Board of Education and Baker v. Carr, did not produce the results the court had intended. In his book The Least Dangerous Branch, Bickel coined the term countermajoritarian difficulty to describe his view that judicial review stands in tension with democratic theory. Bickel envisioned the Supreme Court as playing a statesman-like role in national controversies, engaging in dialogue with the other branches of government. Thus he did not see the court as a purely passive body, but as one which should lead public opinion, albeit carefully. Bickel's writings addressed such varied topics as constitutionalism and Burkean thought, citizenship, civil disobedience, freedom of speech, moral authority and intellectual thought. Bickel has been cited by Chief Justice John Roberts and by Justice Samuel Alito as a major influence and is widely considered one of the most influential constitutional conservatives of the 20th century. A February 1970 essay in which he argued court-ordered school desegregation was unattainable was used by President Richard Nixon as political cover to resist school busing as part of his strategy for re-election in 1972. Relative to Alito's legal thinking and philosophy, one writer in 2011 looked particularly at Alito dissents in Snyder v. Phelps, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, and United States v. Stevens, three First Amendment cases. The writer traced the influence of The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress, The Morality of Consent and other Bickel writings both as they bore on Alito's developing thinking in college and as he chose to go to Yale (Bickel would die during Alito's third year there); and as the Bickel writings bore on the solitary or minority opinions Alito wrote in the three cases, here departing in cases even from other usually allied conservative members of the court. Bickel was a gifted and easily accessible instructor. In 1971, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He inaugurated the DeVane Lecture series at Yale in 1972 where he taught a large class mostly of Yale undergraduates. Selected bibliography The Least Dangerous Branch (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962) Politics and the Warren Court (Harper & Row, 1965) The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress (Harper & Row, 1970) The Morality of Consent (Yale University Press, 1975) History of the Supreme Court of the United States: The Judiciary and Responsible Government: 1910-1921 (vol. IX, Macmillan, 1984) SCOTUSblog Online Symposium on The Least Dangerous Branch (August 2012) See