jeffrey toobin nine

Jeffrey Toobin - The Nine

Book Description:

It's not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court,

argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided

by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His

Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan

administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion,

affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state

separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin

paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable

moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter

Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees

as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public

consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist

and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional

doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. The author

deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's

internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the

vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials

(inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the

2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court