Podcast interview – Erwin Chemerinsky’s The Conservative Assault on the Constitution

By Adam Schlossman
on Dec 10, 2010 at 10:56 am

SCOTUSblog interviews founding Dean of UC Irvine Law School and constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky about his book The Conservative Assault on the Constitution. 

Dean Chemerinsky also has agreed to provide written responses to additional questions, which will appear in a separate post.

To access the podcast, click on the purple image on the right.

An outline of highlights from the podcast, which is approximately twenty-five minutes long:

:23:  Dean Chemerinsky discusses the book and explains his reasons for writing it.

1:14 – Conservatism on the Court.

2:56 –  Understanding  the actions of the current conservative Court majority within the larger conservative political movement.

4:04 – Does the ideological make-up of the Court accurately reflect the ideological composition of the rest of the country?

4:49 – Is the rightward shift, noticeable in the Court, also occurring in the lower courts?

6:06 -  Why Presidents Clinton and Obama chose to nominate more centrist Justices.

8:21 -  Defining “liberal” and “conservative.”

9:48 – The role of liberal organizations, like the ACLU and GLAD, in the rightward shift of the Court.

10:44 – Justice Kennedy’s role in the conservatives’ redefinition of constitutional meaning

12:50 -  How far will the conservative drift go?

14:40  – How might the conservative Justices respond to the major themes in the book?

15:50  – A basic conservative criticism of liberal constitutionalism is that it is anti-democratic to allow unelected judges to impose their personal policy preferences on the nation.  Is there any built-in constraint against such subjectivity in the judicial role?

19:03 – President Obama’s view of the Constitution and the nominations of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan

20:36 – Executive power and the current Court.

21:57 –  Dean Chemerinsky describes his “vision to reclaim the Constitution.”

23:35 – What audience is the book intended to reach?

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