SCOTUS 'is an emperor that truly has no clothes,' Chemerinsky says in new book
Cover image courtesy of Viking Books.
Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky criticizes both liberal and conservative justices in his new book, but he’s not worried they will hold a grudge should he appear before the U.S. Supreme Court again.
After all, he lost both cases he most recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court—in unanimous decisions. “How much worse could it get?” he asks the Washington Post.
Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California at Irvine’s law school and an ABAJournal.com contributor. According to the Post, in an interview Chemerinsky is “unfailingly polite and soft-spoken; he is the kind of man who praises an interviewer’s questions.” Yet his book, The Case Against the Supreme Court, pulls no punches.
Chemerinsky criticizes both Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example, for suggesting during their confirmation hearings that judges merely apply the law to cases before them. “John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor should be ashamed of themselves for giving the American people such a misleading impression of what justices do,” he says. He criticizes the liberal Warren court for not going far enough. He calls for 18-year term limits for the justices.
“We should realize that this is an emperor that truly has no clothes,” Chemerinsky writes. “For too long, we have treated the court is if they are the high priests of the law, or at least as if they are the smartest and best lawyers in society.”
But “the court has frequently failed, throughout American history, at its most important tasks, at its most important moments,” he writes.
The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) and the Los Angeles Times also have reviews of the book. According to the Wall Street Journal op-ed, Chemerinsky is worried his book will be perceived as a liberal text knocking the court. But he fails to evaluate Roe v. Wade, deemed by the Wall Street Journal editorial writer to be “arguably the worst [Supreme Court case], legally and morally, in the 20th century.”
