We will never know with certainty who won the 2000 presidential election, says Judge Richard Posner in his new book. That’s because it was a statistical tie. Posner, a leading legal scholar and conservative Reagan appointee to the bench, acknowledges the likelihood that more Florida voters than we thought intended to vote for Al Gore.
But he argues that the Supreme Court was right to give the election to Bush, in order to avoid national chaos. Posner’s new book, “Deadlock,” makes a rare attempt to transcend politics in evaluating the legal case that decided a presidential election for the first time in American history. The result is a book that will please no one, but forces the reader to think.
Guests:
Richard Posner, judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh District, and author of “Breaking the Deadlock” and “The Frontiers of Legal Theory,”;
Alan Dershowitz, professor, Harvard Law School and author of “Supreme Injustice.”