Here are 100 books that The Supermajority fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been fortunate to have had many Supreme Court experiences–seven arguments, a clerkship for Justice John Paul Stevens, head of Justice Stephen Breyer’s confirmation team, two books on the Court, analysis for the media, and my current Georgetown Law School position teaching constitutional law. I love to read about the Supreme Court and write and talk about the Court and its Justices. The vivid sagas that underlie the Justices and their cases help us to understand this powerful institution about which we know less than our other branches. It has never been more important to understand the Supreme Court and its role in American life and our constitutional democracy.
Nobody knows the Supreme Court better than long-time journalist Joan Biskupic. Her biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, our first woman Justice, is both riveting and revealing.
In the current age of dramatic change at the Court, O’Connor’s careful centrist approach is especially important to consider and remember. O’Connor’s background as an elected official in the Arizona legislature, our last Justice to have electoral experience, which used to be common among Justices, gave her especially valuable insights and experience.
Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned. She was called the most powerful woman in America, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Then, just one year short of a quarter century on the bench, she surprised her colleagues and the nation by announcing her retirement.
Drawing on information from once-private papers of the justices, hundreds of interviews with legal and political insiders, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, Joan Biskupic…
I have been fortunate to have had many Supreme Court experiences–seven arguments, a clerkship for Justice John Paul Stevens, head of Justice Stephen Breyer’s confirmation team, two books on the Court, analysis for the media, and my current Georgetown Law School position teaching constitutional law. I love to read about the Supreme Court and write and talk about the Court and its Justices. The vivid sagas that underlie the Justices and their cases help us to understand this powerful institution about which we know less than our other branches. It has never been more important to understand the Supreme Court and its role in American life and our constitutional democracy.
Earl Warren was one of our most consequential Chief Justices.
Serving from 1953 to 1969, he led the way on many country-changing decisions. He deftly forged the Court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education andoversaw other landmark cases, establishing one-person, one-vote for our democracy; banning prayer in public schools; and presiding over a criminal justice revolution, including the famous Miranda decision that gave us warnings that every American knows by heart.
Jim Newton’s lively biography is indispensable in understanding these momentous developments, as well as the intriguing character of Warren, who also served as California’s Governor and the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 1948.
Perhaps more than any other Justice, Warren launched the modern era of our jurisprudence.
An account of the career of the former chief justice and chairman of the Warren Commission draws on previously unavailable government documents and new interviews to evaluate his integral roles in the evolutions of defining political moments from the past half century, from school desegregation to the support of Japanese Americans interred during World War II. 40,000 first printing.
Things may have gotten better for women compared to our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations, but that is not to say that it’s easy to navigate work and life, the weight of others’ expectations, and the expectations we place on ourselves. Women of color have a particular set of challenges that others often can’t even see. I have been lucky: I have found wonderful guides and sources of inspiration, and I have been able to pass along what I have learned. Nobody should have to navigate these challenging waters on their own. We need buddies, confidantes, truth-tellers, and sources of inspiration.
I believe in having heroes, and the more human and relatable they are, the better. In this book, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor tells her amazing story while also showing that she is not so different from the rest of us.
And while it’s a fascinating and inspiring story, what I love about this book is the same thing that I love about the person who wrote it. She’s normal and relatable, a person who has struggled with diabetes since she was small, who grew up in the most modest of circumstances, and who rose to become the first Hispanic person on the Supreme Court both because she is extraordinary and because she is just like the rest of us.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “searching and emotionally intimate memoir” (The New York Times) told with a candor never before undertaken by a sitting Justice. This “powerful defense of empathy” (The Washington Post) is destined to become a classic of self-invention and self-discovery.
The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon.
In this story of human triumph that “hums with hope and exhilaration” (NPR), she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own…
I have been fortunate to have had many Supreme Court experiences–seven arguments, a clerkship for Justice John Paul Stevens, head of Justice Stephen Breyer’s confirmation team, two books on the Court, analysis for the media, and my current Georgetown Law School position teaching constitutional law. I love to read about the Supreme Court and write and talk about the Court and its Justices. The vivid sagas that underlie the Justices and their cases help us to understand this powerful institution about which we know less than our other branches. It has never been more important to understand the Supreme Court and its role in American life and our constitutional democracy.
Our public schools are where most people first encounter the power of the government. In this pathbreaking and dazzling book, law professor Justin Driver discusses the Supreme Court’s decisions on students’ rights, ranging from locker searches and drug testing to corporal punishment and dress codes.
Driver’s prose is clear and engaging. His descriptions of the Court’s school cases bring the unforgettable litigants to life, almost as if he had written a short story collection. He skillfully uses the education cases as a lens for understanding the Supreme Court and its Justices.
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school students, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades.
Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to unauthorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compulsory…
My father advised me that to be a good writer, I should first learn a trade and particular subject matter from the inside out. As a working criminal justice practitioner for the last two decades, I’ve been lucky to work with some of the smartest people and best run organizations in the country. I’ve always been a big reader and someone who likes to link the sometimes brutally practical, day-to-day work of running an organization (I lead New York City’s main pretrial services agency) to larger philosophical issues. My life’s goal is to show how big ideas play themselves out in the day-to-day practice of public policy.
In writing our book, my co-author Greg Berman and I relied heavily on Derthick’s classic 1979 account of the development of Social Security in its first 15 years.
Derthick shows that its intentionally incremental development became the key to its later success as the largest and most successful anti-poverty program ever developed.
Derthick shows how two unheralded government bureaucrats nurtured and protected the program in its early years, including against a very popular and more immediately radical alternative.
The book does a good job of showing that choices made by the architects of government programs in their early days help set their long-term trajectories – an understudied topic.
