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How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? The Constrained Court combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman show how two types of constraints have influenced the decision making of the modern Court. First, Bailey and Maltzman document that important legal doctrines, such as respect for precedents, have influenced every justice since 1950. The authors find considerable variation in how these doctrines affect each justice, variation due in part to the differing experiences justices have brought to the bench. Second, Bailey and Maltzman show that justices are constrained by political factors. Justices are not isolated from what happens in the legislative and executive branches, and instead respond in predictable ways to changes in the preferences of Congress and the president. The Constrained Court shatters the myth that justices are unconstrained actors who pursue their personal policy preferences at all costs. By showing how law and politics interact in the construction of American law, this book sheds new light on the unique role that the Supreme Court plays in the constitutional order.

Mark Graber looks at the history of abortion law in action to argue that the only defensible, constitutional approach to the issue is to afford all women equal choice--abortion should remain legal or bans should be strictly enforced. Steering away from metaphysical critiques of privacy, Graber compares the philosophical, constitutional, and democratic merits of the two systems of abortion regulation witnessed in the twentieth century: pre-Roe v. Wadestatutory prohibitions on abortion andRoe'sban on significant state interference with the market for safe abortion services. He demonstrates that beforeRoe,pro-life measures were selectively and erratically administered, thereby subverting our constitutional commitment to equal justice. Claiming that these measures would be similarly administered if reinstated, the author seeks to increase support for keeping abortion legal, even among those who have reservations about its morality. Abortion should remain legal, Graber argues, because statutory bans on abortion have a history of being enforced in ways that intentionally discriminate against poor persons and persons of color. In the years beforeRoe, the same law enforcement officials who routinely ignored and sometimes assisted those physicians seeking to terminate pregnancies for their private patients too often prevented competent abortionists from offering the same services to the general public. This double standard violated the fundamental human and constitutional right of equal justice under law, a right that remains a major concern of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Is nationwide abolition of capital punishment a realistic prospect in the United States? This question has taken on new urgency as the United States has become increasingly isolated in its retention and use of the death penalty. Most nations of the world—including many third-world countries—have abolished the death penalty, leaving the United States as theonlyWestern industrialized nation in the world to formally retain the practice. Moreover, our retention is not merely formal: even recently, after death sentences and executions have declined for several years in a row, we have witnessed, on average, approximately one execution each

This is a critical review of the book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty. Parts of the book addressed are public opinion polling, racial disparities, and death-qualified juries. Numerous examples are provided for how the book, while informative, provides a deceptive view on the subject through the selective use of statistics and provided explanations.