Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court - Softcover

O'Connor, Sandra Day

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812984323 ISBN 13: 9780812984323

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the first woman to sit on the United States Supreme Court comes this fascinating book about the history and evolution of the highest court in the land.

“[A] succinct, snappy account of how today’s court—so powerful, so controversial and so frequently dissected by the media—evolved from such startlingly humble and uncertain beginnings.”—The New York Times
 
Out of Order sheds light on the centuries of change and upheaval that transformed the Supreme Court from its uncertain beginnings into the remarkable institution that thrives and endures today. From the early days of circuit-riding, when justices who also served as trial judges traveled thousands of miles per year on horseback to hear cases, to the changes in civil rights ushered in by Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall; from foundational decisions such as Marbury v. Madison to modern-day cases such as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice O’Connor weaves together stories and lessons from the history of the Court, charting turning points and pivotal moments that have helped define our nation’s progress.
 
With unparalleled insight and her unique perspective as a history-making figure, Justice O’Connor takes us on a personal exploration, painting vivid pictures of Justices in history, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the greatest jurists of all time; Thurgood Marshall, whose understated and succinct style would come to transform oral argument; William O. Douglas, called “The Lone Ranger” because of his impassioned and frequent dissents; and John Roberts, whom Justice O’Connor considers to be the finest practitioner of oral argument she has ever witnessed in Court. We get a rare glimpse into the Supreme Court’s inner workings: how cases are chosen for hearing; the personal relationships that exist among the Justices; and the customs and traditions, both public and private, that bind one generation of jurists to the next—from the seating arrangements at Court lunches to the fiercely competitive basketball games played in the Court Building’s top-floor gymnasium, the so-called “highest court in the land.”
 
Wise, candid, and assured, Out of Order is a rich offering of inspiring stories of one of our country’s most important institutions, from one of our country’s most respected pioneers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sandra Day O’Connor was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised on the Lazy B Ranch. She attended Stanford University, where she took Wallace Stegner’s writing course. She began her public service in Phoenix, and was majority leader of the Arizona Senate before becoming a judge. She is the author of Lazy B, a memoir about growing up in the Southwest, and The Majesty of the Law, a reflection on American law and life. President Reagan nominated her as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and she served from 1981 to 2006. She serves as Chancellor of the College of William & Mary, and is on the board of trustees of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

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Looming Large

Historic Intersections of the President

and the Supreme Court

The role of the judicial branch in our system of government differs markedly from that of the executive branch. Each shoulders substantial powers and obligations under the Constitution. Whereas the Executive enforces the law, however, the Supreme Court interprets the law and has no power to command obedience or appropriate funds to enforce its orders. Whereas the President is elected by the people and serves for limited terms, federal judges are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate and serve for life. Whereas the Executive reflects the political will of the majority, the judiciary is designed to check assertions of power by the political branches. It thus comes as little surprise that throughout history, the Executive and the Supreme Court have intersected, overlapped, and even clashed.

A story is told that William Howard Taft once found himself stranded at a small country railroad station. Informed that the express train would stop only for a large group of passengers, Taft wired the conductor: “Stop at Hicksville. Large party waiting to catch train.” When the train stopped, Taft boarded, alone. He then turned to the confused conductor. “You can go on ahead,” he declared. “I am the large party.”

We laugh at that story because we remember that Mr. Taft, at his heaviest, tipped the scales at over three hundred pounds. But as the twenty-seventh President of the United States and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States, he also was the only person ever to have tipped the scales by holding both of those incredibly “large” offices—experiencing firsthand the responsibility of heading two of the most significant institutions in the free world. His time in these two roles put him on two different sides of the same constitutional coin.

Indeed, our remarkable Constitution recognizes the individual “largeness” of these governmental bodies while acknowledging that their relative strengths will at times coexist, at times collide, and nearly always manage to carry out the will of the majority while safeguarding the rights of the minority. A look at the dynamic between these two institutions speaks volumes about the genius of our Constitution.

