charge half-heartedly. For some reason, when the Florida Supreme Court, in Gore-initiated lawsuits, intervened on Gore’s behalf to overturn decisions by lower state courts and elected and local officials, Tribe saw a vindication of democracy. But when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in those Gore-initiated lawsuits, overturning decisions by the Florida Supreme Court and effectively upholding the decisions by Florida’s lower state courts and elected and local officials, Tribe saw a subversion of democratic process.

Like it or not, the 2000 election controversy was taken over by lawyers and judges within days of the election. The decisive battles took place in courts of law and turned on the interpretation of obscure and ambiguous statutes, little-known as well as landmark cases, and broad principles of federalism and constitutional law. InReview as clear and decisive a legal theory that Tribe the lawyer, along with some of the brightest legal minds in the land, regarded as not worth mentioning in their brief on behalf of the vice president, Tribe the scholar committed a substantial mischaracterization of the law.

In passing off weak arguments as if they were devastating and unanswerable, and in refusing to acknowledge any merit whatsoever in respectable arguments on the other side of the issue, Tribe the scholar displays the vices that have contributed so much to the academic denunciation of Bush v. Gore. Indeed, after a year of intemperate and deeply flawed criticism and with no end in sight, the collective effort by academic critics to expose the alleged failure of the conservative justices in Bush