Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Norman Vieira and Leonard Gross provide an in-depth analysis of the political and legal framework surrounding the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees. President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court met with a fierce opposition that was apparent in his confirmation hearings, which were different in many ways from those of any previous nominee. This behind-the-scenes view of the politics and personalities involved in the Bork confirmation controversy provides a framework for future debates regarding the confirmation process. To help establish that framework, Vieira and Gross examine the similarities as well as the differences between the Bork confirmation battle and other confirmation proceedings for Supreme Court nominees.

The history of the second wave of feminism in the United States demonstrates the potential for both serious social change and seemingly intractable divisions among women. Race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and religion have all been dividing influences among women, shaping their various perspectives on and relations to the women's movement. Yet collectively, women's efforts--identified as second wave feminism--are seen as having made a difference. This book highlights the lives and work of fifty second wave feminists, women who have served as catalysts in the developing feminist movement. A diverse group--playwrights and politicians, grassroots organizers and scientists, poets and theologians--they provide the reader with compelling stories of individual women's lives, collective feminist struggles, and the possibilities of feminist social change.

The women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s changed the lives of a vast majority of women, especially young women, in America. This introduction to the movement provides not only a narrative overview, but also a wealth of ready-reference materials, including 13 lengthy biographical profiles of key figures, a broad selection of 15 primary source documents, a glossary of terms, and a useful annotated bibliography. The women's liberation movement was an outgrowth of earlier waves of feminism, including the women's suffrage movement that gained women the right to vote in 1920. In a succession of chronologically organized chapters, Berkeley tells the tumultuous story of the movement from its historical roots through the present.

This volume is a compilation of the U.S. federal special prosecutor/independent counsel investigations spanning the complete twenty-one year tenure from 1978-1999 of the independent counsel statute. The entries include individuals who have served as investigators; those who have been targets of investigations; all attorney generals who have called for appointment of special prosecutors; all presidents during whose terms of office such prosecutors served; and all legal cases that served to argue for or against the constitutionality of the independent counsel statute. These historical precedents are traced from Ulysses Grant's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the St. Louis Whiskey Scandal in 1875. More contemporary cases include Watergate, precipitated by Richard Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" dismissal of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973; Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's Iran-Contra Investigation; and Special Prosecutor Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation of the Clintons and,the ensuing permutations which brought individuals like Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky to prominence and also brought the statute calling for such investigations into constitutional debate.

Since 1958, twenty-five men and two women have forced the Supreme Court to consider whether the Constitution's promises of equal protection apply to gay Americans. Here former Washington Post editor Joyce Murdoch and her partner, celebrated lesbian columnist Deb Price, reveal how the nation's highest court has reacted to these cases -- from the surprising 1958 victory of a tiny homosexual magazine to the 2000 defeat of a gay Eagle Scout. A triumph of investigative reporting, Courting Justice draws on interviews with justices' friends, relatives, and former clerks to offer an inside look at individual rulings and the often surprising context of those decisions. Murdoch and Price's careful research and passionate advocacy give us an inspiring new perspective on the unfolding of the gay rights movement in America.

In The Rehnquist Court and the Constitution, Tinsley Yarbrough provides a comprehensive look at today's Supreme Court Justices and their record--a study all the more valuable for the Court's mixed decisions and hard-to-categorize course. An accomplished biographer, Yarbrough offers incisive portraits of the nine who now sit on the high bench, and tellingly reviews their nomination hearings. He also explores the workings of the Court, ranging from the selection and role of the clerks to the work load (including the end-of-term "June crunch") and assignment of opinions. But the heart of the book is a systematic exploration of the Court's record in such fields as government power, economic regulation, and criminal justice. In decision after decision, the author discusses the various justices' opinions, arguments, and legal theories; he also offers his own analysis (including a sharp critique of the decision to allow the Paula Jones lawsuit to move forward). Like many writers on the Rehnquist Court, Yarbrough finds a general continuity with the past, shaded by a conservative outlook (especially in matters of criminal justice and affirmative action), but he identifies a significant departure in its rulings on economic regulation. Since 1937, he writes, the Supreme Court had generally adopted an expansive view of federal power over economic matters; the Rehnquist Court has reversed that trend. The Rehnquist Court has not launched an all-out assault on the Warren Court's precedents, as many conservatives hoped, but as Yarbrough shows it has embarked on important new departures. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, intelligently written, this book will stand as the finest study of the Rehnquist Court for years to come.