In recent years, the justices of the Supreme Court have ruled definitively on such issues as abortion, school prayer, and military tribunals in the war on terror. They decided one of American history’s most contested presidential elections. Yet for all their power, the justices never face election and hold their offices for life. This combination of influence and apparent unaccountability has led many to complain that there is something illegitimate—even undemocratic—about judicial authority.
In The Will of the People, Barry Friedman challenges that claim by showing that the Court has always been subject to a higher power: the American public. Judicial positions have been abolished, the justices’ jurisdiction has been stripped, the Court has been packed, and unpopular decisions have been defied. For at least the past sixty years, the justices have made sure that their decisions do not stray too far from public opinion.
Friedman’s pathbreaking account of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court—from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Rehnquist court in 2005—details how the American people came to accept their most controversial institution and shaped the meaning of the Constitution.
Barry Friedman is the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He has taught, written and litigated about the Constitution for twenty-five years.
Throughout his career, Friedman has had one foot in the academy and one foot in the world of law and legal practice. Following a clerkship with Judge Phyllis Kravitch on the Eleventh Circuit, Friedman taught for a year at the University of Alabama, where he also engaged in death penalty and prisoner litigation. He then moved to practice at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Washington, DC, while teaching as an adjunct at Georgetown University Law Center. In 1986, Friedman joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University School of Law, where he taught until moving to New York in 1999. Between 2007 and 2010 Friedman served as the Vice Dean of New York University School of Law. In the last twenty years, Friedman has represented pro bono and private clients at every level of the state and federal courts. His cases have dealt with abortion rights, free speech, interstate commerce and state authority
Friedman is one of the country's leading authorities on the federal courts and judicial behavior. His work is interdisciplinary, grounded in law, political science and history. He has published over fifty academic articles in some of the country's leading journals. Along with Professor Steven Burbank he co-edited Judicial Independence: An Interdisciplinary Approach. He also contributes regularly to the mainstream media, with articles or opinion pieces in The New Republic, The New York Times, The American Lawyer, and Forbes.com, among others. The Will of the People is his first book.
Friedman has energetically devoted himself to the public interest. He was the affiliate president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, and on the board of the State and Local Legal Center; he also served on the board and executive committee of the American Judicature Society for many years. He presently is co-director of the Furman Academic Scholars program, which prepares students for a career in the legal academy.
Friedman lives in Greenwich Village, with his wife Jill Anton - a food stylist - and his two children Samara and Simon.
