The Chief

The Chief
Author: Joan Biskupic
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0465093280

An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic Chief Justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far. John Roberts was named to the Supreme Court in 2005 claiming he would act as a neutral umpire in deciding cases. His critics argue he has been anything but, pointing to his conservative victories on voting rights and campaign finance. Yet he broke from orthodoxy in his decision to preserve Obamacare. How are we to understand the motives of the most powerful judge in the land? In The Chief, award-winning journalist Joan Biskupic contends that Roberts is torn between two, often divergent, priorities: to carry out a conservative agenda, and to protect the Court's image and his place in history. Biskupic shows how Roberts's dual commitments have fostered distrust among his colleagues, with major consequences for the law. Trenchant and authoritative, The Chief reveals the making of a justice and the drama on this nation's highest court.

Roberts Vs. Texaco:

Roberts Vs. Texaco:
Author: Bari-Ellen Roberts
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1999-03-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780380796397

Texaco recruited banking executive Bari-Ellen Roberts with promises of a professional challenge and advancement. But she and 1400 other African Americans faced a persistant pattern of racial discrimination so onerous that it wound up in a lawsuit-and ultimately in the largest discrimination settlement in U.S. History. This is the true story of how a giant corporation was challenged against all odds by one brave woman who was determined to stand her ground. Here, in Bari-Ellen Roberts' own words, is the fascinating, infuriating, and ultimately triumphant account of how she acheived an electrifying result that could change the face of corporate America, including the inside story of the notorious "Texaco Tapes," which recorded senior executives making racially-charged comments while they allegedly plotted the destruction of evidence. Here is a fresh and inspiring vantage point on what is unquestionably the major civil rights battleground of the twenty-first century: the workplace. Spellbinding and eloquent, intensely personal and dramatically riveting, this is the most persuasive yet damning account of corporate racial discrimination ever written.

The Roberts Court

The Roberts Court
Author: Marcia Coyle
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 145162753X

For years, the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts has been at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Here, the much-honored, expert Supreme Court reporter Marcia Coyle's examination of four landmark cases is "informative, insightful, clear and fair...Coyle reminds us that Supreme Court decisions matter. A lot." (Portland Oregonian). Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the US Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action. Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside analysis of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began and how they exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United case. Most dramatically, her reporting shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups have strategized to find cases and crafted them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority. The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat to the struggle to lay down the law of the land.

Uncertain Justice

Uncertain Justice
Author: Laurence Tribe
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0805099093

An assessment of how the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is significantly influencing the nation's laws and reinterpreting the Constitution includes in-depth analysis of recent rulings and their implications.

American Justice 2015

American Justice 2015
Author: Steven V. Mazie
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0812292278

American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court is the indispensable guide to the most controversial and divisive cases decided by the Supreme Court in the 2014-15 term. Steven Mazie, Supreme Court correspondent for The Economist, examines the term's fourteen most important cases, tracing the main threads of contention and analyzing the expected impacts of the decisions on the lives of Americans. Legal experts and law students will be drawn to the lively summaries of the issues and arguments, while scholars and theorists will be engaged and provoked by the book's elegant introduction, in which Mazie invokes John Rawls's theory of "public reason" to defend the institution of the Supreme Court against its many critics. Mazie contends that the Court is less ideologically divided than most observers presume, issuing many more unanimous rulings than 5-4 decisions throughout the term that concluded in June 2015. When ruling on questions ranging from marriage equality to freedom of speech to the Affordable Care Act, the justices often showed a willingness to depart from their ideological fellow travelers—and this was particularly true of the conservative justices. Chief Justice Roberts joined his liberal colleagues in saving Obamacare and upholding restrictions on personal solicitation of campaign funds by judicial candidates. Justice Samuel Alito and the chief voted with the liberals to expand the rights of pregnant women in the workplace. And Justice Clarence Thomas floated to the left wing of the bench in permitting Texas to refuse to print a specialty license plate emblazoned with a Confederate flag. American Justice 2015 conveys, in clear, accessible terms, the arguments, decisions, and drama in these cases, as well as in cases involving Internet threats, unorthodox police stops, death-penalty drugs, racial equality, voting rights, and the separation of powers.

The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century

The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century
Author: Brad Roberts
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2015-12-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0804797153

“An excellent contribution to the debate on the future role of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence in American foreign policy.” ―Contemporary Security Policy This book is a counter to the conventional wisdom that the United States can and should do more to reduce both the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategies and the number of weapons in its arsenal. The case against nuclear weapons has been made on many grounds—including historical, political, and moral. But, Brad Roberts argues, it has not so far been informed by the experience of the United States since the Cold War in trying to adapt deterrence to a changed world, and to create the conditions that would allow further significant changes to U.S. nuclear policy and posture. Drawing on the author’s experience in the making and implementation of U.S. policy in the Obama administration, this book examines that real-world experience and finds important lessons for the disarmament enterprise. Central conclusions of the work are that other nuclear-armed states are not prepared to join the United States in making reductions, and that unilateral steps by the United States to disarm further would be harmful to its interests and those of its allies. The book ultimately argues in favor of patience and persistence in the implementation of a balanced approach to nuclear strategy that encompasses political efforts to reduce nuclear dangers along with military efforts to deter them. “Well-researched and carefully argued.” ―Foreign Affairs

Give Us the Ballot

Give Us the Ballot
Author: Ari Berman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2015-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374711496

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015 An NPR Best Book of 2015 Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.

The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right

The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right
Author: Michael J. Graetz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476732515

The magnitude of the Burger Court has been underestimated by historians. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards dotted the landscape, especially in the South. Nixon promised to transform the Supreme Court--and with four appointments, including a new chief justice, he did. This book tells the story of the Supreme Court that came in between the liberal Warren Court and the conservative Rehnquist and Roberts Courts: the seventeen years, 1969 to 1986, under Chief Justice Warren Burger. It is a period largely written off as a transitional era at the Supreme Court when, according to the common verdict, "nothing happened." How wrong that judgment is. The Burger Court had vitally important choices to make: whether to push school desegregation across district lines; how to respond to the sexual revolution and its new demands for women's equality; whether to validate affirmative action on campuses and in the workplace; whether to shift the balance of criminal law back toward the police and prosecutors; what the First Amendment says about limits on money in politics. The Burger Court forced a president out of office while at the same time enhancing presidential power. It created a legacy that in many ways continues to shape how we live today. Written with a keen sense of history and expert use of the justices' personal papers, this book sheds new light on an important era in American political and legal history.--Adapted from dust jacket.