The age-old question “Does the Supreme Court follow the election returns?” entails a more recent corollary, “Can the Supreme Court shape public opinion?” In Legacy and Legitimacy, Rosalee A. Clawson and Eric N. Waltenburg tackle this latter query with a creative research design, sound methodology, and clearly expressed findings. In so doing, they broaden and strengthen Jim Gibson and Greg Caldeira's landmark studies of public support for the “Third Branch.”

Clawson and Waltenburg predicate their examination of African Americans' response to the Supreme Court on legitimacy theory, positing that diffuse support for political institutions ameliorates conflict and perpetuates the governmental system: “Because the Court enjoys remarkably high and stable levels of abstract mass approval compared with the presidency and Congress” (p. 5), “it can wrap its cloak of legitimacy around its rulings” (p. 6). For blacks, this diffuse support arises from a history of beneficial Supreme Court rulings. The book argues that by accepting the high tribunal's decisions, blacks view the American regime as legitimate and authoritative in its policies.

One of the book's many strengths is its multidimensional approach to answering this core question: Why do African-Americans view the Court, and thus the U.S. regime, as legitimate? The authors provide a cogent, compact summary of Civil Rights history and how blacks' innovative public-interest-law strategy brought litigation to the federal courts. From the 1857 disaster of Dred Scott to the 1954 victory in Brown, blacks experienced court decisions that initially denied them basic human rights but, finally, awarded them full citizenship. Sometimes the justices led the nation, as in education cases; sometimes the Court followed Congress and the president, as in its validation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By focusing on African Americans' euphoric responses to Brown, especially in their content analysis of the black press, Clawson and Waltenburg offer a much-needed antidote to legal scholars' diminution of Brown's impact.

Gerald Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope (1991) and Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (2004) are skeptical about the Court's ability to produce effective social reform. Yet this new book concludes quite convincingly that when Congress was mired in the segregationist mentality of senior southern legislators, the Supreme Court cloaked its rulings in legitimacy that catalyzed additional social policy to improve the life of African Americans. Moreover, the Court provided a litigation model that other social movements could follow in trying to capture their full measure of rights.

Particularly intriguing in light of President Barack Obama's nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court are Clawson and Waltenburg's references to the contributions that representative justices can make toward legitimizing the Court in the eyes of previously marginalized groups. Thurgood Marshall ascended from leadership of the Civil Rights litigation movement to a seat on the high court, where he pursued African American interests. He exemplified both active and “descriptive” representativeness, the latter concerning who the representative is or what he or she is like, rather than what he or she does (see Barbara A. Perry, A “Representative” Supreme Court? 1991). Tension between the two types of representation occurs when a justice like Clarence Thomas meets the “descriptive” criterion but does not vote in favor of most blacks' views toward Civil Rights. Clawson and Waltenburg performed a test of media framing and discovered that liberal blacks were even less supportive of recent anti-affirmative-action decisions when the media attacked Thomas (as the black media typically do). The book concludes on a cautionary note that Justice Thomas's presence, combined with the Roberts Court's propensity to dilute race-conscious remedies (as in the 2007 school-assignment cases), may reverse blacks' long-held respect for the tribunal's legitimacy.

Yet the book's experimental, archival, and survey data present a more nuanced portrait of black attitudes toward the Supreme Court. The authors find that African Americans not only reflect a historically positive connection to the tribunal but also trust it more than the federal bureaucracy in interpreting public policy. These views then filter through racial group attitudes and media framing. Although the authors note that the experiments conducted on their campus at Purdue University are not generalizable, they also utilized national survey data to bolster their findings. The 2003 Blacks and the Supreme Court Survey provided panel data from a national representative sample of African Americans both before and after the Court decided two University of Michigan affirmative-action cases. This study allowed Clawson and Waltenburg to determine causal direction of the Court's impact on public opinion: Blacks with higher levels of diffuse support for the Court demonstrated increased support for affirmative action, but the Court's pro-affirmative-action outcome did not produce higher levels of diffuse support for the institution.

Perhaps the book's overarching point on judicial legitimacy indicates that black (and white) public opinion toward the Supreme Court is more complex than most political scientists are willing to accept. Scholars are dismissive of the differences that the justices draw between themselves and the other two “political” branches. Clawson and Waltenburg write that the Court's “image as an apolitical guardian of the Constitution” is a “myth” (p. 67). The tribunal is not apolitical, to be sure, but the public recognizes the contrast between the judicial process—with its emphasis on logic, precedent, and what Henry Abraham labels “the taught tradition of the law” (The Judicial Process, 1998)—and broader political processes. John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse have observed that the Supreme Court transcends the grubby elements of democracy that Americans most dislike (endless and petty debates, mudslinging, posturing, and pandering to interest groups) and that are so obvious in Congress (Congress as Public Enemy, 1995). While I have focused on the macro implications of the Supreme Court's image (Barbara A. Perry, The Priestly Tribe, 1999), Clawson and Waltenburg carefully reveal the micro-level ramifications of the high tribunal's legitimacy for African Americans. The authors' future studies of additional judicial policies and the Supreme Court's impact on other groups—most specifically Hispanics in the wake of Sotomayor's appointments—should be eagerly awaited by scholars of civil rights and liberties, race and ethnicity, law and society, and media and politics.