front cover of The Cult Of The Court
The Cult Of The Court
John Brigham
Temple University Press, 1991

In recent years widespread attention has been focused on decisions handed down by the Supreme Court that grapple with passionate issues: integration, school prayer, abortion, affirmative action. The appointment of new justices is a highly charged political event although the Court is supposed to be "above" politics. Amidst the bicentennial celebration of the Constitution and almost daily reports of major confrontations awaiting the highest court’s judicial review, John Brigham presents a fresh and innovative examination of the U.S. Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional interpretation.

Drawing on philosophy and anthropology, The Cult of the Court offers a social scientific investigation of an institution whose authority has come to be taken for granted. The author emphasizes that the Court is an institution and that its authority is founded less in the claim of legal expertise than in hierarchical finality—the assertion of political will, not of legal judgment. He shows how the Court has supplanted the Constitution as the authority in our political world and that what makes legal "sense" is affected by these factors of institutionalization, bureaucratization, and court-dominated constitutionalism.

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front cover of Material Law
Material Law
A Jurisprudence of What's Real
John Brigham
Temple University Press, 2009

Law is part of the process by which people construct their views of the world. In Material Law, distinguished scholar John Brigham focuses on the places where law and material life intersect, and how law creates and alters our social reality. Brigham looks at an eclectic group of bodies and things—from maps and territories and trends in courthouse architecture to a woman’s womb and a judge’s body—to make connections between the material and the legal.

Theoretically sophisticated, and consistently fascinating, Material Law integrates law and society, political science, and popular culture in a truly interdisciplinary fashion. Brigham examines how the meaning of law is influenced by politics, reviewing, for example, whether the authority of global law supersedes that of national law in the context of Anglo-American cultural colonialism. What emerges is a well-reasoned look at how the authority of law constitutes what we see as real in our lives. 

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