That Eminent Tribunal: Judicial Supremacy and the
Constitution. Edited by Christopher Wolfe. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004. 256 p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
“Constitutional law professors have been very upset lately with
the U.S. Supreme Court” (p. 181). So begins Keith E.
Whittington's contribution to this collection of 11 essays on the
subject of, in the words of the subtitle, “judicial supremacy and
the Constitution.” Many in the unhappy chorus mentioned by
Whittington are mainstream legal academicians who decry the conservative
judicial activism sometimes practiced by the Rehnquist Court; they long
for a robust activism in defense of liberal political values that
characterized Warren and some Burger Era rulings. But the contributors to
this book are not members of that chorus. Instead, most question or
condemn the liberal activism preferred by the legal mainstream, while a
few reject both styles of activism and hanker for a modest judicial role
characterized by editor Christopher Wolfe as “traditional judicial
review” (p. 202).