Glidden’s book coincides with the stress facing national courts in the US and abroad. President Joe Biden commissioned a panel to examine judicial reform. The panel published a comprehensive report in December 2021 detailing and analyzing a wide array of current ideas to reform judicial legitimacy but concluded without formally endorsing a path forward. Glidden’s book goes in a bolder direction: it begins and ends with a proposed constitutional amendment designed to return interpretation powers in the 14th Amendment—and its crucial array of equal protection and due process policies—to Congress. The amendment proposal requires unanimity in the Supreme Court for a federal law to be overturned. Glidden supports this idea through a historical summary of judicial review, which morphed into a culture of judicial supremacy in which the Supreme Court substitutes its will for the will of elected representatives, who reflect both parties and every region of the country. Despite the even poorer esteem many feel for the House and Senate, Glidden spends several chapters asserting his main point that “it has been primarily Congress, not the Supreme Court, which historically has promoted and nurtured democracy” (p. 14). Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Choice Reviews

William B. Glidden mourns the evisceration of the Fourteenth Amendment and the erection of a juristocracy that has disrespected Congress’s powers almost from the first. Calling for a new constitutional provision requiring unanimity on the Supreme Court to overturn legislation, Regulating Our Constitutional Rights is an essential contribution for our age of revived debate about whether American democracy should continue to allocate so much power to judges.

Samuel Moyn, Yale University

Glidden presents a history of the U.S. Constitution and its judicial interpretation that leads him to the skeptical conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Constitution have on balance failed to improve the working of our democratic system. Addressing recent proposals for “Court reform,” he offers a constitutional amendment that would restate the core meaning of the Constitution and implement it by requiring that any decision invalidating a federal statute be unanimous. A useful contribution to on-going debates about the Supreme Court and its role in our government.

Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School