The Atlanta Lawyer June/July 2015 | Page 9

Book Review the Senate in his confirmation hearing. Justices should be limited to 18 year terms staggered so that a new justice is seated every two years. The book makes a very strong case for adoption of a system nominating judges based upon merit, rather than politics, modeled on the scheme employed by President Jimmy Carter One problem with Chemerinsky’s argument is that it is based upon an unproven premise that the twin purposes of the Supreme Court are to protect minorities and prevent repression. While I share his view that these should be defining characteristics of the Court in the American constitutional system, I would have appreciated an argument making out this case. It would be possible to make minor alterations in the first part of the book to support an argument that the Court has been fantastically successful in protecting interests of the 1% minority against the demands of the 99%, to use the slogan of the Occupy movement. (To be fair, Chemerinsky defines the class to be protected as “minorities who cannot rely on the political process.” The 1% identified by Occupy seem to have no problem buying protection.) Commenters such as Derek Bell (The Constitutional Contradiction) explicitly reject the idea that the Constitution was designed to protect personal liberty against repressive tendencies of majorities. The Official News Publication of the Atlanta Bar Association We tend to forget that rights championed by the Warren Court emanated from amendments to the Constitution, not from the core document issued by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The present Constitution was written for commercial purposes redressing disastrous economic policies embodied in the Articles of Confederation adopted in 1777. Even given the Constitution’s predisposition to favoring the economic over the idealistic, the fact that adoption of the Constitution in 1789 depended on amendments protecting personal freedom justifies an assessment that certain ideals are core to American culture. In this sense, The Case Against the Supreme Court encourages lawyers to be optimistic about the fundamentals of our Constitutional system. The case, like a good brief, is well-researched, easy to follow, and compelling. Michael Jablonski practices Political Law. He is also a Presidential Doctoral Fellow in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Research Group at Georgia State University. He co-authored (with Shawn Powers) The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom, published by the University of Illinois Press in March. June/July 2015 THE ATLANTA LAWYER 9