Courting the Center

The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America, by Jeffrey Rosen (Oxford, 256 pp., $25)

IT ought to be axiomatic in publishing: Do not give a book a title that makes a claim the author doesn’t really attempt to prove. Not all book titles make claims, bold or otherwise. But, to take a bestseller of recent years, imagine if one opened Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization only to discover that it wasn’t really about the Irish or about civilization. Just the same reaction awaits the reader of The Most Democratic Branch, in which Jeffrey Rosen appears to forget, after about page 4, that his title argues that the judiciary is, well, the most democratic branch of our government. Halfway through his introduction we find him recommending that the judiciary “defer to the constitutional views of Congress,” and the title’s claim is never heard again.