the New Deal era. Judicial review most commonly occurs within eras rather than across them, with a Court reconstituted by the prevailing coalition negating legislation passed by that coalition. This reality significantly alters the normative question of the Court's role in a democracy, and it raises questions about the concept of stable eras. The current trend of political party dealignment calls into question the continuing validity of the critical-elections approach.

Defining judicial independence as the ability of courts to make decisions in the short term without regard for the preferences of officeholders, this article empirically examines the conditions under which judicial independence is and is not likely to be found. Nine periods of intense congressional hostility to the Supreme Court are identified and Court reactions are chartered along a continuum from pure independence to total subservience. Examination of the historical record highlights five key factors related to independence and shows that judicial independence existed in only three of the periods. In the remaining six periods, the Court either refrained from hearing certain cases, issued opinions more in line with congressional preferences, or reversed itself. The article rejects the hypothesis of judicial independence, concluding that in times of congressional opposition to the Court, only under special conditions identified in the analysis will it retain its independence.

It has recently been argued in this Review that public opinion research tends to favor the expert authority of elite institutions such as the courts, over the democratic authority of the people as a source of law or constitutional interpretation. In this article we introduce an alternative survey construction that allows the public to be considered as a possible source of constitutional knowledge Using this survey, we find that most respondents can clearly articulate their position on the constitutionality of abortion, and offer and recognize reasons to ground both support and opposition to their position. We argue that these findings suggest that further work with alternative survey constructions may more firmly establish public knowledge in constitutional debates, thereby forming the basis to reclaim a democratic constitutional politics.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, has been criticized by some for failing to bring a woman's perspective to the Court, and by others for acting too much like the stereotypical woman who cannot make up her mind. Both criticisms overlook the possibility that O'Connor's impact as a female is derived from the fact that she is promulgating a very specific jurisprudence—that of the feminine. However, it is in employing this jurisprudence that she undermines the potential for both a feminist jurisprudence and for a cohesive conservative bloc on the Court.

The difference between legal terms such as “person” and “human being” represents more than a question of standing or mere semantics. Within liberal democratic societies, such as the United States and Canada, such distinctions may indicate substantive differences regarding fundamental concepts such as citizenship, membership in society, and the scope and essential nature of rights and liberties. In particular, judicial decisions regarding abortion have relied upon such distinctions in order to articulate some of the fundamental issues upon which such controversies are based.