The overwhelming scholarly assessment is that the ruling in Bush v. Gore is a poor model of judicial reasoning. It is unsteadily grounded and hard to square with the justices' previous decisions, and it reduces confidence in the court. Most analysts simply find it impossible to swallow the idea of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy and Thomas, who have spent years fighting the liberal expansion of the equal protection clause, seizing upon it as a basis for stopping a voter recount. But on the decision's overall legitimacy and appropriateness, commentators are divided. Not evenly divided, to be sure, given the liberal bent of the legal academy, but the split is deep and troubling

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http://www.the-rule-of-law.com/archive/supreme/statement.html

The inconclusive results of the newspaper recounts remind us that judges shouldn't cast themselves as national saviors in political disputes. These cases are so likely to distort their judgment and inflame their passions that judges on both sides of the political aisle can't reliably evaluate the consequences of a decision to intervene. By rushing to hand Mr. Bush an election that he might well have won without their help, the conservative justices tarnished his legitimacy far more than any manual recount could have done.

Quite demonstrably the worst Supreme Court decision in history, Bush v. Gore changes everything in American law and politics. The Rehnquist Court has destroyed any moral prestige still lingering from the Warren Court's brief but passionate commitment to civil rights in the middle of the last century. Now the court has returned to its historic conservative role, rushing to aid the political party of property and race privilege in a debased partisan way, torturing out of the Equal Protection Clause new rules to assure the power of one political faction. Bush v. Gore was no momentary lapse of judgment by five conservative justices, but the logical culmination of their long drive to define an extra-constitutional natural law enshrining the rights of white electoral majorities, like the one that brought George W. Bush the White House.
From the beginning, Bush desperately sought, as it were, to prevent the opening of the door, the looking into the box--unmistakable signs that he feared the truth. In a nation that prides itself on openness, instead of the Supreme Court doing everything within its power to find a legal way to open the door and box, they did the precise opposite in grasping, stretching and searching mightily for a way, any way at all, to aid their choice for President, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'état, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause--the Court asserting that because of the various standards of determining the voter's intent in the Florida counties, voters were treated unequally, since a vote disqualified in one county (the so-called undervotes, which the voting machines did not pick up) may have been counted in another county, and vice versa. Accordingly, the Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court's order that the undervotes be counted, effectively delivering the presidency to Bush.

More than 660 law professors signed a statement comparing the majority of the Supreme Court justices to propagandists who suppressed the facts and acted as "political proponents for candidate Bush, not as judges."

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At the heart of Dershowitz's argument is his certainty that the majority justices would fail what he calls the "shoe-on-the-other-foot test" -- that is, if Gore was ahead and it was Bush who was seeking a hand recount, the majority would have ruled differently. This is an extremely serious accusation, because deciding a case on the basis of the identity of a litigant is a violation of the judicial oath of impartiality. If there were a process to oversee the Supreme Court (and Dershowitz argues that there should be), such a violation would presumably result in the offenders being removed from office. Dershowitz challenges anyone who believes the majority would pass the other-foot test to prove it, "by demonstrating how their opinions in this case can be reconciled with their opinions in prior cases as well as with their extrajudicial writings." Dershowitz concludes that the majority justices "shamed themselves and the Court on which they serve, and ... defiled their places in history."