First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life By Kenneth Starr. Warner Books, 320 pages, $26.95 Bill Clinton did not destroy his opponents; he drove them insane, and they destroyed themselves. Of all the careers Clinton ended in ignominy — Bob Dole, Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich come to mind — one of the […]
Garrett Epps
Garrett Epps is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. He covers the Supreme Court for theatlantic.com. His book American Epic: Reading the U.S. Constitution was published in August 2013 by Oxford University Press.
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Courting Disaster
More than a decade ago, I ran into a friend at a college bookstore. At the time, this man was a professional semiotician and the world’s leading academic expert on the delightfully trashy prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” On an impulse, I asked him what he thought of the then-new and very hot “L.A. Law.” Plainly […]
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Space is the Place
Joss Whedon is the Hazel Motes of American television. Motes, a hill-country preacher created by Flannery O’Connor, toured the back roads of the American South to win souls for the “Church Without Christ.” Having annihilated God, Motes was helplessly possessed nonetheless by the religious instinct — and, O’Connor later wrote, his peculiar stubborn integrity lay […]
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The Case Against Jed Bartlet:
“There’s nothing good on TV anymore,” a friend recently said. He is a Democrat and a University of North Carolina basketball fan. “I don’t watch anything but that ESPN Classic,” which shows videotapes of old Tar Heel victories. For those nostalgic for the days of elected government, there really is little news programming worth watching. […]
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Civilization and its Discontents
Cultural novelties are many, but genuinely new art forms don’t come along very often. The computer game may be to our time what film was to the early twentieth century. There’s a cultural divide about this — literate young people in their twenties routinely spend leisure hours hunting aliens on their PCs; gaffers like me […]
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Book Review: Inventing America
What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States. By James F. Simon. Simon and Schuster, 348 pages, $27.50. Ten years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Shockoe Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, where John Marshall is buried. Our little party — two law clerks and a federal […]
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Can Buffy’s Brilliance Last?
When future critics ask whether turn-of-the-century American TV produced any works of genius, the verdict on the entire medium–all 128 channels of it–is likely to depend on their assessment of a cult teen hit currently airing on UPN, with syndicated reruns on FX. At first glance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer seems indistinguishable from the WB’s […]
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MicroJustice
In a surprise breakthrough in antitrust settlement talks, negotiators for Microsoft and the government have agreed on a plan by which the software giant will acquire the U.S. Department of Justice for $7 billion, sources close to the discussions said yesterday. Though no official announcement has been made, the parties are said to be working […]
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Democracy’s Blueprints
Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do By Cass R. Sunstein. Oxford University Press. 304 pages $29.95 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, constitutionshave been a major American export. Like French lieutenants carrying a fieldmarshal’s baton in their rucksacks, many top-ten law professors have a draftdocument for Klopstockia or Zembla tucked away on their hard drives, […]
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The Law According to Levy
In 1957 the Fund for the Republic asked a young historian to write a brief memorandum on the original understanding of the First Amendment. Leonard Levy, who was teaching at Brandeis University, examined the sources and concluded that, at the time the amendment was framed, American courts recognized the crime of “seditious libel”–criticism of the […]