Although former vice president Joe Biden has been declared president-elect by all network election desks, President Donald Trump has promised to challenge results in several states. This has led commentators to casually evoke the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore but usually without discussing the facts of the case and the legal issues it involved. But, as law school instructs, the facts do matter, as do the specific precedents the Court set out in its decision.
However, if you are interested in these matters, the UofL Law Library can help. It has several books and articles from that era and from the years that followed which examine this leading case and its impact on presidential election law.
Books
Journalists E. J. Dionne & William Kristol provide a detailed hour-by-hour narrative of the thirty-six days from the election to the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (KF 5074.2 .B87 2001). In The Votes That Counted : How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election (KF 5074.2 .G55 2001), legal scholar Howard Gillman examines in detail the legal strategies in the case “from briefs and oral arguments to final decisions.”
While these accounts are neutral in tone, in Supreme Injustice : How the High Court Hijacked the Election of 2000 (KF 5074.2 .D47 2001) Alan M. Dershowitz offers a blistering critique of the Court’s intervention.
In the decades that followed the decision, the impact of Bush v. Gore was analyzed by legal scholars and political scientists. R. Michael Alvarez, in Election Administration in the United States: The State of Reform After Bush v. Gore (JK1976 .E437 2014), looked at the case's impact on laws and court precedents on the administration of elections, including ballot format changes, the "growth in the availability of absentee ballot rules and other forms of convenience voting," and court rules in examining invalid ballots. In The Final Arbiter : The Consequences of Bush v. Gore for Law and Politics (KF 5074.2 .F56 2005) Christopher P. Banks and other scholars of both law and political science examine Bush v. Gore's long-term impact from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives.
Law review articles
In addition, the law journals library of Hein Online captured the spirited debates of America’s leading constitutional scholars. Here are a few articles that have been cited over 7,000 times:
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