The Court and Politics: What Is The Lesson of FDR’s Confrontation with the Court?

Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court (2010).

Richard Pildes

For decades after Alexander Bickel’s work, concern with the “countermajoritarian difficulty”– the question of how to justify judicial review in a democratic society–dominated American constitutional scholarship. In recent years, a number of commentators and legal scholars, most significantly my colleague Barry Friedman in his magisterial recent book, The Will of the People, have sought to dissolve this question or suggest it is passé. They argue that there is, […]