A leading legal scholar explores how the constitutional right to seek justice has been restricted by the Supreme CourtThe Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' ...

A groundbreaking work from one of America’s leading legal scholars, No Democracy Lasts Forever audaciously asserts that the only way a polarized America can avoid secession is to draft a new Constitution.The Constitution has become a threat to American democracy. Due to its inherent flaws—its treatment of race, dependence on a tainted Electoral College, a glaringly unrepresentative Senate, and the outsized influence of the Supreme Court—Erwin Chemerinsky, ...

An unprecedented work of civil rights and legal history, Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court has enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses through its decisions over the last half-century.Police are nine times more likely to kill African-American men than they are other Americans—in fact, nearly one in every thousand will die at the hands, or under the knee, of an officer. As eminent constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky ...

Why originalism is a flawed, incoherent, and dangerously ideological method of constitutional interpretationOriginalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Three of the Supreme Court’s nine justices explicitly embrace the originalist approach, as do increasing numbers of judges ...

The 2016 presidential election profoundly reshaped the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump's selection of three justices - Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett - created a solid six-justice conservative majority. The impact was seen a year ago in October Term 2021, Justice Barrett's first full term. The Court overruled Roe v. Wade, dramatically increased the protection for gun rights, found a First Amendment right for a high school football coach to pray publicly on the f...

The Supreme Court’s October 2023 Term was filled with blockbuster decisions that will have a dramatic effect on the law and on people’s lives. The Court created broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken by a president, dramatically limited the power of federal administrative agencies, clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment, and empowered cities to use the criminal law against the unhoused. This concise book reviews the key decisions of October Term 2022 and th...

A timely history of the profound impact of Earl Warren's Supreme Court on many areas of modern American government and societyFrom 1953 to 1969, Earl Warren served as chief justice of the US Supreme Court. During that time, the Warren Court made a number of historically important decisions involving anti-miscegenation laws (Loving v. Virginia), the right to privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut), and, perhaps most important, racial segregation (Brown v. Board of Education).In Th...

Is a fight against equality and for privilege a fight for religious supremacy? Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional attorney and author of the critically acclaimed book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, dives into the debate on religious liberty, the modern attempt to weaponize religious freedom, and the Supreme Court's role in that “crusade.”Seidel examines some of the key Supreme Court cases of the last thirty y...

Expert guidance for navigating the difficult new issues around free speech rights in higher educationIn their earlier book, Free Speech on Campus, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman argued that colleges and universities should permit the expression of the widest possible range of views. Nearly ten tumultuous years later, many issues have arisen that this simple principle does not adequately address. To what extent must an institution provide expensive se...

Throughout American history, views on the proper relationship between the state and religion have been deeply divided. And, with recent changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, First Amendment law concerning religion is likely to change dramatically in the years ahead. In The Religion Clauses, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, two of America's leading constitutional scholars, begin by explaining how freedom of religion is enshrined in the First Amendment through two pr...

A preeminent constitutional scholar offers a hard-hitting analysis of the Supreme Court over the last two hundred yearsMost Americans share the perception that the Supreme Court is objective, but Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the country’s leading constitutional lawyers, shows that this is nonsense and always has been. The Court is made up of fallible individuals who base decisions on their own biases. Today, the Roberts Court is promoting a conservative agenda under t...

Over the last few decades, the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts have undergone a dramatic shift to the right, the result of a determined effort by right-wing lawmakers and presidents to reinterpret the Constitution by reshaping the judiciary. Conservative activist justices have narrowed the scope of the Constitution, denying its protections to millions of Americans, exactly as the lawmakers who appointed and confirmed these jurists intended. Basic long-standing principles of ...