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Ely, John Hart
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Born in New York City, John Hart Ely graduated from Princeton University in 1960 and Yale Law School in 1963. As a summer clerk at Arnold, Fortas, & Porter, a Washington, D.C. law firm, he assisted Abe Fortas in the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright, writing a first draft of a brief on behalf of Clarence Earl Gideon, a Florida drifter who had been tried and convicted without a lawyer.
In the fall of 1963, Ely trained with Company A of the U.S. Army's Military Police School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Ely served as the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He went on to clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he considered a hero, and to whom he dedicated his landmark book, Democracy and Distrust (1980). As a clerk for Warren, Ely authored the landmark decision Hanna v. Plumer. Joining the faculty of Yale Law School in 1968, and moving to Harvard Law School in 1973, Ely wrote several influential law review articles, including a highly critical analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in an article entitled The Wages of Crying Wolf, published in the Yale Law Journal, wherein he argued that the Court's decision protecting abortion rights was wrong because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be. Ely's most notable work was his 1980 book Democracy and Distrust, which ranks as one of the most influential works about constitutional law ever written. In it, he argues against interpretivism of which Hugo Black was an exponent, originalism advanced by Robert Bork, and textualism advanced by Antonin Scalia, by contending that strict construction fails to do justice to the open texture of many of the Constitution's provisions; at the same time, though, he maintains that the notion that judges may infer broad moral rights and values from the Constitution is radically undemocratic, whether the moralism of Ronald Dworkin or the libertarian Richard Epstein. Instead, Ely argued that the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution so as to reinforce democratic processes and popular self-government, by ensuring equal representation in the political process (as in the Court's decision in Baker v. Carr [1961]). He argues ejusdem generis that the Constitution's unenumerated rights (such as the 9th Amendment or the Privileges or Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment) are procedural in nature rather than substantive, thus protecting rights to democratic processes but not rights of a substantive nature. Justice Stone's Footnote Four from United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938) is a chief inspiration for Ely's theory of judicial review. In her recent book on Hans Kelsen, Sandrine Baume identified Ely as a significant defender of the compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy.Ely was listed alongside Dworkin as one of the foremost defenders of this principle in recent years. Ely went on to serve as dean of Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1987, and remained on the faculty until 1996. Prompted by his love of scuba diving, he visited the University of Miami School of Law in 1996. Discovering he liked the city and the faculty, he chose to stay and became the first holder of the law school's first endowed chair, named after Richard A. Hausler. Ely was there when he died of cancer, aged 64.
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Born in New York City, John Hart Ely graduated from Princeton University in 1960 and Yale Law School in 1963. As a summer clerk at Arnold, Fortas, & Porter, a Washington, D.C. law firm, he assisted Abe Fortas in the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright, writing a first draft of a brief on behalf of Clarence Earl Gideon, a Florida drifter who had been tried and convicted without a lawyer.
In the fall of 1963, Ely trained with Company A of the U.S. Army's Military Police School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Ely served as the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He went on to clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he considered a hero, and to whom he dedicated his landmark book, Democracy and Distrust (1980). As a clerk for Warren, Ely authored the landmark decision Hanna v. Plumer. Joining the faculty of Yale Law School in 1968, and moving to Harvard Law School in 1973, Ely wrote several influential law review articles, including a highly critical analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in an article entitled The Wages of Crying Wolf, published in the Yale Law Journal, wherein he argued that the Court's decision protecting abortion rights was wrong because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be. Ely's most notable work was his 1980 book Democracy and Distrust, which ranks as one of the most influential works about constitutional law ever written. In it, he argues against interpretivism of which Hugo Black was an exponent, originalism advanced by Robert Bork, and textualism advanced by Antonin Scalia, by contending that strict construction fails to do justice to the open texture of many of the Constitution's provisions; at the same time, though, he maintains that the notion that judges may infer broad moral rights and values from the Constitution is radically undemocratic, whether the moralism of Ronald Dworkin or the libertarian Richard Epstein. Instead, Ely argued that the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution so as to reinforce democratic processes and popular self-government, by ensuring equal representation in the political process (as in the Court's decision in Baker v. Carr [1961]). He argues ejusdem generis that the Constitution's unenumerated rights (such as the 9th Amendment or the Privileges or Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment) are procedural in nature rather than substantive, thus protecting rights to democratic processes but not rights of a substantive nature. Justice Stone's Footnote Four from United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938) is a chief inspiration for Ely's theory of judicial review. In her recent book on Hans Kelsen, Sandrine Baume identified Ely as a significant defender of the compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy.Ely was listed alongside Dworkin as one of the foremost defenders of this principle in recent years. Ely went on to serve as dean of Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1987, and remained on the faculty until 1996. Prompted by his love of scuba diving, he visited the University of Miami School of Law in 1996. Discovering he liked the city and the faculty, he chose to stay and became the first holder of the law school's first endowed chair, named after Richard A. Hausler. Ely was there when he died of cancer, aged 64. |
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Full Name |
Ely, John Hart | ||
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| Birth Year | 1938 | ||
| University/Affiliation | Yale Law School | ||
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| Constitutional Law, Generally (17) Politics (General) (9) War (5) Judges (4) Jurisprudence (4) Legal History (4) Race, Ethnicity, and the Law (4) Courts (3) Criminal Law and Procedure (3) Education Law (3) | |||
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Cited by Articles (0-5 Years) |
286 | ||
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This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by other articles in HeinOnline within the past five years only. Citation sources include the Bluebook, Prince's Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, and the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
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Cited by Articles (5+ Years)
(By Year) |
5,699 | ||
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This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by other articles in HeinOnline beyond the past five years only. Citation sources include the Bluebook, Prince's Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, and the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
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Cited by Cases (0-5 Years)
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15 | ||
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This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by cases available in HeinOnline or via Fastcase within the past five years only.
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Cited by Cases (5+ Years)
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250 | ||
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This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by cases available in HeinOnline or via Fastcase beyond the past five years only.
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Accessed (Past 12 Months) |
672 | ||
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This metric counts the cumulative number of times an author's articles have been accessed by HeinOnline users within a rolling 12 month period. In order for an author's article to count as accessed, the article must be clicked from either search results or by browsing to the article, or retrieved using the citation navigator.
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| ScholarRank | 89 | ||
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ScholarRank is an overall ranking based on the calculation of five HeinOnline ScholarCheck metrics. The Z-score for each of the five metrics is taken and then averaged; the final average is entered into standard competition ranking to produce the overall ScholarRank for each author. Further information on HeinOnline's ScholarRank may be found in our Knowledge Base.
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Average Citations per Article |
260.22 | ||
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This metric counts the cumulative number of times this author has been cited by other articles, then divides this number by this author's total number of articles written, to calculate the average number of citations per article.
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Average Citations per Document |
199.50 | ||
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This metric counts the cumulative number of times this author has been cited by other articles, then divides this number by this author's total number of documents written, to calculate the average number of citations per document.
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| Self-Citations | 19 | ||
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This metric counts the cumulative number of an author's self-citations. This metric is not currently factored into the overall ScholarCheck ranking analysis.
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H-Index |
22.00 | ||
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The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of an author. The index is based on the set of the author's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. Further information on an h-index can be found here.
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