Product Description

As frequent swing vote and centrist voice, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor helped shape many of the Supreme Court's landmark decisions and opinions under the leadership of William Rehnquist. Indeed, many argue that her overall impact and influence was greater than that of the Chief Justice himself.

Nancy Maveety now takes a closer look at what might justifiably be known as the O'Connor Court, in which the voices of individual justices came to the fore. She describes how policy leadership was subdivided among these eminent jurists in a way that fostered an individualist conception of judicial power. And she explains how this distribution of power contributed to a proliferation of concurring opinions--and, in polarizing issues like Planned Parenthood v. Casey or the Michigan affirmative action cases, decisions that sidestepped precedent-setting principles.

Maveety's book is the first to look beyond the conventional wisdom that O'Connor's centrism gave her de facto control over a court notorious for its disunity, providing instead a more precise and systematic analysis of her influence. Maveety seeks not only to assign a definitive meaning to "the Rehnquist Court" but also to identify its historical importance for the constitutional order and the conception of judicial power within it--situating O'Connor squarely at its center.

Maveety describes the attributes that distinguish this Court from its predecessors and suggests how O'Connor's five years on the Burger Court foreshadowed her emergence as an accommodationist. Then, as the Court became more polarized under Rehnquist, there evolved the individualized behavior and rule-of-thumb jurisprudence that came to characterize O'Connor's decision making. What resulted were carefully circumscribed decisions like Bush v. Gore or Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that provide fewer precedents for lower courts.

Queen's Court ultimately reveals that the importance of the Rehnquist years extends from the substance of constitutional law to the institutional operation of Court decision-making--and that O'Connor was vital to those changes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #871261 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 194 pages

Review
"An excellent and incisive account of how Sandra Day O'Connor became the least predictable and most influential judge on the Rehnquist Court." -- Judith A. Baer

From the Back Cover
"An excellent and incisive account of how Sandra Day O'Connor became the least predictable and most influential judge on the Rehnquist Court."--Judith A. Baer, author of Our Lives before the Law

"Makes a convincing case that 'rule-of-thumb pragmatism' was the defining feature of the Rehnquist Court."--Thomas M. Keck, author of The Most Activist Supreme Court in History

"A major work that for many years will shape the way we understand the decision making of the modern Supreme Court."--Mark Silverstein, author of Judicious Choices

About the Author
Nancy Maveety is professor of political science at Tulane University and in 2007-2008 was a Fulbright lecturer at Shandong University in China. She is author of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court and Representation Rights and the Burger Years and editor of The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior.

Customer Reviews

A Perceptive Perspective on the Rehnquist Court
I found this to be a remarkably perceptive and unique study of the Rehnquist Court, with a much broader focus than just Justice O'Connor. The author teaches at Tulane and has written a prior book on the Justice in 1996, as well as articles and papers. The central point of analysis here is what the author terms the "choral court," i.e., the practice of extensive concurring opinions by individual associate justices which accompanied the Court's opinion in significant cases. Coupled with this are two other factors which the author discusses: fact-based, "rule of thumb" balancing, and an assertive philosophy of judicial power. The result was a Court that manifested case-by-case decisions, eschewed hard and fast rules, and employed vaguely-worded, fact-based tests which made it difficult precisely to grasp what the Court was holding. The author also discusses the reactions of a variety of Court commentators as to this development, reviews the period during which Justice O'Connor remained on the Court awaiting her replacement to be confirmed, and offers some predictions on whether the characteristics of the "O'Connor Court" will continue on under Chief Justice Roberts.

The author is always careful to delineate the issues she plans to address and how she plans to do it. For example, the introduction lays out virtually the entirety of what the book covers and how the analysis will proceed. To be sure, the author believes that Justice O'Connor was the most influential practitioner of the "rule of thumb" technique, which echoes other commentators' views that she was the real center of power in the last ten years or so of the Rehnquist Court (rather than the Chief). I am only partially convinced of this argument, but the author's analysis is truly impressive and thorough. The author extensively discusses cases in which the associate Justices applied this technique, which she characterizes as sometimes being "maddingly and misleadingly vague." Unlike many books on the Court, her discussion of cases is concise, to the point, and flows smoothly so the general reader is not lost in a flurry of legalisms.

I really feel the strongest section of the book is the chapter devoted to the views of commentators as to these practices of the Rehnquist Court. When you have Justice Breyer eschewing "exact formulas" in favor of fact-based, vague balancing, it is no wonder that many Court watchers had a lot to say. A most important concern is how can the Court render decisions which do not rely upon clearly articulated and firm principles? Did the Court fulfill its constitutional obligations to render decisions if they rest upon unique congeries of facts and reflect tests that maximize judicial discretion in rendering decisions? Are seemingly "unprincipled activist behavior" and "result-oriented pragmatism" the guidelines we want the Court to apply in its decision-making? It is no surprise that we started to hear a lot about "judicial minimalism" from these commentators. I think this is the real issue for reflection that the book forces the reader to consider--and in so doing, it renders a major service. The book runs under 200 pages, including notes, valuable bibliography, and index. Despite its concise size, the book is full of thought-provoking stimulants backed up with impeccable research and true insight into what occurred during the Rehnquist years.