Power of Federal Judiciary Over Legislation by J. Hampden Dougherty is a compact but weighty work first published in 1912, offering a vigorous defense of the judiciary’s power to strike down unconstitutional laws. Written during an era of growing skepticism toward centralized authority, Dougherty’s book situates judicial review as an indispensable safeguard built into the American constitutional system. He begins by tracing the intellectual and historical roots of this power, arguing that it was not an accidental byproduct but an intentional creation of the framers. Drawing on the Constitutional Convention debates and the Federalist Papers—particularly Alexander Hamilton’s famous exposition in Federalist No. 78—Dougherty insists that the courts’ ability to declare legislative acts void is central to maintaining the supremacy of the Constitution.
Read today, Dougherty’s work resonates in a world facing renewed tensions between legislatures and courts. The questions he grappled with—how much power unelected judges should have over elected lawmakers, whether the judiciary can check majoritarian excesses without overstepping, and how to reconcile constitutional text with evolving social norms—remain pressing in 2025.
In an age of polarized politics, social media-driven outrage, and legislative gridlock, the themes of Dougherty’s book speak directly to contemporary challenges. His work encourages a sober reflection on whether judicial power is a threat to democratic self-government or an essential defense against its excesses.
More than a historical artifact, Power of Federal Judiciary Over Legislation functions as a mirror for modern constitutional crises. It underscores how the tensions between law and politics, and between judicial restraint and activism, are not new but woven into the fabric of American governance. As debates continue in 2025 about court-packing, term limits for justices, and the appropriate scope of judicial intervention, Dougherty’s concise and forceful treatise offers both a defense of the judiciary’s traditional role and a challenge to ensure it remains a stabilizing rather than destabilizing force in constitutional democracy.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 108p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Stephen E. Gottlieb

FROM THE PREFACE; “Why This Book. Notwithstanding common descriptions of the justices, there is no center on this Court, and there are no moderates. When the Court's "conservatives" find common ground with the Court's "liberals," they have arrived at their conclusions from essentially unrelated premises. Analysis of the Court as if there were a continuum from Rehnquist to Breyer is a serious misunderstanding. This book is intended to clarify the thinking of the nine current members of the Court and the significance of their ways of thinking for the rest of us. We like to think of judges and justices as deciding cases on the facts and the law. Thus some may find upsetting the suggestion although it is surely not new-that justices decide cases in line with their own private, preexisting philosophies of law….”

NY. New York University Press. 2000. 360p

Selected And Edited With An Introduction By A. S. P. Woodhouse

From the Preface by A. D. Lindsay: “I commend the book, so completed, to all who wish to be able to give a reason for their democratic faith, and wish it could be read so as to stop the mouths and pens of those who produce facile refutations of the fundamental idea s of democracy. These ideas, liberty, equality and fraternity, if divorced from the religious context in which they belong, become cheap and shallow and easy of refutation. Those who will take the trouble to get behind the theological language of these documents will see how profound those democratic ideas are, how real and concrete and recurring is the situation which gives rise to them; and will see the tension there must always be between them so long as they are alive.”

London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. 1951. 617p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP