Conservative Court Research Articles

Judicial Power and Influence on Population Health.

Policy Points Since its founding, the Supreme Court has played a major role in defining the parameters of governments' public health powers and the scope of individual health-related rights. Although conservative courts have been less favorable to public health objectives, federal courts have, for the most part, advanced public health interests through consensus and adherence to the rule of law. In establishing the current six-three conservative supermajority, the Trump administration and the Senate shifted the Supreme Court dramatically. A majority of Justices, led by Chief Justice Roberts, did shift the Court in a decidedly conservative direction. It did so incrementally, guided by the Chief's intuition that the Institution itself should be preserved, mindful of maintaining public trust and appearing outside the political fray. That has all changed because Roberts' voice no longer holds sway. Five members of the Court have displayed a willingness to overturn even long-held precedent and dismantle public health policy in favor of the Justices' core ideological tenants-notably the extensive reach of the First and Second Amendments and a parsimonious view of executive and administrative action. Public health is vulnerable to judicial rulings in this new conservative era. This includes classic public health powers in infectious disease control as well as reproductive rights; lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer or questioning, and others (LGBTQ+) rights; firearm safety; immigration; and climate change. Congress has the power to curb the most extreme actions of the Court while still adhering to the vital ideal of a nonpolitical branch. That does not require Congress itself to overreach (such as by "packing" the Supreme Court, as Franklin Delaeno Roosevelt once proposed). Congress could, however, 1) disempower lower federal judges from issuing injunctions that apply nationwide, 2) limit the Supreme Court's so-called shadow docket, 3) alter the way that presidents appoint federal judges, and 4) set reasonable term limits for federal judges and Supreme Court Justices.

The Conservative Court on the Unacceptable Perils in Second-Guessing FDA Safety Decisions and Its Coming Review of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA (The 'Abortion Pill' Case)

The Conservative Court on the Unacceptable Perils in Second-Guessing FDA Safety Decisions and Its Coming Review of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA (The 'Abortion Pill' Case)

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

Right-Sizing the Supreme Court: A History of Congressional Changes

Since the Republican Senate refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016--coupled with the Trump Administration’s success in filling that seat with Neil Gorsuch, followed by the appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett--there has been widespread interest in how to balance a suddenly solidly conservative Court majority, one likely to remain so for decades. One way to do so is to expand the size of the Court, an issue the Constitution left to Congress, which exercised that authority repeatedly during the Constitution’s first 80 years. This article examines those mostly forgotten congressional changes to the Court’s size as well as Congress’ more notorious failure during the New Deal. The article reveals that the successful expansions were often due to population growth but always the product of political calculations. Since the U.S. population is now nearly ten times larger than it was when Congress last changed the Court’s size, reconsidering the Court’s size may be an issue ripe for congressional consideration, should the political winds suggest that is possible.

CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY IN THE U.S. SUPREME COURT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

At the beginning of the new millennium, the United States entered a new Republican Party cycle. The competition between the two leading parties in the 2000 elections was more acute than ever. It even resulted in a protracted constitutional and political crisis, when the U.S. Supreme Court had to stop the prolonged recounts in Florida (five votes in favor, four against), which was beneficial to the Republican parties. However, the Republicans managed to strengthen their future positions, and Democrat Barack Obama replaced Republican George W. Bush in the White House only after his two presidential terms. Should understand American constitutional judicial lawmaking primarily as the Supreme Court’s lawmaking as the activity of processing, interpreting, applying, and repealing regulations. Lawmaking activities aim to fill the gaps in legislation and reflect the objective needs of public life. Hence the importance of constitutional judicial lawmaking in human rights and other areas of legal regulation. As a legal tool, the U.S. Supreme Court uses procedural requirements and arguments in relatively (and specifically) undeveloped and unmodified legislation. The basis of constitutional lawmaking is the U.S. Supreme Court’s role in overseeing the implementation of judicial procedures. The requirement to comply with the procedural guarantees included in the U.S. Constitution’s text, which coincides with common law’s procedural requirements, is given the meaning of constitutional principles by the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, there was no reason for conservatism’s full triumph in the early 21st century, as in the last decade of the 20th century. This celebration is not visible in the activities of the Supreme Court. Due to the death of W. Rehnquist in 2005, John Roberts, whose biography was very similar to Rehnquist’s in terms of close ties to the Washington bureaucracy, filled the Chairman’s vacancy. The Supreme Court of the United States in national minorities’ rights until the 2000s, despite the turn to constitutional judicial conservatism, did not move to a complete activism revision. The Court’s main goal was not to attack affirmative measures but to interpret state regulation’s doctrinal grounds, such as equal protection by law and due process. Still, conservative courts failed to change the role and reformat the meaning of doctrines. Keywords: conservative ideology, conservatism, U.S. Supreme Court, constitutional judicial doctrines, U.S. Constitution, dissenting opinions of U.S. Supreme Court justices, conservative decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.                                                                          

