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“... originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Instead, he took the path described in my previous essay,* and tendered stealth nominees whose public records provided few clues as to future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both John Roberts and Samuel Alito were bright young recruits to the Reagan ...”

“... I haven’t the slightest idea – and neither do you. Our collective uncertainty demonstrates my point: the British constitution is at a crossroads. Parliament should be mindful of this as it moves to turn Clegg’s Alternative Vote initiative into binding legislation. Consider the government’s plan to schedule the poll on 5 May 2011, the day of the ...”

“... at Columbia University to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: my project was a biography of J.G. Frazer. At Columbia I had written a dissertation on the literary-critical legacy of the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ (Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A.B. Cook, turn-of-the-century classicists who had ...”

“... imagination as well. Defenders of freedom can be found on both the right and the left. As my sunset story suggests, the challenge is to organise a left-right coalition against the friends of authority. Stranger things have happened in politics, and for less noble causes. Europe is already influencing this political dynamic. The Spanish Government’s ...”

“... house to the point where it can no longer raise a remotely plausible challenge to the Commons. My only question is whether its solution manages to throw out the baby with the bathwater in restricting elected members to a single 15-year term. Given the low quality of the members likely to be elected under these ground rules, it seems wiser to build on the ...”

“... should have happened at this point, and some form of creative compromise would have been required. My best guess is that Congress would have followed precedent and created an electoral commission with five senators, five congressmen and five Supreme Court justices. The five judges might well have cast the deciding votes, but they would have been acting in a ...”

“... of personal attack. Whether Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas was telling the truth isn’t relevant. My point is different: Bush’s stealth strategy was failing to solve the Bork problem. Rather than paving a smooth path to the court, it was causing an escalating spiral of partisan warfare and personal attack. Thomas won by a vote of 52 to 48, but the entire ...”

“... between the main protagonists there was little or no consensus on constitutional principles. Bruce Ackerman says that the events he describes in his new book do ‘not support the now standard view of South Africa as a paradigmatic case of “negotiated transition” in which elites managed the tricky business of change through enlightened collaboration’. I ...”

“... seems like a copious burial hoard among which – somewhere – Frazer himself unobtrusively lies. Mr Ackerman has set himself the task of excavation. The site is relatively untouched; the only book-length study of Frazer, by R. Angus Downie, was, as Ackerman says, hagiography, written under the eye of Lady Frazer ...”

“... it has proved for them fully to disentangle themselves from the old ways of thinking. Bruce Ackerman’s Social Justice in the Liberal State is the latest work to consider these matters. It is distinguished by two features: one is its unusual heuristic device of what he calls ‘dialogic’ method, and the other is the seriousness with which it takes ...”

“... a scenario in which the law might be suspended. The chief supporter of such a provision is Bruce Ackerman who teaches at Yale (and is an LRB contributor). According to Ackerman, who is associated with the left, it should be specified in the constitution exactly when and how it can be suspended precisely so that it need not ...”

“... professor of criminal law, Alan Dershowitz, and the Yale professor of constitutional law, Bruce Ackerman, are two of the country’s most renowned teachers. So while issuing what are essentially interim reports from the battlefront, they together provide a comprehensive overview of the potential consequences for the rule of law of this politically concocted ...”

“... there has been a hybridising of science writers, nature journalists, writer-scientists. Diane Ackerman and George Schaller are representative of either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New ...”

“... straightforward way of unloading it onto the reader. In tracing the love affair of Max Ackerman (previously referred to as ‘the Professor’) and Eleanor Anders (often identified in the earlier novels by her pudding-basin haircut) it manages to take in most of the scientific and political highlights of the Twenties and Thirties: unrest in ...”

“... or the Gertrude she becomes, speaks with the unmistakable accents of 20th-century feminism: ‘My father and future husband bargained me away, and you have given me back my essential value.’ Gertrude’s value is what Updike wants to affirm. If ...”