American Constitution Society : Yale Law School Professor Linda Greenhouse writes a book about U. S. Supreme Court : "conservative activists substituting their policy judgments for those of Congress; using the First Amendment as a deregulatory tool; and proposing to unsettle long-settled understandings of affirmative action and voting rights"

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Professor Greenhouse denounces the anti-Federalist U. S. Supreme Court  - A Court that wants to legislate "from the bench"..... :

Know Your Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court
A Very Short Introduction
May 31, 2012

By Linda Greenhouse, the Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. Greenhouse, a member of the American Constitution Society's Board of Directors, will be signing copies of her new book at the 2012 ACS National Convention.

Know Your Supreme Court


Some excerpts :

Has there been a time recently when public understanding of the Supreme Court was so important – and so lacking?

In a Pew poll two summers ago, only 28 percent of the respondents could identify John Roberts as chief justice (a position he had then held for nearly five years) from among a list of four names. The other options, all of which some people selected, were Thurgood Marshall, who had died 17 years earlier; John Paul Stevens, who was in the news for retiring; and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Just imagine what people don’t know about how the court sets its agenda or construes statutes, or about the powers of the chief justice or the debate over constitutional interpretation.

With a court of conservative activists substituting their policy judgments for those of Congress; using the First Amendment as a deregulatory tool; and proposing to unsettle long-settled understandings of affirmative action and voting rights, it’s essential that we become a nation of knowledgeable, or at least better-informed, court-watchers. That’s the big ambition of my new little book – and I use the word “little” as an accurate physical description (7 by 4.5 inches in dimension, 117 pages of text), not as false modesty.   

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As I worked on the book, the audience I had in mind was basically the audience I internalized during nearly 30 years of covering the Supreme Court for The New York Times: smart people who came to the subject willingly and didn’t have to be pandered to or spoon fed. My goal was to demystify the Supreme Court for these readers, to arm them with the knowledge they need to observe the court on an ongoing basis. If students – high school, college, or law school – happen upon the book, so much the better. I was thrilled when a class of A.P. United States history students from a New York City public high school showed up at a book talk I gave at Cooper Union in Manhattan.

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