The Conservative Court

The Conservative Court Aryeh Neier (bio) Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America by Adam Cohen Penguin Press, 2020, 448 pp. In 1963, I started work at the American Civil Liberties Union. My assignment was to establish new affiliates of the organization in states such as Texas and Oklahoma and to upgrade the capacity of long-standing state affiliates, such as those in Michigan and Pennsylvania. It was a thrilling time [End Page 147] to be engaged in those tasks. ACLU activities were regularly punctuated by victories for civil liberties at the U.S. Supreme Court, many of them in cases argued by the lawyers I was working with. Those wins included cases substantially expanding the rights of criminal defendants to be treated fairly by the police and the courts, striking down loyalty oaths required of public employees, ending the censorship of movies, overturning the prohibition on interracial marriage, barring state-enforced religious practices, expanding the right to protest, upholding freedom of speech, equalizing the right to vote in state elections, requiring that welfare recipients should be treated fairly, and many more. Click for larger view View full resolution Chief Justice John Roberts in 2006 (Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images) In 1970, fifty years after it was founded, I became the ACLU’s fourth national executive director, a post I held for the next eight years. It was a very different period on the court. Richard Nixon became president in 1969 and soon had the opportunity to designate Warren Burger as chief justice of the Supreme Court, replacing Earl Warren. He appointed three other justices during his first three years in office. The Nixon Court succeeded the Warren Court. The ACLU continued to prevail in some important cases. We supported the New York Times and the Washington Post in publishing the Pentagon Papers, helping to achieve a major victory for freedom of the press. We also established the pioneering Women’s Rights Project, directed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which won a series of victories before the Supreme Court that largely, though not completely, made overt discrimination against women as legally untenable as overt discrimination against racial minorities. Though we took pride in the quality of the legal work of Ginsburg and her colleagues in those cases, we recognized that more was involved than litigation strategy and skill. A crucial factor in our success was the transformative impact of the women’s rights movement on American society in the 1970s. Women were securing jobs and workplace responsibilities previously denied to them; they [End Page 148] were entering educational programs and professional specialties in which their presence had been scarce; they were enlisting men to share in domestic duties that most had previously disdained. Changes in the law required by our Supreme Court victories accompanied and facilitated these developments, but they did not take place in isolation. A similar process took place decades later when the Supreme Court struck down limits on gay rights, including the prohibition on same-sex marriage. Those decisions came down after the emergence of a substantial gay rights movement, which had already transformed American society by the early years of the twenty-first century. The Supreme Court’s decisions did not lead the way. ________ The legal victories for women’s rights and gay rights in the past half century have partially obscured the picture Adam Cohen paints in his important book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, makes a compelling argument that since the advent of the Nixon Court, the highest court in the land has been a consistent ally of corporate interests and the wealthy and the enemy of Americans who are less economically fortunate, especially those who are racial minorities. He achieves this by systematically analyzing the Court’s decisions on welfare, education, voting rights, campaign finance, labor, corporate responsibility, and criminal justice over the past five decades. Cohen is particularly concerned with the Supreme Court’s treatment of poverty through its decisions dealing with welfare recipients. He writes that the Warren Court “appeared to be...

Ideology and Risk Focus: Conservatism and Opinion‐Writing In the U.S. Supreme Court

Neuroscience proffers evidence that self‐described conservatives have stronger fear responses and aversion to risk than self‐described liberals. Combined with studies showing that judicial ideology drives the content of Supreme Court majority opinions, I argue that conservatism is linked to risk focus in Supreme Court majority opinions. I use the Language Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software on a sample of Supreme Court majority opinions, and find that conservative opinions score higher on the LIWC dimension called Risk Focus than liberal opinions. This effect is enhanced in criminal procedural cases. If conservative judges’ perceptions of risk are inflated, and if such perceptions are reflected in the binding opinions that they author, then such opinions’ heightened sense of risk may influence the perceptions of risk of lower‐court judges, which may in turn affect their decision‐making in such important areas as sentencing and convictions. Such a pattern raises important questions for the thousands of lower‐court decisions which impact the basic liberties of American citizens.ObjectiveTo determine whether judicial ideology affects the focus on risk of Supreme Court opinions.MethodsOriginal, random sampling of 1200‐1300 Court opinions; use of LIWC software to analyze risk focus of each opinion; regression analysis of ideology on risk focus.ResultsAs ideology becomes more conservative, the Court's opinions demonstrate increased evidence of focus on risk. This effect is pronounced in criminal procedure cases.ConclusionThe theory is supported. Increasingly conservative Court opinions demonstrate an increased focus on risk.

