To listen to the nation's preeminent constitutional theorists tell it, Bush v. Gore was an obvious outrage--nothing less than a politically driven repudiation of democracy and the rule of law.

• Vanderbilt University law professor Suzanna Sherry maintained in the New York Times that "there is really very little way to reconcile this opinion other than that they wanted Bush to win."
• Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy proclaimed in the American Prospect that Bush v. Gore was a "hypocritical mishmash of ideas," and that "the Court majority acted in bad faith and with partisan prejudice."
• University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson asserted in the Nation that "Bush v. Gore is all too easily explainable as the decision by five conservative Republicans--at least two of whom are eager to retire and be replaced by Republicans nominated by a Republican president--to assure the triumph of a fellow Republican who might not become president if Florida were left to its own legal process."
• American University law professor Jamin Raskin opened an article in the Washington Monthly by describing the case as "quite demonstrably the worst Supreme Court decision in history," and proceeded to compare it unfavorably with the notorious Dred Scott decision.
• A total of 554 law professors from 120 American law schools placed a full-page ad in the New York Times on January 13, 2001, declaring that the justices had acted as "political proponents for candidate Bush, not as judges. . . . By taking power from the voters, the Supreme Court has tarnished its own legitimacy."
• Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz asserted in Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 that "the decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath."

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