JOTWELL's Courts Law Section has posted a
book review that may be of interest:
Kevin C. Walsh (Richmond School of Law) covers
Justin Crowe,
Building the Judiciary: Law, Courts, and the Politics of Institutional Development (Princeton University Press, 2012). Here's the first paragraph
of the review:
Scholars working within the field of “Federal Courts” have, from the
beginning, been concerned about the past and future of the federal
courts as instruments of government. But the beginning of Federal Courts
as a field was in the early 1950s, several decades after the Judiciary
Act of 1891 created the intermediate circuit courts of appeals and
almost three decades after the Judiciary Act of 1925 reconfigured the
relationship between the Supreme Court and all other courts in the
United States deciding questions of federal law. And the trajectory that
the federal judiciary has traveled since that time has been relatively
consistent. To the extent that this may have resulted in a failure to
appreciate the forces that had already made the federal courts so powerful by the time Federal Courts came into its own, Justin Crowe’s recent book Building the Judiciary offers a helpful corrective.
Read on
here.
