Here's a book review that combines the topics we're covering in both 2301 and 2302 this week. The author suggests that public opinion plays a bigger role in Supreme Court decisions than is generally appreciated:
. . . liberal commentators who fear that the Roberts Court could shift dramatically to the right in the coming years betray a lack of historical perspective. The Court will inevitably march to the tune that the American public plays. “The decisions of the justices on the meaning of the Constitution must be ratified by the American people,” Friedman matter-of-factly explains. “That’s just the way it is.” A Supreme Court decision, on this understanding, bears a resemblance to an opening bid in a hand of poker. “It is through the process of judicial responsiveness to public opinion that the meaning of the Constitution takes shape,” Friedman writes. “The Court rules. The public responds. Over time, sometimes a long period, public opinion jells, and the Court comes into line with the considered views of the American public.” In his account, the views of Supreme Court justices are, in comparison to the views of the American public, of trifling significance. “Ultimately, it is the people (and the people alone) who must decide what the Constitution means,” Friedman proclaims. And so the left need not gnash its teeth over the replacement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., or about any other personnel decisions for that matter, because “the long-run fate of the Roberts Court is not seriously in doubt; its decisions will fall tolerably within the mainstream of public opinion, or the Court will be yanked back into line.”
The reviewer begs to differ.
