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The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans

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This is a wonderful book. Like his previous book, "Courting Disaster," Martin Garbus tells what really happens in the Supreme Court. He also describes the Court from a political viewpoint and goes through each of the court subjects and shows how each judge comes out. It's detailed, knowledgable and a pleasure to read. I'm not a lawyer, and I loved it.

In 2000, when the Supreme Court crowned George W. Bush President of the United States, friends of mine argued that Bush would be a one term President and would create little damage to our foreign policy, or to any of our institutions. They were wrong on all counts. In his book, The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans, Martin Garbus outlines just how deep and long term the effect of Bush' s Supreme Court appointments will be for our country. With the appointments of Samuel Alito and John Roberts, the court has moved seriously to the right rejecting precedent and chipping away at some of the court's most important rulings regarding privacy, religion and states' rights. Garbus outlines recent court decisions taking the reader through the conservative arguments. He demonstrates how these decisions are part of a conservative plan implemented by the Bush administration's court appointees which will undo major liberal decisions since the Warren court. His analysis is alarming and should be read by everyone who is concerned about the future of our democracy.

It is hard not to be frightened by Martin Garbus' new book. I've been a fan of the legendary Garbuis since his early books (TOUGH TALK and TRAITORS AND HEROES), which covered his swashbuckling career as one of the nation's pre-eminent first amendment lawyers. His clients -- from Lenny Bruce to Vaclac Havel to Spike Lee -- are a list of the powerful and important, and Garbus' work defending them is fascinating. But this book is something different.

Instead of revisiting past cases, Garbus looks to the future -- specifically, what the next quarter century holds for America given the makeup of the incredibly conversative Roberts court. Given the ages of the most conservative members -- Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas -- these guys will be around and voting as a bloc for a long time to come. If you think the Rehnquist years were bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet. What Garbus sees happening as a result is very upsetting -- nothing less than a conservative revolution to undo every progressive decision on the Supreme Court since the New Deal. No more reguolatory laws controlling Wall Street, no more environmental regulation, no more protection for workers and minorities, no more protection for abortion (though this will not be attacked directly), no govrenment agencies regulating American business, nothing whatsoever to balance the private sector run amok and the evils of prejudice and discrimination.

It's a nightmare vision, but it's no nightmare -- it's all to real. And Garbus elucidates the developments, and the history bhind them, in a clear, simple and dramatic way. If you want to know what's going to happen on the Supreme Court -- and therefore in all of our lives -- in the next 25 years, this book will show you the very scary truth. Take it as a call to action. and make sure we don't let any more conservatives on the court for a long time to come!

With the recently re-aligned Supreme Court, I wanted to know what is going on and what could happen to our legal system. This book gives it to you in clear language with a high level of depth and detail. Trial lawyer Martin Garbus, who has appeared before the Supreme Court many times, explains the sweeping changes that can be handed down from the Court and just might shake the foundations of this country. It's a really good read, and I'm glad I picked it up.

Garbus says that the impact of the conservative SC block of Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas will be to control the SC for the next couple of decades. Let's hope he's correct as the court has been steadily expanding federal power over tha last few decades. Garbus overlooks that the liberal wing of the court Breyer, Stevens, Ginsburg and Sotomayor (Souter when the book was written) also vote as an ideological block. He is not correct to judge the swing voter, Justice Kennedy as more conservative that the previous swing voter, Sandra O'Connor. The most the current ideological polarization of the court can accomplish is to slow down the populist expansion of government power. With luck the conservative court can mitigate left wing control of government predicted in James Carville in "40 More Years".

The book deserves credit for readable accounts of many significant, and mostly recent cases. It does a good job of selecting cases of previous eras from the Marshall Court, late 19th century jurisprudence and the New Deal, Warren, Burger and Rehnquist Courts. Garbus describes a case by case decision basis without any particular judicial philosophy. He attempts a pragmatic approach. Between the introduction and last chapter which degenerates into a leftist diatribe the book contains a lot of interesting case law. The reader learns much about Eminent Domain, the Takings Clause, the Commerce Clause, deregulation, and environmental control legislation. There is a moderate amount of space devoted to advocation of the Incorporation doctrine whereby the B of R is applied to the states. The book is not good at tracing abortion legislation to right of privacy. While not generally as derogatory of business as most left wing idealists, Garbus deplores free market conservatism without citing much economic justification.

Garbus deplores the conservative tendency to find facts to justify ideology. He makes no comment on that aspect for the liberal block of the court. Thurgood Marshall admitted that he decided first on the basis of social need and found justification later. The best and possibly the only original item in the book comes in a discussion of factual analysis as used in judicial decisions. Garbus alludes to the Rashomon effect to illustrate how different Justices can view facts from different perspectives to make very different conclusions from the same set of facts.

Garbus continually uses opinions of Judge Bork to derogate the current conservative SC block. He over relies on on the unpopular Bush v. Gore decision to support his cause. Garbus says that the Rehnquist Court cutback federal power at a time when it was dangerous to do so. When would Garbus advocate stopping expansion of federal power? He doesn't explore what will happen when all that federal power is appropriated towards a fascist cause after the inevitable swing to the right that will follow the current period of socialist government control.

'The Next 25 Years' is not as good as "The Supreme Court Phalanx" by Ronald Dworkin written from the same viewpoint as '25 Years' while analyzing the conservative stance through the idea of "Originalism", a philosophy only lightly touched as 'Textualism" in Garbus' approach.

Attorney Martin Garbus, in the social tradition of Clarence Darrow, has laid out in concise but stark terms the damage that the now-dominant, right-wing ideologue Supreme Court justices have done to constitutional and human rights. He forecasts that if their 5-4 past decisions are prologue, then the future for the next 25 years is not bright for those who believe that no one is above the law.

This book is must reading for anyone who is concerned about fairness and compassion in the meting out of justice by the federal judiciary. It is an easy-to-read constitutional history of the most significant cases and their effects on Americans.

There are a few errors that should have been caught during the review and editing. For example, on page 56, the name of Richard Mellon Scaife is given as Richard Scaife Mellon, and on pages 110-111, the date of Baker v. Carr is incorrectly listed as 1959, rather than the correct date of 1962. It is correct in note 42. And a final example will suffice. On page 132, Justice Byron White is incorrectly identified as his 19th century predecessor Justice Edward White. However, these errors do not detract from Mr. Garbus' cogent insight and call to action of all who believe, as he does, that "We need justice now[!]"

On a personal note, as a Louisiana native and student of its history, I was aware of the Colfax, LA, riot and murders of April 13, 1873. However, I was not familiar with United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that arose from the attempted criminal prosecution of the Colfax murderer s (p. 90). And I was certainly not aware that Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O'Connor had resurrected this Reconstruction-era bias as a precedent in Morrison v. United States to rule on May 15, 2000, that "Congress had no power to punish private violence motivated by gender" (p. 90). Another pernicious Louisiana case, Plessy v. Ferguson (May 18, 1896), has been cited by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts to "provide the basis of future decisions on issues ranging from abortion to civil liberties to race and gender persecution" (p. 70). Plessy v. Ferguson is the Supreme Court case sanctioning segregation in which the Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. Plessy was not overturned until Brown v. Topeka Board of Education in 1954.