Closing the Courthouse Door
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A leading legal scholar explores how the constitutional right to seek justice has been restricted by the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court’s decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court’s record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens’ constitutional rights. The Court has restricted who has standing to sue, expanded the immunity of governments and government workers, limited the kinds of cases the federal courts can hear, and restricted the right of habeas corpus. Closing the Courthouse Door, by the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, is the first book to show the effect of these decisions: taken together, they add up to a growing limitation on citizens’ ability to defend their rights under the Constitution. Using many stories of people whose rights have been trampled yet who had no legal recourse, Chemerinsky argues that enforcing the Constitution should be the federal courts’ primary purpose, and they should not be barred from considering any constitutional question.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United, which deal with substantive issues, have understandably garnered the most attention from nonlawyers, but law professor Chemerinsky (The Case Against the Supreme Court) demonstrates here that the Court's procedural decisions are also vitally important. As he notes, "Court decisions rejecting rights get headlines, while rulings dismissing cases on... procedural grounds garner little attention." The net effect, however, of such dismissals is to close "the federal courthouse doors to those whose rights have been violated." The professor immediately makes this plain with the horrifying case of current and former female military personnel prevented from suing over sexual assaults they had suffered while in the service. A federal appellate court ruled that they had no legal remedy, because the U.S. government is completely immune from being sued in the absence of an authorizing statute and the Supreme Court has ruled that "people cannot sue others in the military." Such examples of the deficient logic behind adherence to doctrines such as sovereign immunity, a relic of English law from the time of Edward I holding that the "King can do no wrong," make this powerful and impassioned book anything but dry reading. Its cogent analysis is enhanced by practical steps for enabling federal courts to again truly enforce the U.S. Constitution.