The Rule of Five Guys

In Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court (Belknap Press 2020), Professor Richard Lazarus chronicles the litigation in Massachusetts v. EPA, beginning with the original citizens' petition asking EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and culminating in the Supreme Court's decision and its aftermath. The bulk of the book is devoted to the legal tactics and personal conflicts of several of the attorneys who participated in the case, of whom I am one. In this review, I find that Lazarus's reverence for the Supreme Court, and apparent reluctance to criticize it, weaken his treatment of the legal issues in Massachusetts as he fails to grapple with the portent of the strongly worded dissents and the likely fate of these issues on today's more conservative Court. I also find that the book's rendering of the human dramas of the lawyers in Massachusetts reenacts and amplifies the gender dynamics I sensed in that litigation.

Taking Note: Justice Harry A. Blackmun's Observations from Oral Argument about Life, the Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court

Taking Note: Justice Harry A. Blackmun's Observations from Oral Argument about Life, the Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court

Litigating Money Bail Away: A Dim Future for the Status of the Poor Under the 14 Amendment

This essay is the first to analyze the possibility of ongoing litigation around bail reform to resurface 14th amendment jurisprudence regarding the status of the poor. Fifty years after Professor Caleb Foote predicted the coming constitutional crisis arising from the injustices generated by our financially based system of pretrial release—money bail—the underlying constitutional issues may soon finally reach the highest court in the land. As recent scholarship demonstrates, however, current Supreme Court jurisprudence may not look favorably at those petitioners who wish to expand Fourteenth Amendment protections to the indigent. Worse yet, precisely as these issues are resurfacing, the court is likely on the heels of a significant movement toward the right—producing a court ideologically inclined to be deaf to increasingly audible concerns in support of the poor. In this essay, first, I contextualize the current bail system, drawing on criminal justice and social science research, to reveal a dim picture of the inequities it produces. I then overview the growing movement for bail reform, focusing on the recent package of lawsuits brought by Equal Justice Under Law in states across the country. Then I assess the constitutional analysis marshaled by these lawsuits, supplementing their claims with my own additional synthesis of evolving jurisprudence, and evaluating their likelihood of success. I argue that given existing jurisprudence, petitioners will have to seek heightened judicial scrutiny in order to push the Court to render the bail system unconstitutional. To attain the Court’s heightened scrutiny, petitioners will have to compel the Court to address wealth as the grounds for suspect class determination. Finally, I extend my analysis to the potential positions that a new and more conservative court under President Trump may take regarding the Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence analyzed in the prior section.

‘This Citie of insufficience’: Heraldic Text and the Representation of Authority in York’s 1486 Entertainment for Henry VII

This essay compares the two extant texts that record the York welcome pageants for King Henry VII in 1486. An assessment of the professional, political, and personal places of heralds as servants of the court yet also as somewhat independent members of a corporation sets up a reading of the ‘herald’s memoir’ version of the York entertainment. Scholars have, until recently considered the herald’s text little more than propaganda for the new Lancastrian monarchy. A reading of selected cruxes, changes, and contrasts in and between the two versions, however, demonstrates the unique work of heralds as they toed the line between roles as conservative court functionaries keeping records of proper display and nascent literary historians with some sense of voice and narrative.

A Judicial Response to the Call of National Reconstruction: Revisiting the Supreme Court of Japan's Adjudication of the Cabinet Order No. 325

