Direct Democracy and the Courts. By Kenneth P. Miller. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 278 pp. $24.99 paper. Direct Democracy and the Courts comes at a time when the conflict between courts and direct democracy is particularly visible, as evidenced by the passage of California's Proposition 8 banning samesex marriage and its subsequent challenge in federal court. This lucidly written, rich, and important book effectively explores the politics that result from a political system that blends strong judicial review with strong direct democracy. The author, Kenneth P.Miller, evaluates this hybrid system from a Madisonian perspective of appreciation for deliberative, representative democracy, and neither the courts nor the initiative process are immune from criticism. In the end, however, Miller posits that ''direct citizen lawmaking has been largely contained by the constitutional system in which it operates,'' largely through judicial counterbalancing (p. 216). The book's greatest strength is the extensive research on the history of initiatives. Because of Miller's thorough research, the book will serve as a resource for scholars of both direct democracy and judicial politics. Miller's framing of the Progressive Era's push for voter initiatives as being driven by a very different view of democratic politics than that of the Founders is particularly useful. Elite deliberation with passive publics was replaced, or partially replaced, by a system that values active citizen engagement and control. This, of course, creates a tension in the U.S. polity, particularly over majoritarian power and the rights of the minority. Indeed, this concern for minority rights that are, and have been, threatened by the initiative process is, appropriately, one of the central themes of the book. As Miller notes, ''A fair reading of the record suggests that direct democracy's consequential impact on rights has been to limit the expansion of rights in a numbers of areas, including affirmative action, bilingual education, marriage, and certain areas of the criminal law'' (pp. 154-5; emphasis in original). Miller is careful to point out that the normative implications of this depend on one's view of what rights are, or should be, but he clearly notes that rights expansion is complicated by the presence of direct democracy. The role of the courts in constraining the initiative process complicates this process even further, and in a way unintended by the Progressives, according to Miller. Indeed, the several chapters that Miller devotes to the exploration of judicial attempts to limit direct democracy will be of great interest to law and society scholars. He chronicles the process of unfavorable judicial response to the constraining of rights or initiative interference with the constitutional allocation of governmental powers, as reflected in the U. …