Judging Judges: Values and the Rule of Law. By Jason E. Whitehead. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. 253 pp. $49.95 cloth.

• Date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12171
• Published date: 01 December 2015

offices. The street matters both because it tells us what law is in ways

that cannot be grasped by looking at high courts alone. And, it also

holds out the promise of progressive social change that was the hall-

mark of the scholarship of Joseph Gusfield, Murray Edelman, and

Jacobus tenBroek. I would like to see more on visual sociology of

law; but in this framework, the visual would have to become a con-

cern of editors of “the Review.”

The editing is quite severe. Something like constitutional law

teachers feel the need to do for their undergraduates. This makes

the collection accessible to student readers in the sense that the

works are not too long. But it also deprives them of the challenge of

slogging through the scholarship that grounds their enterprise. In

the final analysis, the collection is very tight and will be a big help in

situating the field for scholars newly interested in law.

***

Judging Judges: Values and the Rule of Law. By Jason E. Whitehead.

Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. 253 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Reviewed by Cornell W. Clayton, Department of Politics, Philosophy

and Public Affairs, Washington State University

The rule of law has fallen on hard times. Today political scientists

and legal scholars often deride the notion that law can constrain

judges as a na€

ıve mythology. Supreme Court justices are character-

ized as voting in “liberal” or “conservative” blocs, as if political ideol-

ogy alone determines how they decide cases. In Judging Judges,

Jason Whitehead seeks to rescue the idea of the rule of law from

academic critics and to revitalize it for a post-Realist era.

The faith in the rule of law began unraveling as a result of two

academic movements in the twentieth century. First, the Legal Real-

ists bunked formal, mechanistic conceptions of judging and demon-

strated instead how law and politics were deeply interwoven in the

judicial mind. Then came along positivist social scientists who endeav-

ored to use judicial voting data to show judges decided cases on the

basis of ideological preferences rather than objective legal principles.

Coming to terms with these twin movements is not easy. Judges,

even those who accept that law requires political choices, reject the

idea that they decide cases on the basis of personal preferences and

they insist that law matters. Academic critics insist the evidence is to

the contrary, that such thinking is either self-delusion or deceitful.

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