The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism.

Abstract

s book is a stimulating panorama of American constitutional law, academic scholarship, and history in the wake of the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Brown v. Board.It is ostensibly about the search for an objective, non-political basis to justify the Court's decision, but Kalman's investigation leads her to the evolving relationship among the legal academy, other academic disciplines, the legal profession, and the bench.Ultimately, the book is about the uses to which history can and should be put in the attempt to ground constitutional decision-making.The book revolves around the "counter-majoritarian difficulty", or more prosaically, the problem of judicial review in a democracy prizing rule by the majority (or at least rule by the representative branches of government).Traditionally, judicial review has been defended against its democratic critics with the argument that when judges measure a law against the standards of the constitution, they unproblematically discover the meaning of the constitution and apply it to the case at hand.Judges do not engage in a political or If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.

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