A Fascinating View of the Supreme Court

books:

	• Laboratory of Justice: The Supreme Court's 200-Year Struggle to Integrate Science and the Law David L. Faigman Times Books, 2004 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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A Fascinating View of the Supreme Court

For those of us who primarily hear about Supreme Court cases through the news or at school, it is easy to forget that the actual Court decision that emerges from a case is the complex interaction of nine individuals interpreting the law and the facts. This book explores in fascinating detail how the Supreme Court's landmark decisions are very much a human endeavor reflecting the different justices' world views. While Faigman uses the justices' understanding of science (or sometimes misunderstanding) in making their legal decisions as his primary prism to examine the Court, the book is anything but simply a "law and science" book. To me, it was much more about how the justices bring their individual strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and fears as human beings, to deciding cases with profound implications for society. I always had assumed, for example, that Justice Taney, who decided the infamous Dred Scott decision that saw slaves as property to be owned, must have been a bigoted villain. While Taney by no means emerges from Faigman's telling as a hero, he does become much more of a three-dimensional figure, one who had deep personal qualms about slavery but who, in a terribly misguided way, thought he was saving the Union by his opinion in Dred Scott. In chapter after chapter, Faigman similarly shows how Court decisions that we have all heard of, like Brown v. Board of Education, are much more than simply decisions reflecting "The Law," but reflect individual justices' struggles with changing scientific and social understandings. I don't know if the author meant the title "Laboratory of Justice" to have another meaning beyond looking at how the Court tries to adapt the law as science changes our understanding of the world around us, but as I read the book, I did find myself thinking of the justices not as the scientists running the "laboratory of justice" but as part of the experiment itself going on in the laboratory of justice. This is a superb book for anyone who wants to gain insight into the Court's workings as told by someone with a keen eye for interesting facts that are insightful and entertaining at the same time.

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From the American Revolution to the genetic revolution, the U.S. Supreme Court's uneasy attempts to weave science into the Constitution

Suppose that scientists identify a gene that predicts that a person is likely to commit a serious crime. Laws are then passed making genetic tests mandatory, and anyone displaying the gene is sent to a treatment facility. Would the laws be constitutional?
In this illuminating history, legal scholar David L. Faigman reveals the tension between the conservative nature of the law and the swift evolution of scientific knowledge. The Supreme Court works by precedent, embedding the science of an earlier time into our laws. In the nineteenth century, biology helped settle the "race question" in the famous Dred Scott case; not until a century later would cutting-edge sociological data end segregation with Brown v. Board of Education. In 1973 Roe v. Wade set a standard for the viability of a fetus that modern medicine could render obsolete. And how does the Fourth Amendment apply in a world filled with high-tech surveillance devices?
To ensure our liberties, Faigman argues, the Court must embrace science, turning to the lab as well as to precedent.

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