Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America

Most people think that the Supreme Court has a rough balance between left and right. This is a myth; in fact the justices once considered right-wing have now taken the mantle of the Court's moderates, and the liberal element has all but disappeared. Most people also think that judicial activism is solely a liberal movement. This is also a myth; since William Rehnquist was confirmed as Chief Justice in 1986, the Supreme Court has engaged in an unprecedented record of judicial activism.

These two factors are feeding a movement to restore what many conservatives call "The Constitution in Exile," by which they mean the Constitution as it existed before the Roosevelt administration. Radicals in Robes explains what the restoration of this constitutional vision would mean. It would mean the end of the FCC, the SEC, the EPA, and every other federal agency that enacts regulations that have the force of law. It would mean that the clause of the First Amendment that says that Congress may make no law "respecting an establishment of religion" would be turned on its head. Marriage laws and many other familiar areas of modern life are all in the sights of this conservative movement.

Radicals in Robes takes judicial philosophy out of the law schools and shows what it means when it intersects partisan politics. It pulls away the veil of rhetoric from a dangerous and radical right-wing movement and issues a strong and passionate warning about what conservatives really intend. One of the most respected legal theorists in the country, Cass R. Sunstein here issues a warning of compelling concern to us all.

"In this timely and keen analysis of how judges interpret the Constitution today, Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor and New Republic contributor, espouses what he calls a 'minimalist' approach that respects precedent and takes only small-scale steps forward, and lashes out at the 'fundamentalism' practiced by extreme conservative judges. Legal fundamentalists profess to base their interpretations on the meanings ascribed to the Constitution by the original ratifiers. But in many respects, Sunstein says, fundamentalists ignore, or misread, the history they claim to venerate. Further, he says many fundamentalist positions would undermine liberties Americans have come to value — rights that one fundamentalist judge, offering the example of the right to privacy, says were created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court. For Sunstein, capitulation to the fundamentalists could lead to state (but not federal) establishment of religion, to the elimination of a protected right to privacy and to invalidation of most environmental regulations. We should be skeptical, the author insists, when political ideology seems to dictate judges' constitutional doctrine. This compressed book covers all the hot-button constitutional issues in 10 short, plainly written chapters. Americans monitoring the upcoming Senate deliberations over Bush's nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court will want to bear in mind the arguments Sunstein so trenchantly presents. Agent, Sydelle Kramer. (Sept. 6)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The most cited law professor on any faculty in the U.S., Cass R. Sunstein is Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, a contributing editor at the New Republic and the American Prospect, and a frequent contributor as well to such publications as the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. He is the recipient of the Henderson Prize, and the Goldsmith Book Prize; his many books include Republic.com, Why Societies Need Dissent, Risk and Reason, and Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.