Most states in East Asia had undergone foreign interference, invasion, or colonization under the West Powers before they finally embraced modern constitutionalism. While nowadays modern constitutionalism seems to have enjoyed universal acceptance and worldwide practice, what relatively tends to be ignored is the struggle of the recipient states to embrace, adapt, and accommodate the modern constitutionalism they inherited to their local political and social-economic context. The very issue which especially attracts legal scholars’ attention is how the constitutional court, usually assigned the significant role as the guardian of constitution in modern constitutionalism, manages to safeguard constitutionalism while also attends to the needs of social-political transition.In East Asia, Japan was the case that always appeal to the curiosity of legal scholars. History proves the astounding miracle of Japan’s notable success in how it managed to seek national identity, reconstructed its society, and achieved economic prosperity after foreign occupation. Interestingly, however, as if serving as the comparison to the booming development of the post-war Japan, the Supreme Court of Japan has always been known as a typical of a conservative court with unequivocal deferent tendency to the Government. It makes one wonders if the Court could have had to do with the success of Japan’s national reconstruction, and ever played any significant role contributing to Japan’s remarkable experience. This Article analyzes the Supreme Court of Japan’s ruling upon the constitutionality of Cabinet Order No. 325 in 1952. It was a landmark case in the history of the Court, in which the status of the occupation was reviewed for the first time, with the Orders of the SACP called into question as contravene the Constitution. This Article attempts to, through a contextual analysis in light of its social-political background, revisit this case and explore the Court’s contribution by rendering this decision in response to the Nation’s need of national reconstruction. This Article concludes that the Court played a significant role in this adjudication. In contrast to the general assumption of the Court’s conservative tendency, the Court in this case was conscious and strategic to attend to the needs of national reconstruction, including consolidating sovereignty and national identity, upholding the rule of law and human rights protection, and empowering the burgeoning civil society.

Gideon, Miranda, and the Downside of Incorporation

The U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona are cut from the same cloth. Each was the result of the Court’s frustration with the tedium of case-by-case analysis, and so each represents a broad, bright-line rule. Gideon dictated that in all serious criminal cases, the defendant is entitled to counsel, ending the muddled, multi-factor analysis of Betts v. Brady. Miranda dictated that in all custodial interrogations, the suspect is entitled to counsel and to be informed of that right and his right to remain silent, purporting to settle three decades of lack of clarity in the jurisprudence of coercive interrogations.And both Gideon and Miranda are widely perceived as failures. Miranda, a contentious 5-4 decision once decried by conservatives as having gone too far, has spawned a jurisprudence widely recognized by liberals as anemic. In the overwhelming majority of cases, warnings are given and a waiver obtained, and courts in such cases are highly unlikely to rule that a confession was coerced irrespective of what occurred following warnings and waiver. Gideon, once a warmly greeted unanimous decision, is now almost uniformly looked upon as representing a promise unfulfilled. In large part, this is a result of Strickland v. Washington, whose test to determine whether counsel was constitutionally ineffective prevents courts from disturbing convictions except in the most extreme cases, where counsel’s actions can have no conceivable strategic justification.This Article argues that the perceived failings of these two doctrinal lines spring from the same source: the use of very strong presumptions that sharply constrain judicial discretion. Miranda evolved into a rule establishing a virtually irrebuttable presumption that statements resulting from a custodial interrogation are uncoerced if they are preceded by warnings and waiver. Gideon evolved into a rule establishing a virtually irrebuttable presumption that if the defendant had an attorney, that attorney performed adequately to protect the defendant’s rights. As a result of each rule, judges are largely prevented from sifting through the messy facts of individual cases.This Article further argues that these later developments cannot be explained exclusively in crass political terms, as the result of more conservative Courts cutting back on rights granted by the liberal Warren Court. Rather, they were largely the result of the incorporation agenda of the Warren Court itself. By its nature, incorporation favors bright-line rules, as contrasted with the nebulous standards of fundamental fairness analysis. Gideon and Miranda represent two such rules. But bright-line rules typically do not entirely replace nebulous, multi-factored standards. Rather, rules often either move standards to other places in the analysis or generate the need for entirely new standards. Thus, multi-factored standards persisted after Gideon and Miranda, in the form of the tests used to determine whether counsel was reasonably effective and whether an interrogation was coercive despite the provision of Miranda warnings. But because the Court had fully bought into incorporation by the end of the Warren Court era, and because incorporation exerts a strong preference for rules over standards, the Court was required to erect further rules to support the structure it had begun to build in the 1960s. These “scaffolding” rules, in the form of the heavy presumptions mentioned above, were advanced by liberal and conservative members of the Court alike.

