What is Stephen M. Feldman reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Stephen M. Feldman, author of Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court: Law, Power, and Democracy.

His entry begins:

I just finished reading Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant. To say that I loved this book would be an understatement. The protagonist, Sabine, is a devoted resident of Los Angeles. Her gay husband has recently died, and through an evolving series of odd events, she ends up visiting his estranged family (mother, sisters, and nephews) in Alliance, Nebraska. I have never lived in L.A., and I don’t live in Nebraska. But I grew up in New York, lived in San Francisco, and currently reside in Laramie, Wyoming, only a few hours from Alliance. Patchett’s comedic contrast between life on the coast and in the heartland is...[read on]

About  Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court, from the publisher:

In this concise, timely book, constitutional law expert Stephen M. Feldman draws on neoconservative writings to explore the rise of the neocons and their influence on the Supreme Court. Neocons burst onto the political scene in the early 1980s via their assault on pluralist democracy’s ethical relativism, where no pre-existing or higher principles limit the agendas of interest groups. Instead, they advocated for a resurrection of republican democracy, which declares that virtuous citizens and officials pursue the common good. Yet despite their original goals, neocons quickly became an interest group themselves, competing successfully within the pluralist democratic arena. When the political winds shifted in 2008, however, neocons found themselves shorn of power in Congress and the executive branch. But portentously, they still controlled the Supreme Court.

Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court explains how and why the neoconservatives criticized but operated within pluralist democracy, and, most important, what the entrenchment of neocons on the Supreme Court means for present and future politics and law.

Learn more about Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court at the New York University Press website.

Stephen M. Feldman is the Jerry W. Housel/Carl F. Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Wyoming. His previous books include Free Expression and Democracy in America: A History and American Legal Thought From Premodernism to Postmodernism: An Intellectual Voyage. Free Expression and Democracy.

Writers Read: Stephen M. Feldman.

--Marshal Zeringue