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Slate book review: ?Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion?

By Alliance Alert

Lincoln Caplan writing at Slate: "It has been Brennan's legal enemies who have generally been readiest to credit him with a political philosophy?albeit rooted in a personal, rather than principled, vision. Central to the conservative attacks on the Warren Court a generation ago was a portrait of Brennan as an avatar of judicial activism. A measure of that campaign's lasting impact is that many liberals, too, assume that, in shaping key rulings of the Supreme Court, Brennan imposed his own views and preferences . . . The biography usefully complicates that reductive notion, most notably in the realm of gender relations." At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru comments: "[T]his defense misunderstands the conservative critique of judicial activism. That critique is perfectly capable of recognizing that an activist?s decisions might be 'principled' in the sense of fitting into a coherent political philosophy; what it denies is that the Constitution authorizes the justice to implement this political philosophy."

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on October 21, 2010 (boomark / email).