Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment

Authors

Gerard E. Lynch, Columbia Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

1977

Abstract

As its title suggests, Raoul Berger's Government by Judiciary states an extreme version of a familiar thesis: The Supreme Court has abandoned its proper role as interpreter of the Constitution and has usurped the power to act as a third legislative chamber. Like kadis under a tree, the Court creates law from mere personal predilections. The main instrument of this judicial coup has been the fourteenth amendment. Government by Judiciary is an historian's book, strongest when using the historian's tools to illuminate the past. Underlying this research, however, is a remarkably simplistic theory of constitutional interpretation, a theory that forms the basis for Professor Berger's dire conclusions about the role of the Supreme Court in American government.

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | Law

Comments

Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment by Raoul Berger, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. xii, 483, $15.00 cloth.

Recommended Citation

Gerard E. Lynch, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, 63 Cornell L. Rev. 1091 (1977).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2122