Revista da EMERJ - V. 20 - N. 2 - Maio/Agosto - 2018

 R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 20, n. 2, p. 8 - 53, Maio/Agosto. 2018  8 Bush v. Gore Through the Lens of Constitutional History Michael J. Klarman James Monroe Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. I have benefitted from the comments of Jim Ryan and Daryl Levinson, and from numerous conver- sations with Mike Seidman. I am also grateful to Bar- bie Selby, Kent Olson, and other reference librarians at the University of Virginia School of Law for helping to educate me about Florida election law during the election controversy and for research help with this Article. Peggy Cusack and Michelle Morris provided very helpful research assistance. On December 12, 2000, the United States Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, picked a president. 1 By shutting down the state- -wide manual recount that had been ordered just days earlier by the Florida Supreme Court, the High Court Justices ensured that George W. Bush would become the forty-third president of the United States. In this essay, I shall speculate on the long-term implications of this controversial ruling for the Court’s institutional standing and legi- timacy. My strategy will be to canvas some of the landmark decisions in American constitutional history– Dred Scott v. Sandford , 2 Brown v. Board of Education , 3 Furman v. Georgia , 4 Roe v. Wade , 5 and others–with the aim of deriving a list of factors that predict how particular rulings will affect the Court’s reputation. Then I shall consider how those variables apply to Bush v. Gore and predict that decision’s long-term consequences. 1 Bush v. Gore, 121 S. Ct. 525 (2000). 2 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857). 3 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 4 408 U.S. 238 (1972). 5 410 U.S. 13 (1973).