Comprehensively analyzes the American social security program, considering its history, politics, policies, and troubled future and advocating a realistic and less reverent approach to its modification.
Having personally witnessed the great expansion of rights in my lifetime, I wanted to know how this belief in rights took root. Equality is not a natural idea; most societies have been shaped by hierarchies since the beginning of time. I was led to the late eighteenth century as a crucial period for the articulation of universal human rights. And that led to me the abolition of torture, the abolition of slavery, and the idea of “declaring” rights which gave them a surprising force. Once universal rights were declared, those still excluded (women, slaves) wanted to know why and much of modern times has been concerned with just that question.
You always knew you should read Rousseau, but you didn’t. His novel Julie is too long, though eighteenth-century readers did not think so. This book is abstract but if you get beyond that first impression and think like an eighteenth-century person your mind will be blown. At a time when most people listened to the authorities (in church and state), Rousseau started from the simple proposition that anyone could think through the basic issues of social and political life. He takes everything down to first principles and changes everything by making democracy seem thinkable.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." This statement exemplifies the main idea behind "The Social Contract", in other words that man is essentially free if it weren't for the oppression of political organizations such as government. Rousseau goes on to lay forth the principles that he deems most important for achieving political right amongst people.
I grew up in the 1960s when the Supreme Court was widely praised in liberal circles for its path-breaking decisions protecting rights. Inspired by this vision of rights through law, I went to law school and then to graduate school, including a couple of years in England where I was confronted with skepticism about the role of courts. Are liberal beliefs about the role of the Supreme Court correct? Can courts really produce progressive social change, not just on paper, but in practice? Most of my research and scholarship addresses these questions that go to the heart of the belief that Supreme Court decisions protecting and furthering rights matter.
Lucas Powe’s magnificent study focuses on the relationship between the Supreme Court and elites throughout American history.
The Court, Powe argues, is not an independent institution dedicated to protecting the rights of the disadvantaged. Rather, it works in tandem with elites to further their interests. The book is beautifully written and persuasively argued.
'The Supreme Court follows the election returns', the fictional Mr. Dooley observed a hundred years ago. And for all our ideals and dreams of a disinterested judiciary, above the political fray, it seems Mr. Dooley was right. In this engaging - and disturbing - book, a leading historian of the Court reveals the close fit between its decisions and the nation's politics. The story begins with the creation of the Constitution and ends with the June 2008 decisions on the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Rendering crisp (and often controversial) judgments on key decisions from Marbury v. Madison to…
I am fascinated by how gender and sex, characteristics of our beings that we take to be the most intimate and personal, are just as subject to external forces as anything else in history. I have written about the cultivation of masculinity in college fraternities, the history of young people and the age of consent to marriage, and about a same-sex couple who lived publicly as “father and son” in order to be together. My most recent book is a biography of an abortion provider in nineteenth-century America who became the symbol that doctors and lawyers demonized as they worked to make abortion a crime. I am a professor at the University of Kansas.
This is the definitive account of what abortion looked like for the one hundred years during which it was almost completely illegal in the United States.
Reagan does an excellent job of showing us the different ways that women nevertheless accessed abortion care during that time, even as she points out how access was always shaped by race and class.
She is also great at demonstrating how and why police and lawmakers cracked down on abortion and made it less accessible at particular moments in this one-hundred-year period, ultimately showing why it was eventually decriminalized in 1973.
The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what's to come.
When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed-and how millions of women…
Years ago, I wrote mystery novels featuring women investigators when that was new in the genre. Now, I discover stories of real-life women whose lives have a natural story arc that can engage the reader from start to finish. Like gambling and prostitution, abortion, when it was illegal in the US, as it is now again in many places, was simultaneously in your face and undercover. It was also largely practiced by women, which is why I’m fascinated by books about it.
This book has a permanent place on my nightstand, where I reach for it whenever I need a pithy, brilliant reminder of how the US completed its late-nineteenth-century transformation from a country with no abortion laws to a place where abortion was banned everywhere at every stage.
I’m amazed that a book first published in 1978, long before the advent of the Internet, managed to marshal evidence from newspaper classified ads and forgotten trials to present a portrait of America where abortion was widespread but seldom dared to speak its name.
'The history of how abortion came to be banned and how women lost--for the century between approximately 1870 and 1970--rights previously thought to be natural and inherent over their own bodies is a fascinating and infuriating one.
Faith “Zanweah” Sternstein grew up in Tappita, Nimba County, Liberia. Her heritage and cultural background is that of the Dan (Gio) ethnic group, where her lineage comes directly through Chiefs Tarpeh, Snagon, and Vonleh. She met her future husband, Martin Sternstein, when he served as Fulbright Professor at the University of Liberia. While much has been written about Liberia, there has been little serious research into the lives of the early presidents, and we much enjoyed filling in this gap. We subscribe to the African proverb: Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
This scholarly two-volume treatise covers the history of Liberia from 1820 to 1944.
We often referred to this comprehensive study to point us to sources relating to our own research. The author carefully documents political, legal, and constitutional changes over a 125-year period. There is extensive quoting from primary sources.
This is not an easy read, but should be used as a reference for specific topics of interest. There is no comparative authoritative contribution to Liberia’s legal record.
A Documentary History of the Constitutions, Laws and Treaties of Liberia from the Earliest Settlements to the Establishment of the Republic, a Sketch of the Activities of the American Colonization Societies, a Commentary on the Constitution of the Republic and a Survey of the Political and Social Legislation from 1847 to 1944. With Appendices Containing the Laws of the Colony of Liberia, 1820-1839, and Acts of the Governor and Council, 1839-1847. With Maps and Illustrations. Foreword by Roscoe Pound. With a new introduction by Nakomo Duche.
"Interesting questions of public law and of international law are raised by the history…
