Respected Legal Scholars Interpret the Case of Bush v. Gore in a New Book

In “Bush v. Gore: The Question of Legitimacy,” published this week by Yale University Press and edited by Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman, some of the nation’s most distinguished legal scholars explore the historic Supreme Court decision that determined the outcome of the 2000 presidential election.

The opinions about the decision represented in this collection of essays range from it was “a broad assault on the rule of law,” in the words of Stanford’s Margaret Jane Radin, to the conclusion of Charles Fried, former solicitor general in the Reagan administration, that it was reasonable and justified.

Other legal experts whose essays appear in the collection include Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard; Steven Calabresi, who teaches constitutional law at Northwestern and who served in the administrations of George H.W. Bush Sr. and Reagan; and Appeals Court Judge and former dean of Yale Law School Guido Calabresi.

This book exposes the major legal questions raised by the decision. Did the Supreme Court upset the balance of power guaranteed by the Constitution? How will the decision affect the selection of future Supreme Court Justices? Was the Court right to take the case at all? These are only a few of the points debated by 13 of the nation’s finest legal minds. Each author considers the arguments of the others, and their individual opinions are often at variance with the predictable party lines with which they are associated.

“Bush v. Gore” is written for a general audience. “The contributors refuse to hide behind mind-numbing minutia,” says Ackerman, who is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale and who contributed one of the essays. “You don’t have to go to law school to get to the heart of their dispute. It is enough to be a thoughtful American.”