Constitutional law for a changing America: rights, liberties, and justicia / Lee Epstein

Constitutional Law for a Changing America: rights, liberties, and justice made its debut in a discipline already supplied with many fine casebooks by law professors, historians, and social scientists. We believed then, as we do now, that there was a need for a fresh approach because, as political science dicial processes, we saw a growing disparity between what we taught and what our research taught us. We had adopted books for our classes tht focused primarily on Supreme Court decisions and how the Court applied the resulting legal precedents to subsequent disputes, but as scholars wu understood that to know the law is to know is to know only part of the story . A host of political factors internal and external influence the Court´s decisions and the development of constitutional law, Among the more significant forces at work are the ways lawyers and interest groups frame legal disputes, the idelogical and behavioral propensities of the justices, the politics of judicial selection, public opinion, and the positons elected official take, to name just a faw.