Overview
"The tale of how a cohesive majority of the Supreme Court has, in the six years from 1996, cut back the power of Congress and enhanced the autonomy of the 50 states. The immunity from suit of the sovereign, Blackstone taught, is necessary to preserve the people's idea that the sovereign is ""a superior being"". Promoting the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity to constitutional status, the current Supreme Court (in 2002) has used it to shield the states from damages for age discrimination, disability discrimination, and the violation of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and fair labour standards. Not just the states themselves, but every state-sponsored entity - a state insurance scheme, a state university's research lab, the Idaho Potato Commission - has been insulated from paying damages in tort or contract. Sovereign immunity, as Noonan puts it, has metastasized. ""It only hurts when you think about it,"" Noonan's Yalewoman remarks. Noonan is a passionate believer in the place of persons in the law. Rules, he claims, are a necessary framework, but they must not obscure law's task of giving justice to persons. His critique of Supreme Court doctrine is driven by this conviction."
Full Product Details
Author: John T. Noonan
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 1.90cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.064kg
ISBN: 9780520235748
ISBN 10: 0520235746
Pages: 212
Publication Date: 21 August 2002
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Out of Print
Availability: Awaiting stock
Reviews
John T. Noonan, Jr. brings impeccable scholarly and judicial credentials to his dramatic accusation that five members of the Supreme Court are systematically thwarting justice to Americans through a states rights policy that is essentially political and without basis in the Constitution. Judge Noonan's stature as a leading conservative thinker gives added prestige to this compact, lively and riveting account. -Norman Dorsen, Stokes Professor of Law, New York University; President of the ACLU, 1976-1991
Author Information
John T. Noonan, Jr. is Robbins Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a dozen books, including Bribes (1987), Persons and Masks of the Law (2002), and The Lustre of Our Country : The American Experience of Religious Freedom (1998), which was a New York Times Notable Book. He is currently the holder of the Maguire Chair in Ethics at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress and a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
