Reclaiming the federal courts /

Yackle's primary thesis is that the conservative Burger and Rehnquist Supreme Courts have systematically undermined citizens' access to the federal court system. Yackle believes that federal courts are good because they inherently foster individual liberties, whereas state courts cannot or will not adequately perform this function. He examines the various ways in which recent decisions and activities of the Supreme Court have restricted federal judicial power, such as making it more difficult to acquire standing to sue and also to acquire writs of habeas corpus. Believers in an activist, politically liberal federal court system will love this text; conservatives and believers in judicial self-restraint will find it less appealing. The book is similar in tone and style--but opposite in its point of view--to The Tempting of America by Robert H. Bork (CH, May'90). Yackle's arguments are well documented, and in fact one quarter of the text consists of footnotes. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. R. A. Carp; University of Houston