To find an example of the judiciary and the presidency surviving the collision of two larger-than-life personalities, we need not travel very far into the early days of our republic. Second cousins John Marshall and Thomas Jefferson were anything but the kissing kind. Indeed, their relationship was privately nasty and publicly only slightly better. Their exchanges—well documented, but not well-mannered—planted the seeds for an all-out war over the proper role of the judiciary vis-à-vis the other branches of government, and set the trajectory of constitutional law as we know it today.

Jefferson almost was not our third president, coming to the post only after the House of Representatives broke an electoral tie vote in his race with Aaron Burr. Marshall almost was not our fourth Chief Justice, receiving the nomination from John Adams only after first choice John Jay declined reappointment. But once fate brought them to their respective positions of authority in 1801, Jefferson and Marshall came to blows in ways that put even today’s climate of political acrimony to shame.

Early in his administration, Jefferson attempted to have Marshall impeached. He accused him of “irregular and censurable” behavior.1 In Marshall’s hands, Jefferson lamented, “the law is nothing more than an ambiguous text, to be explained by his sophistry into any meaning which may subserve his personal malice.”2 He spoke vehemently of his bitter disappointment in his own appointees to the Supreme Court, calling them “lazy” and weak for not standing up to the “crafty chief judge.”3

Marshall, in turn, labeled Jefferson “totally unfit” for the presidency.4

Jefferson called the Chief Justice a man “of lax lounging manners . . . and a profound hypocrisy.”5 Over time, these two actors played out a rather hateful drama, rooted in personal animus and fundamental disagreement as to the proper role of government and the appropriate balance between the judicial and executive branches.

History teaches us that it was Marshall’s decision in Marbury v. Madison that permanently legitimated and strengthened the Supreme Court and that gave the Chief Justice his least obvious but perhaps greatest victory over the President. Many say that that case, which came to stand for the authority of the Court to review the acts of the political branches, might as well have been captioned Marshall v. Jefferson.

Here is what happened. In the watershed 1800 election, Marshall’s Federalist Party lost control of the executive and the legislative branches to Jefferson’s Republicans, and in an effort to retain some presence in government, the Federalists decided to pack the Court before they left office. President Adams appointed Marshall, then the secretary of state, as Chief Justice, and Congress passed a number of pieces of legislation to restructure the court system and provide the lame-duck Senate and outgoing President Adams with many new positions to fill. Adams filled them—or thought he did—through a series of midnight appointments.

But Jefferson fought back. When he took office as President, he refused to deliver the commissions of some of the Adams appointees. When William Marbury, an appointed judge who didn’t get his commission, sought a court order compelling the administration to deliver his commission, the case made its way to the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Marshall, to the surprise of many, denied the order that would have forced his nemesis Jefferson to issue the judicial commissions. That might have seemed like a victory for the new President.

But the “victory” that Marshall handed to Jefferson came with a silver lining for the Court and for himself. Marshall and the Court denied the order to grant Marbury’s commission on the grounds that the part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 that had given the Supreme Court the power to issue such orders was contrary to the Constitution.

Writing for a unanimous Court in 1803, Marshall declared “that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by [the Constitution]” and, more important, that it is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department” to say what the Constitution means.6

In one fell swoop, Marshall gave up a small power that Congress had conferred upon the Court and took in exchange an even larger, overarching power—to examine and decide the ultimate constitutionality of all acts of Congress that one challenged in Court. Despite the vehement disagreement of his cousin Thomas Jefferson, this bold assertion by John Marshall about the power of the Court has survived as the final and official answer to this day. Today, portraits of Marbury and Madison hang in the Justices’ private dining room in the Supreme Court—an ongoing reminder of how the Court established its role as a coequal branch.

The lessons to be learned from the story of Jefferson and Marshall are many. It is the story of a government that develops and evolves, that grows and changes, over time. It is the story of large institutions competing and accommodating and evolving in ways that may both amaze and alarm us. Perhaps even more significant, it is a story that begins a distinctively human thread that is woven throughout all of the Court’s history: The judiciary and the presidency are inhabited by real people, with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812984323
• ISBN 13: 9780812984323
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien