Law and Politics by Linda Greenhouse

[elleng]

I first read about Robert A. Dahl’s death earlier this month in the Yale Daily News. Why would the editors of a student newspaper publish a Page 1 obituary of a 98-year-old political science professor who had retired from teaching well before any of today’s undergraduates were born?

The article made the answer obvious, as did obituaries in The Times and elsewhere: Robert Dahl all but created the modern field of political science, anchoring it at Yale, where he served as department chair and took on many other high-level responsibilities. The obituaries emphasized his work on democratic theory and constitutional structure. They gave less, if any, attention to his pathbreaking study of the Supreme Court.

Here is the opening paragraph of one of the best known among his hundreds of academic articles:

“To consider the Supreme Court of the United States strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance in the American political system. For it is also a political institution, an institution, that is to say, for arriving at decisions on controversial questions of national policy. As a political institution, the court is highly unusual, not least because Americans are not quite willing to accept the fact that it is a political institution and not quite capable of denying it; so that frequently we take both positions at once. This is confusing to foreigners, amusing to logicians, and rewarding to ordinary Americans who thus manage to retain the best of both worlds.”

With its clarity of expression, the article, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker,” might have been written yesterday (although, on second thought, probably not: modern political science articles are typically jargon-riddled.) In fact, it appeared in the Journal of Public Law 57 years ago. All these years later, it still has much to teach us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/opinion/greenhouse-law-and-politics.html?hp&rref=opinion

[BlueMTexpat]

1. Thanks, elleng!

Great read!