Vol. 8 No. 9 (September 1998) pp. 349-350.

WHO MAKES THE LAW: THE SUPREME COURT, CONGRESS, THE STATES, AND SOCIETY by Timothy D. Cheney. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. 109 pp. Paper $16.80. ISBN 0-13-493081-9.

Reviewed by Drew Noble Lanier, Department of Political Science, University of Central Florida. Email: dlanier@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu.

 
Timothy Cheney (Linfield College) has written a brief book that seeks to discuss the policy process in which the major institutions engage in the making and the implementation of laws. He focuses on the dialogue between the policy actors in an attempt to illustrate the interconnectedness of the policy-making machinery of the American system of governance. As the title suggests, he breaks down the analysis into a discussion of how the Supreme Court makes decisions, how the Constitution can be amended, how Congress legislates, and how the states and society at large react to the pronouncements of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the law.

As with any scholarly product, there are strengths and weaknesses with Cheney’s work. Cheney does a good job of setting out the basic steps through which the Court goes in deciding a case submitted to it. Naïve readers will find helpful his discussion of such difficult-to-define topics as mootness and ripeness. Cheney’s work also deserves praise for including many examples to illustrate the underlying concepts that he elucidates. For example, in his discussion of amending the Constitution, he discusses such controversial topics as abortion and school prayer and references the seminal cases for each of these and other compelling topics of our time. When he takes up the topic of Congress’ reaction to decisions of the Court, he uses those examples once again to emphasize the related nature of the actions of the Court and the national legislature. He continues the linkage by considering the reaction of the states as governmental structures and the larger population to the decisions of the Court, as well, completing the circle.

Perhaps the main criticism I have for Cheney is that his work does not significantly add to the body of knowledge that the academic community possesses with respect to the linkages between the Court, the Congress and the larger society. The great bulk of the material he discusses has been published previously elsewhere, notably in Johnson and Canon’s (1984) JUDICIAL POLICIES: IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT and in various judicial process texts. Many times throughout the book, he refers to polls and studies to explain how the public has reacted to some policy statement but he fails to cite supporting references for his assertion. Moreover, his conclusion is anticlimactic: "[i]t seems more likely, particularly on matters involving social, cultural and emotionally maintained attitudes and beliefs, that it is a cooperative, ongoing process, discussion, dialogue, and debate" (Cheney, p. 75).

Throughout the book, Cheney’s writing style is not formalistic or stilted. He approaches the subject matter in a relatively informal and accessible manner. However, this too may be a point for which he may be criticized. While it is true that the most appropriate audience for Cheney’s work may be undergraduates or high school seniors taking an Advanced Placement American Government course, he all too often engages in a writing style that is much too self-aware. For example, in his discussion of the Establishment clause, Cheney refers to a Senate vote in 1994 to "protect ‘constitutionally protected prayer,’" (Cheney, p. 41) and then writes "[t]his bit of courageous legislation means – I’m not sure! It basically says ‘obey the law.’" Although I as a teacher appreciate clear language that students would find to be approachable, Cheney should be much less informal in his writing style. As I read the book, that style became a distraction for me and took me away from the underlying thesis of the work. Moreover, his gratuitous use of quotation marks to indicate irony or questionable meaning is also inappropriate in a formal manuscript such as this.

Thus, the work may be appropriate for an introductory American national government course or other such course where the students may be intimidated by more formal treatments of the relationship between the Supreme Court, the Congress, the States, and society. It could serve as an ancillary work to generate debate among the students about the fundamental question of our system: who exercises power, how and with what consequences.
 

REFERENCES

Johnson, Charles, and Bradley Canon. 1984. JUDICIAL POLICIES: IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.


Copyright 1998