To students and practitioners of the American policy process, judicial review is a fascinating instrumentality. In its use, we imagine the concentrated power of a tiny, insular cadre of specialists to declare what may and what must happen in public policy. To anyone with a policy agenda, this power is both beguiling and fearsome. However, this depiction is also a significant exaggeration of how federal judicial review has developed and is actually practiced today—one of the many important points that Whittington makes in Repugnant Laws.
Though the broad outlines of many of the issues raised in this book will be familiar to specialists in American public law, the evidence that Whittington marshals sets a new standard for comprehensiveness. The backbone of the book is an original data set of every U.S. Supreme Court opinion reviewing an act of Congress on constitutional grounds (the book does not consider judicial review...