Plato's Ideal and the Perversity of Politics

Educational Policy Making and the Courts, as its subtitle suggests, is much less concerned with demarcating the boundaries of judicial intervention in public school controversies than it is with exploring, from an empirical perspective, the competing assertions frequently made by proponents and opponents of judicial activism. The education sphere, in the light of the controversial nature of many judicial decisions involving teacher seniority, school finance, student rights, bilingual education, and the like, provides a convenient and appropriate context in which to test various hypotheses on the capabilities of courts and the legitimacy of their decisions (p. xi).2 The authors are extremely ambitious. They seek to close the "gap between theoretical debates about judicial activism and empirical research into actual trial court behavior" (p. xii). If the book does not entirely succeed, and it does not, this does not detract from the pathbreaking nature of the enterprise. Others may build on their research, refining the methodology and more carefully delineating the limits of empirical research with respect to the vexing normative issues of judicial activism.