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Garrett Epps

Garrett Epps is a contributing editor at The American Prospect. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. His most recent book is Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.

Recent Articles

Faux Federalism

Garrett EppsMar 11, 2012
(Flickr/tarsandsaction)

The central fact of American federalism, as I’ve written before, is hypocrisy. 

The Emerging Sotomayor-Muppet Axis of Evil

Garrett EppsMar 02, 2012

Can’t you take a joke?

In the time and place where I grew up, as I have written before, Federal judges were figures of awe. They were men (all men) of rather severe probity, following unpopular mandates from the Supreme Court even when those decisions cost them friends and put their lives in danger. I never recall a public complaint from any of the judges in the Southern state where I grew up, and certainly never outright ridicule of the President and the Congress—at least where others might overhear. 

Pirates of the Corporation

Garrett EppsFeb 29, 2012

Let’s play make-believe (sorry, lawyers call it “counterfactual”) with Justice Stephen J. Breyer. Imagine that Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, had incorporated his buccaneering business as Pirates, Inc. Now Blackbeard is captured.

And sued. “Do you think in the 18th century if they'd brought Pirates, Incorporated [to court], and we get all their gold, and Blackbeard gets up and he says, oh, it isn't me; it's the corporation—do you think that they would have then said: Oh, I see, it's a corporation. Good-bye. Go home[?]”

The Court That Walks Off Cliffs

Garrett EppsFeb 24, 2012
(Flickr/peachygreen)

Affirmative Action: Perhaps the defining characteristic of the Rehnquist Court was a certain last-minute reticence. On issue after issue—the Commerce Power, abortion, even the long-standing conservative desire to do away with Miranda v. Arizona—the Court would walk up to the edge of the abyss, dangle its toes over the side, and then step (slightly) back. While moving the law far to the right, the Court seldom engaged in the kind of radical overruling that would have perhaps called its legitimacy into question.

The Right to Tell Lies

Garrett EppsFeb 22, 2012
(Flickr/cliff1066a,,c)

Most Supreme Court arguments last one hour—30 minutes for each side.  At unpredictable intervals, however, the Court grants one party several extra millennia of agony as a once-solid case disintegrates in full view of the entire courtroom.

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