Martin Shapiro: An Appreciation
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R. Shep Melnick
R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government. He is currently completing The IX Commandments, a study of how courts and agencies have interpreted and enforced Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments.
Abstract
Over the past half century no judicial politics scholar has been more respected or influential than Martin Shapiro. Yet it is hard to identify a school of thought one could call “Shapiroism.” Rather than offer convenient methodologies or grand theories, Shapiro provides rich empirical studies that show us how to think about the relationship between law and courts on the one hand and politics and governing on the other. Three key themes run through Shapiro’s impressive oevre. First, rather than study courts in isolation, political scientists should view them as “one government agency among many,” and seek to “integrate the judicial system in the matrix of government and politics in which it actually operates.” Law professors may understand legal doctrines better than political scientists, but we know (or should know) the rest of the political system better than they do. Second, although judges inevitably make political decisions, their institutional environment leads them to act differently from other public officials. Most importantly, their legitimacy rests on their perceived impartiality within the plaintiff-defendant-judge triad. The conflict between judges’ role as impartial arbiter and enforcer of the laws of the regime can never be completely resolved and places powerful constraints on their actions. Third, the best way to understand the complex relationship between courts and other elements of the regime is comparative analysis. Shapiro played a major role in resuscitating comparative law, especially in his work comparing the US and the EU. All this he did with a rare combination of thick description and crisp, jargon-free analysis, certainly a rarity the political science of our time.
About the author
R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government. He is currently completing The IX Commandments, a study of how courts and agencies have interpreted and enforced Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments.
Appendix
The Work of Martin Shapiro: A Partial Bibliography
Books
Law and Politics in the Supreme Court (Free Press, 1964).
Freedom of Speech: The Supreme Court and Judicial Review (Prentice-Hall, 1966).
The Supreme Court and Administrative Agencies (Free Press, 1968).
The Supreme Court and PublicPolicy (Scott, Foresman, 1969).
Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Who Guards the Guardians? Judicial Control of Administration (University of Georgia Press, 1988).
On Law, Politics, and Judicialization (Oxford, 2002), with Alex Stone-Sweet.
Selected Articles
“Morals and the Courts: The Reluctant Crusades,” 45 Minnesota Law Review 897 (1961).
“The Supreme Court and Constitutional Adjudication: Of Politics and Neutral Principles,” 31 George Washington Law Review 587 (1963).
“Judicial Modesty: Down with the Old! – And Up with the New?” 10 UCLA Law Review 533 (1963).
“Political Jurisprudence,” 52 Kentucky Law Journal 294 (1964).
“The Warren Court and the Interstate Commerce Commission,” 18 Stanford Law Review 110 (1965).
“The Supreme Court: From Warren to Burger,” in Anthony King, ed., The New American Political System (AEI, 1978).
“The Supreme Court and Economic Rights,” in M. Judd Harmon, ed., Essays on the Constitution of the United States (1978).
“The Presidency and the Federal Courts,” in Arnold Meltsner, ed., Politics and the Oval Office (ICS, 1981).
“Fathers and Sons: The Court, the Commentators, and the Search for Values,” in Vincent Blasi, ed., The Burger Court: The Counter-Revolution that Wasn’t (Yale, 1983).
“Recent Developments in Political Jurisprudence,” Western Political Quarterly 36 (1983).
“Gerrymandering, Unfairness and the Supreme Court,” 33 UCLA Law Rev. 227 (1985).
“The Supreme Court’s ‘Return’ to Economic Regulation,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986).
“Prudence and Rationality Under the Constitution,” in Gary Bryner and Dennis Thompson, eds. The Constitution and the Regulation of Society (Brigham Young University Press, 1988).
“Morality and the Politics of Judging,” 63 Tulane Law Review 1555 (1989).
“Political Jurisprudence, Public Law, and Post-Consequentialist Ethics: Comments on Professors Barber and Smith,” Studies in American Political Development 3 (1989).
“The Supreme Court from Early Burger to Early Rehnquist,” in Anthony King, ed., The New American Political system, second version (AEI, 1990).
“Chief Justice Rehnquist and the Future of the Supreme Court,” in D. Grier Stephenson, Jr., ed., “An Essential Safeguard”: Essays on the United States Supreme Court and Its Justices (Greenwood Press, 1991).
“Public Law and Judicial Politics,” in Ada Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline II (American Political Science Association, 1993), 366.
Shapiro, “Judges as Liars,” 17 Harvard Journal on Law and Public Policy 155 (1994).
“Judicial Activism in the U.S., 1950–2000,” in Byron Shafer, ed., The State of American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
Article note
This essay is a condensed and revised version of my chapter “One Government Agency Among Many’: The Political Juris-Prudence (sic) of Martin Shapiro,” in Tom Ginsburg and Robert A. Kagan, eds., Institutions and Public Law: Comparative Approaches (Peter Lang, 2005).
©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Liberals, Labor, and the Democratic Party’s Volatile Relationship with Free Trade
- Red Parents, Blue Parents: The Politics of Modern Parenthood
- The Changing Contours of the Immigrant Rights Protest Movement in the United States: Who Demonstrates Now?
- Nuclear Fallout: The Senate’s Cloture Threshold and Nomination Votes
- Martin Shapiro: An Appreciation
- Book reviews
- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
- Is Bipartisanship Dead? A Report from the Senate
- To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Liberals, Labor, and the Democratic Party’s Volatile Relationship with Free Trade
- Red Parents, Blue Parents: The Politics of Modern Parenthood
- The Changing Contours of the Immigrant Rights Protest Movement in the United States: Who Demonstrates Now?
- Nuclear Fallout: The Senate’s Cloture Threshold and Nomination Votes
- Martin Shapiro: An Appreciation
- Book reviews
- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
- Is Bipartisanship Dead? A Report from the Senate
- To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party
