Sitting on the shelf at Barnes & Noble beside RLCer Bob Burg's latest (see article below), you will now find another important new book by a Florida RLCer:  The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom by Robert Levy, a senior fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and William Mellor, the president and general counsel of the libertarian Institute for Justice.

The book is a non-lawyer’s guide to the worst cases of the modern era, including Helvering v. Davis (1937) which allowed the government to take money from some and give it to others without any meaningful constraints and Kelo v. City of New London (2005) which approved government seizure of private property to transfer to another private owner.

Are these 12 the absolute worst in history? It is hard to narrow down after 216 years of Supreme Court cases, but Levy and Mellor make a good case and provide a lively read along the way. Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School who served as Ayn Rand’s lawyer, apparently couldn’t narrow it to 12 and is working on a book right now about the 50 worst Supreme Court decisions. He also has some nitpicking to do about Levy’s and Mellor’s dozen.