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Also by Barry Friedman:

The Will Of The People, October 2009
Hardcover / e-Book

The Will Of The People
Barry Friedman

How Public Opinion Has Influenced The Supreme Court And Shaped The Meaning Of The Constitution

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2009
On Sale: September 29, 2009
624 pages
ISBN: 0374220344
EAN: 9780374220341
Kindle: B003BGGYE6
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Political

In recent years, the justices of the Supreme Court have ruled definitively on such issues as abortion, school prayer, and military tribunals in the war on terror. They decided one of American history’s most contested presidential elections. Yet for all their power, the justices never face election and hold their offices for life. This combination of influence and apparent unaccountability has led many to complain that there is something illegitimate—even undemocratic—about judicial authority.

In The Will of the People, Barry Friedman challenges that claim by showing that the Court has always been subject to a higher power: the American public. Judicial positions have been abolished, the justices’ jurisdiction has been stripped, the Court has been packed, and unpopular decisions have been defied. For at least the past sixty years, the justices have made sure that their decisions do not stray too far from public opinion.

Friedman’s pathbreaking account of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court—from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Rehnquist court in 2005—details how the American people came to accept their most controversial institution and shaped the meaning of the Constitution.

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