The construction of morals

When do policies generate expressive or backlash effects? Recent economic models suggest that where a proscribed activity is prevalent, permissive laws liberalize attitudes toward partakers while increasing utility. The opposite occurs in communities where the proscribed activity is rare. To test these predictions, we randomize data entry workers to transcribe newspaper summaries of liberal or conservative court decisions about obscenity. We find that liberal obscenity decisions liberalize individual and perceived community standards and increase utility. Yet religious workers become more conservative in their values, identify as more Republican, view community standards as becoming more liberal, and report lower utility. Workers update beliefs about the prevalence of sexual activities differently in response to liberal or conservative decisions. These results provide causal evidence for the law having indirect social effects that may amplify or attenuate deterrence effects and suggest that legitimacy of law can affect utility and self-identification.

Quanta v. LG Electronics: Frustrating Patent Deals by Taking Contracting Options Off the Table?

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Quanta v. LG Electronics may make it significantly more difficult to structure transactions involving patents. While this decision does make a group of players into winners in the immediate term for existing patent deals (this group includes any customer who, like Quanta, buys patented parts without buying a patent license), almost everyone is likely to come out a loser going forward. The Court in Quanta decided that a patent license that LG Electronics sold only to Intel - and explicitly limited to exclude Intel's customers, like Quanta, and priced to reflect these modest ambitions - would be treated by the Court as extending permission under the patent to those Intel customers. The legal hook on which the Court hung its decision is the patent law doctrine called first sale or exhaustion. The Quanta decision is likely to have a serious negative effect on the nuts and bolts of patent licensing agreements. On one reading, it stands for little more than the unremarkable proposition that the actual patent license contract at issue was just badly written. But that would be a simple matter of applying state contract law to the underlying facts of the contract - not the type of issue that typically gains the Supreme Court's attention. So the real motivating force behind the Court's decision to take the case is probably something else. The extensive briefing and commentary, as well as the opinion's colorful dicta, all suggest that the true import of the case is the way it speaks about what patent contracting can be done - as a matter of Court-created policy for federal patent law. If this view of Quanta is correct, then the decision may be remarkably important in several respects. It may greatly frustrate the ability of commercial parties to strike deals over patents. It may also stand as an example of a seemingly conservative Court acting in direct contravention of clear congressional action.

Title VII Sex and Race Discrimination Litigation Settlements as Opportunities for Organizational Change

This study investigated how frequently and under what circumstances Title VII lawsuit settlements resulted in mandates for substantive organizational change in HR policies and practices that, according to social science research, are likely to move beyond mere pro forma compliance to foster greater inclusion and equality. 502 consent decrees settling Title VII sex and race discrimination lawsuits in 200–2008 were collected, coded, and analyzed. Multinomial logistic regression was used. Sociological theories of organizational change and of the relationship between law and organizations informed the study. 48 % of the consent decrees examined specified no meaningful substantive changes; 31 % required formalization of personnel decision-making remedies; 21 % required more innovative measures. Certified class actions, other non-individual lawsuits, lawsuits filed in more liberal Federal District Courts, and public sector employer predicted more substantive remedies for organizational change in organizations’ EEO policies and practices, all else being equal. Single plaintiffs and a conservative District Court legal environment predicted a greater likelihood of pro forma only remedies. Discrimination lawsuit settlements are a potential impetus for improved diversity management policies. Consent decrees are an unusually direct and potentially powerful mechanism under Title VII for employment discrimination lawsuits to mandate substantive organizational change. Whereas a few studies have discussed a very small number of high-profile settlements, this is the first systematic examination of the programmatic mandates in consent decrees and how they vary.

Reevaluating the Implications of Decision-Making Models

AbstractMost empirical analyses of the US Supreme Court are limited to the Court’s plenary decisions. We contend that summary decisions are an important component of the total decisional output of the Court and, as such, should be included in any overall assessment of the decision making of the Court or its impact on the courts below. We analyze the universe of the Court’s summary decisions from 1995 to 2005. We assess the conventional wisdom that a conservative Court should primarily disturb liberal lower-court decisions and that, in all cases granted certiorari, the policy preferences of the justices should have a major impact on their votes. We find support for neither of these expectations.

Skepticism and the Liberal/Conservative Conceptions of Perceptual Justification

Although it is widely recognized that perceptual experience confers justification on the beliefs it gives rise to, it is unclear how its epistemic value should be properly characterized. Liberals hold, and conservatives deny, that the justification conditions of perceptual beliefs merely involve experiences with the same content. The recent debate on this question has, however, seen further fragmentations of the positions involved with the disputants seeking to identify intermediate positions between liberalism and conservatism. In this paper, I suggest a framework to account for the differences and similarities of the positions within the liberalism/conservatism debate. More importantly, I suggest that, instead of focusing on one particular species of conservatism, we should recognize varieties of conservatism. My conclusion is that no theory of justification need be conservative or liberal tout court. Whether a theory of justification is liberal or conservative depends on which dimension of evaluation is taken to be salient. The implications of this finding for the liberalism/conservatism debate are then investigated.

