Ask the Author: Jeff Rosen

Today we are announcing the beginning of a new, periodic feature. It’s called “Ask the Author,” and it will allow us to conduct substantive discussions via e-mail with the people behind new books and articles that relate to the Supreme Court.

Our premiere installment should be a good one, as our first guest will be Jeffrey Rosen, the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a professor of law at George Washington University Law School. His new book is The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America, which you can find on Amazon here.

The goal for this feature is for a variety of people to submit their thoughts and participate in the discussion, so please e-mail potential questions to jharrow [at] akingump.com or post questions as comments on this page; I’ll be sending the first batch off to Jeff on Thursday afternoon and post his responses on Monday. After that, he is willing to answer a few more questions in another response that will go up at the end of next week.

Of course, if you want to participate and are not familiar with the new book (though you are free to ask Jeff about anything he’s written), I’ve posted a brief summary of it and links to a few reviews after the jump.

Finally, I must note that Jeff deserves an official SCOTUSblog note of congratulations, both for being the inaugural participant in this feature and for becoming the proud father of two-week-old twin boys. He’s been nice enough to schedule his baby-feeding times around our questioning, so hopefully we can make it worth his while.

Back to details of the book, in which Professor Rosen argues not only that the best Supreme Court decisions tend to agree with the constitutional views of the general public, but also that political forces have conspired such that we are now living in an “odd moment in American history where unelected Supreme Court justices sometimes express the views of popular majorities more faithfully than the people’s elected representatives.” The book uses this theory as a way to assess the jurisprudence of the Court in a wide range of areas, but there is a particular focus on cases dealing with race, love and death, politics, and civil liberties. It’s certainly an interesting thesis, and I’m looking forward to a great discussion about it.

For reviews of the book, see Emily Bazelon’s at the Washington Post here, Dahlia Lithwick’s at Slate here, and the Denver Post here. Again, possible questions can go as comments to this post or you can e-mail them to jharrow [at] akingump.com.