Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. is an absorbing and readable biography of one of the most important Supreme Court Justices since World War II.

How oral arguments influence the decisions of Supreme Court justices.

Analyzes the growing divide between the incomes of the wealthy class and those of middle-income Americans, exonerating popular suspects to argue that the nation's political system promotes greed and under-representation.

The magnitude of the Burger Court has been underestimated by historians. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards dotted the landscape, especially in the South. Nixon promised to transform the Supreme Court--and with four appointments, including a new chief justice, he did. This book tells the story of the Supreme Court that came in between the liberal Warren Court and the conservative Rehnquist and Roberts Courts: the seventeen years, 1969 to 1986, under Chief Justice Warren Burger. It is a period largely written off as a transitional era at the Supreme Court when, according to the common verdict, "nothing happened." How wrong that judgment is. The Burger Court had vitally important choices to make: whether to push school desegregation across district lines; how to respond to the sexual revolution and its new demands for women's equality; whether to validate affirmative action on campuses and in the workplace; whether to shift the balance of criminal law back toward the police and prosecutors; what the First Amendment says about limits on money in politics. The Burger Court forced a president out of office while at the same time enhancing presidential power. It created a legacy that in many ways continues to shape how we live today. Written with a keen sense of history and expert use of the justices' personal papers, this book sheds new light on an important era in American political and legal history.--Adapted from dust jacket.

Washington is big business. John B. Judis, a senior editor for the New Republic, onducts an instructive tour through this corridor of money and power in this work. Cutting to the heart of today's debate, it recommends what we can do to fix our broken system.

Billings Learned Hand was one of the most influential judges in America. In Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, Gerald Gunther provides a complete and intimate account of the professional and personal life of Learned Hand. He conveys the substance and range of Hand's judicial and intellectual contributions with eloquence and grace. This second edition features photos of Learned Hand throughout his life and career, and includes a foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Gunther, a former law clerk for Hand, reviewed much of Hand's published work, opinions, and correspondence. He meticulously describes Hand's cases, and discusses the judge's professional and personal life as interconnected with the political and social circumstances of the times in which he lived. Born in 1872, Hand served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He clearly crafted and delivered thousands of decisions in a wide range of cases through extensive, conscientious investigation and analysis, while at the same time exercising wisdom and personal detachment. His opinions are still widely quoted today, and will remain as an everlasting tribute to his life and legacy.

John Marshall (1755--1835) was arguably the most important judicial figure in American history. As the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1801 to1835, he helped move the Court from the fringes of power to the epicenter of constitutional government. His great opinions in cases like Marbury v. Madison and McCulloch v. Maryland are still part of the working discourse of constitutional law in America. Drawing on a new and definitive edition of Marshall's papers, R. Kent Newmyer combines engaging narrative with new historiographical insights in a fresh interpretation of John Marshall's life in the law. More than the summation of Marshall's legal and institutional accomplishments, Newmyer's impressive study captures the nuanced texture of the justice's reasoning, the complexity of his mature jurisprudence, and the affinities and tensions between his system of law and the transformative age in which he lived. It substantiates Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s view of Marshall as the most representative figure in American law.

What underlies this development? In this concise and highly engaging work, Federal Appeals Court Judge and noted author (From Brown to Bakke) J. Harvie Wilkinson argues that America's most brilliant legal minds have launched a set of cosmic constitutional theories that, for all their value, are undermining self-governance.

When we think of constitutional law, we invariably think of the United States Supreme Court and the federal court system. Yet much of our constitutional law is not made at the federal level. In 51 Imperfect Solutions, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton argues that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in protecting individual liberties. The book tells four stories that arise in four different areas of constitutional law: equal protection; criminal procedure; privacy; and free speech and free exercise of religion. Traditional accounts of these bedrock debates about the relationship of the individual to the state focus on decisions of the United States Supreme Court. But these explanations tell just part of the story. The book corrects this omission by looking at each issue-and some others as well-through the lens of many constitutions, not one constitution; of many courts, not one court; and of all American judges, not federal or state judges. Taken together, the stories reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has all of the answers to the most vexing constitutional questions. If there is a central conviction of the book, it's that an underappreciation of state constitutional law has hurt state and federal law and has undermined the appropriate balance between state and federal courts in protecting individual liberty. In trying to correct this imbalance, the book also offers several ideas for reform.

An incisive look at the intellectual and cultural history of free enterprise and its influence on American politics Throughout the twentieth century, "free enterprise" has been a contested keyword in American politics, and the cornerstone of a conservative philosophy that seeks to limit government involvement into economic matters. Lawrence B. Glickman shows how the idea first gained traction in American discourse and was championed by opponents of the New Deal. Those politicians, believing free enterprise to be a fundamental American value, held it up as an antidote to a liberalism that they maintained would lead toward totalitarian statism. Tracing the use of the concept of free enterprise, Glickman shows how it has both constrained and transformed political dialogue. He presents a fascinating look into the complex history, and marketing, of an idea that forms the linchpin of the contemporary opposition to government regulation, taxation, and programs such as Medicare.