The 2000 Presidential Election and Its Aftermath

Electing the President, 2000: The Insiders' View. Edited by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; pp 232. $17.95 paper.

The Unfinished Election of 2000: Leading Scholars Examine America's Strangest Election. Edited by Jack N. Rakove. New York: Basic Books, 2001; pp ix + 266. $25.00 cloth; $17.50 paper.

The Vote: Bush, Gore and the Supreme Court. Edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard A. Epstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; pp 266. $42.00 cloth; $18.00 paper.

The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election. By Howard Gillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; pp xi + 301. $27.50.

Walk into any gathering of constitutional law professors and it will take no more than 15 minutes before the conversation turns to a discussion of the December 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Bush v. Gore, the ruling that ended the tumultuous 36-day aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. That has been my experience over the last two years—it happens every time, without fail—and it is the starkest way to describe the effect that this decision has had on academics who study the Court. With an event of this magnitude, it should come as no surprise that scholars from a variety of disciplines would ultimately examine the forces and circumstances that contributed to that election's dramatic and unprecedented conclusion, and that such studies would provide us with an abundance of perspectives to consider for years to come.

A flood of books were rushed into publication in 2001, and they can be classified into three categories: (1) those by law professors, (2) those by political scientists, and (3) those by academics in cognate fields (for example, communication, history) and journalists, who share the common purpose of analyzing politics from their respective vantage points.

The four books reviewed here are representative samples of these categories, and, as a group, they form a weighty composite of analysis of the 2000 election and its special place in history. The Vote: Bush, Gore and the Supreme Court, edited by University of Chicago law professors Cass Sunstein and Richard Epstein, is a volume of essays by leading law professors, many of whom specialize in elections law. The Unfinished Election of 2000: Leading Scholars Examine America's Strangest Election is another collection, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove, but it differs from the Sunstein and Epstein work in that Rakove has selected contributors from the fields of history, law, and political science, thus giving this book greater texture and a broader scope than the previous one. Electing the President, 2000: The Insiders' View, edited by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman, is a unique window into the campaign strategies of the Bush and Gore media consultants and pollsters: the book is a product of a ten-hour "debriefing" session held at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2001, and it is a transcription of very candid discussions between competing political camps, provoked by questions from academics and reporters. Finally, The Votes That Counted: How theCourt Decided the 2000 Election by University of Southern California political scientist Howard Gillman is, perhaps, the most riveting of the four books, as it follows the unfolding of the post-election legal battles from the Florida trial courts to the U.S. Supreme Court with great care and in a way that is lively, accessible, and understandable, even to those who may not have a sophisticated knowledge of the judicial system. Gillman presents substantial analysis of the conflicting legal positions in the successive cases, while the bigger picture for him lies in drawing conclusions (and judgments) about the role the courts played in the election aftermath and about whether they acted with judicial impartiality or as partisan decision makers.

Thus the books examined here range from a firsthand look at supremely political campaign tactics and strategy (Jamieson...