Includes bibliographical references

The Supreme Court and the temptations of politics. Creation and fall: The first principles of the social compact ; The divided John Marshall ; Chief Justice Taney and Dred Scott: the court invites a Civil War ; The spirit of the Constitution and the establishment of justice ; Judicial activism in the service of property and free enterprise -- The New Deal court and the Constitutional revolution: Federalism and sick chickens ; Roosevelt fails, then succeeds, in remaking the court ; The court stops protecting Federalism ; Economic due process abandoned ; the discovery of "Discrete and insular minorities" ; Laying the foundation for substantive equal protection -- The Warren court: the political role embraced: Arrested legal realism ; Brown v. Board of Education: Equality, segregation, and the original understanding ; One person, one vote: the restructuring of state governments ; Poll taxes and the new equal protection ; Congress's power to change the Constitution by statute ; Applying the Bill of Rights to the states ; The right of privacy: the construction of a Constitutional time bomb -- After Warren: the Burger and Rehnquist courts: The transformation of Civil Rights law ; Judicial moral philosophy and the right of privacy ; The First Amendment and the Rehnquist court -- The Supreme Court's trajectory

The theorists. The Madisonian dilemma and the need for Constitutional theory -- The original understanding: The Constitution as law: neutral principles ; Neutrality in the derivation of principle ; Neutrality int he definition of principle ; Neutrality in the application of principle ; The original understanding of original understanding ; The claims of precedent and the original understanding -- Objections to original understanding: The claim that original understanding is unknowable ; The claim that the Constitution must change as society changes ; The claim that there is no real reason the living should be governed by the dead ; The claim that the Constitution is not law ; The claim that the Constitution is what the judges say it is ; The claim that the philosophy of original understanding involves judges in political choices ; "The impossibility of a clause-bound interpretivism" -- The theorist of liberal Constitutional revisionism: Alexander M. Bickel ; John Hart Ely ; Laurence Tribe ; More liberal revisionists of the Constitution ; Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. -- The Theorists of conservative Constitutional revisionism: Bernard Siegan ; Richard A. Epstein ; Justice John Marshall Harlan ; A judicial philosophical free-for-all -- Of moralism, moral relativism, and the Constitution: The impossibility of all theories that depart from original understanding ; In defense of legal reasoning: "Good results" vs. legitimate process

The bloody crossroads. The nomination and the campaign -- The hearings and after -- The charges and the record: a study in constrasts: The Civil rights of racial minorities ; The Civil rights of women ; Big business, government, and labor ; Freedom of speech under the First Amendment -- Why the campaign was mounted -- Effects for the future

Judge Bork offers a statement of his social and legal philosophy