The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics

Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: This book is one of the true classics of constitutional scholarship. Although written in 1962, the book still contains valuable lessons for current times. In a nutshell, Bickel's approach to judicial review is cautious, skeptical. He possesses doubts as to the reasoning put forward in Marbury v. Madison, the seminal decision laying the groundwork for U.S. judicial review. Yet he is wise enough to realize that in a constitutional democracy, the judiciary must exercise some power to check the other two branches. The inescapable tension between these two positions is what propels the book along. Written only several years after Brown v. Board of Education and just coming at the start of the Warren Court's run of activism, it reads almost as a historical novel at times. Bickel was one of the leading constitutional scholars of the second half of the 20th century, and this book is the earliest full exposition of his views. These views would change over the years before his untimely death in 1974 (compare this book with his final work, The Morality of Consent), but it is fun to see where he started from and how his thinking evolved.