The June Surprises: Balls, Strikes, and the Fog of War

At first, few constitutional experts took seriously the argument that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exceeded Congress's power under the commerce clause. The highly political opinions of two federal district judges - carefully chosen by challenging plaintiffs - of no particular distinction did not shake that confidence that the act was constitutional. This disdain for the challengers' arguments was only confirmed when the act was upheld by two highly respected conservative court of appeals judges in two separate circuits. But after the hostile, even mocking questioning of the government's advocate in the Supreme Court by the five Republican-appointed justices, the expectation was that the act would indeed be struck down on that ground. So it came as no surprise when the five opined the act did indeed exceed Congress's commerce clause power. But it came as a great surprise when Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the four Democrat-appointed justices, ruled that the act could be sustained as an exercise of Congress's taxing power - a ground urged by the government almost as an afterthought. It was further surprising, even shocking, that Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito not only wrote a joint opinion on the commerce clause virtually identical to that of their chief, but that in writing it they did not refer to or even acknowledge his opinion. Finally surprising was the fact that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined the chief in holding that aspects of the act's Medicaid expansion were unconstitutional. This essay ponders and tries to unravel some of these puzzles.

Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Italian Opera in Age of American Revolution. By Pierpaolo Polzonetti. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge Uni - versity Press, 2011. [xix, 376 p. ISBN 9780521897082. $125.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Italian opera was one of dramatic genres that most directly responded to epoch-changing social, political, and cultural events in American Colonies during second half of eighteenth century. News from overseas flooded into European gazettes and newspapers, arousing as much enthusiasm as harsh criticism. They carried along ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, as well as new types of characters that found their way onto operatic stages: good-hearted Native, peaceful Quaker, emancipated woman. This had far-reaching effects on ways operas challenged established social structures and institutions, even when America was not directly evoked in subject of librettos. Given pervasive impact that American events had on European culture of time, it is surprising that music historians have paid such scant attention to ramifications for opera. Pierpaolo Polzonetti's monograph fills this lacuna and provides a welcome contribution to our understanding of genre. Through an impressive array of philosophical texts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and memoirs, all tied to close readings of musical sources, his study analyzes burgeoning influence of American subjects in eighteenth-century Italian opera and relationship to development of several different strands of thought in Enlighten - ment culture. The book covers several geographical areas inside and outside of Italy, and it focuses on a period of forty years: from 1750, when Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi's Il mondo della luna received its premiere in Venice, to 1790, year Lorenzo Da Ponte turned Giuseppe Palomba and Pietro Guglielmi's La quakera spiritosa into a pasticcio for Vienna. The first of these, in fact, antedates earliest entry in Polzonetti's core repertory (p. 4), I napoletani in America (libretto by Francesco Cerlone, music by Niccolo Piccinni), by eighteen years. Il mondo della luna introduces profound impact of contemporary American events on Euro - pean culture at large. In Haydn's 1777 version of opera for relatively conservative court of Eszterhaza, Moon, a topsy-turvy counterpart of Earth, becomes a metaphor for America, serving court's attempt to align itself with enlightened reformism promoted in Vienna. The terminus post quem non of Polzonetti's work shows that European fascination with America as the land of hope and opportunity (p. 15) gradually came to an end when French Revolution violently shook political foundations of Europe. As censorship became stricter, characters like Vertunna, independent, gun-toting female protagonist of La quakera spiritosa, were looked upon with increasing discomfort, and subjects dealing with revolutionary topics were considered subversive. As Polzonetti argues (pp. 298-307), when Da Ponte made a pasticcio out of Palomba's libretto for Vienna, he toned down stereotypical features of main character and tempered gender role inversion that dominated original work. While Polzonetti's forty-year time-span coincides with golden age of opera buffa, his discussion of works on American subjects begins with an opera seria-Carl Heinrich Graun's Montezuma on a libretto by Frederick Great, King of Prussia (Berlin, 1755). Although Montezuma does not concern itself specifically with North America, it serves as an introduction to web of discourses that joined European interest in New World with growing cultural influence of Enlightenment. If opera seria provided a platform for ideological agenda of Frederick's enlightened absolutism in Prussia, opera buffa became principal vehicle for disseminating view of America as a place of political utopias in Italy. …