Rosen: The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America

The D'Oh! of Popular Constitutionalism

The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America. By Jeffrey Rosen. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 238. $25.

With the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, law professors readied themselves for the coming Armageddon. Reagan preached judicial restraint and, with it, the belief that the people and their elected representatives should make policy. The embodiment of that philosophy was Robert Bork, Reagan’s choice to replace judicial moderate Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and a man whose appearance and judicial inclinations conjured images of the devil.