Michael Avery – författare

The lawyers and legal commentators who contribute to We Dissent unanimously agree that during Chief Justice William Rehnquist's nineteen-year tenure, the Supreme Court failed to adequately protect civil liberties and civil rights. This is evident in majority opinions written for numerous cases heard by the Rehnquist Court, and eight of those cases are re-examined here, with contributors offering dissents to the Court's decisions. The Supreme Court opinions criticized in We Dissent suggest that the Rehnquist Court placed the interests of government above the people, and as the dissents in this book demonstrate, the Court strayed far from our constitutional ideals when it abandoned its commitment to the protection of the individual rights of Americans.Each chapter focuses on a different case—ranging from torture to search and seizure, and from racial profiling to the freedom of political expression—with contributors summarizing the case and the decision, and then offering their own dissent to the majority opinion. For some cases featured in the book, the Court's majority decisions were unanimous, so readers can see here for the first time what a dissent might have looked like. In other cases, contributors offer alternative dissents to the minority opinion, thereby widening the scope of opposition to key civil liberties decision made by the Rehnquist Court.Taken together, the dissents in this unique book address the pressing issue of Constitutional protection of individual freedom, and present a vision of constitutional law in the United States that differs considerably from the recent jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court.Contributors: Michael Avery, Erwin Chemerinsky,Marjorie Cohn, Tracey Maclin, Eva Paterson, Jamin Raskin, David Rudovsky, Susan Kiyomi Serrano, and Abbe Smith.

Over the last thirty years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organisation with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organisation is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolise the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House. Today the Society claims that 45,000 conservative lawyers and law students are involved in its activities. Four Supreme Court Justices - Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito - are current or former members. Every single federal judge appointed in the two Bush presidencies was either a Society member or approved by members. During the Bush years, young Federalist Society lawyers dominated the legal staffs of the Justice Department and other important government agencies. The Society has lawyer chapters in every major city in the United States and student chapters in every accredited law school. Its membership includes economic conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, and libertarians, who differ with each other on significant issues, but who cooperate in advancing a broad conservative agenda. How did this happen? How did this group of conservatives succeed in moving their theories into the mainstream of legal thought? What is the range of positions of those associated with the Federalist Society in areas of legal and political controversy? The authors survey these stances in separate chapters on regulation of business and private property; race and gender discrimination and affirmative action; personal sexual autonomy, including abortion and gay rights; and American exceptionalism and international law.