Well-researched, gripping review of the modern supreme court

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	• The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court Jeffrey Toobin Doubleday, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 167 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A timely & important survey of the court

Highly recommended to a wide audience; even close watchers of the court. The Nine is a highly readable and enjoyable profile of the current nine justices along with their recent predecessors.

The Nine is not about the current collective state of jurisprudence and what we should expect to see change under the Robert's court as much as it is a character profile of each justice Toobin was able to effectively probe.

The criticism of other reviewers that Toobin was unable to secure access to some of the justices, most evidently Scalia, Ginsburg, Alito and Souter, is valid. But what author has been able to achieve pervasive access of all the justices comprising a sitting court? None that I know about, including Woodward's seminal The Brethern: Inside the Supreme Court which relied heavily on clerks as well. I would argue that our expectations should be modest on any book revealing each individual justice's private thoughts of the court given the historical and strongly held culture of the court to optimally reveal itself only through its written opinions and occasional memoir. Toobin is to be commended for the access he was able to secure since it contributes to our collecting understanding of the court, which I predict will play a major role in our immediate future every bit as radical as the New Deal court if a Republican wins the '08 election.

Toobin's book is also highly recommended over a competing profile of the current justices, Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court . While Greenburg's perspective seems to based on the shallow understanding and perspective of media pundits, especially the conservative media, Toobin is much more capable of framing his observations based on the history of SCOTUS jurisprudence and the perspective of the judges and clerks themselves.

I do take exception to Toobin framing conservative political objectives through the rhetoric conservatives use, which grossly mischaracterizes the constitutional issues at play. For example, on pg. 3 Toobin claims conservatives want more religion in the "public sphere" when the real issue that creates conflict in this area is that conservatives want to use the power of government to promote their particular religious beliefs even if it violates the equal protection rights of individuals who do not share their beliefs. I can provide many more examples in the comments section if asked.

Toobin also allows Scalia and Thomas to get away with their repeated claims of being originalists who merely want to rule based on the original meaning and/or intent of the Constitution rather than allegedly following the example by their ideological opponents who they claim use the Constitution to meet liberal or temporal political objectives. We have ample evidence, statistically significant to be exact, that both of these justices are happily willing to contradict the original meaning of the Constitution if required to meet a current conservative political objective and are statistically much more inclined to than the moderates and liberals of the court (see Yale study on activism and book on Thomas I link to below).

In fact, one weakness of the book is that Toobin ignores how Stevens is able to write better originalist opinions than either Thomas or Scalia, an example of this in play would have provided a more accurate picture of the hypocrisy of the claimed originalists, especially Scalia, and especially to the general audience reading this book given that constitutional experts are already well aware of this phenomena, with especially Scalia now that he's in the majority.

See Scalia's A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (The University Center for Human Values Series) and First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas for evidence of earlier "activist" (their use of the word, not mine) rulings by them and especially the Thomas book on a statistical survey of Thomas' votes.

So while Toobin didn't cover Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens as well as I would have liked. He does an excellent job on O'Connor and Kennedy while we have plenty of material to get to know Scalia, Thomas, and Breyer, just not in this book. Because it adds to our knowledge base, especially the elusive Souter, it's worth the read.

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Great book.

The Nine is the best non-fiction book I have read in years. Toobins knows his material and is unbiased in his presentation. Sandra Day O'Connor comes across as a much more complicated woman than I had previously thought. Toobins left me very, very frightened about the current direction of the court.

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Well-researched, gripping review of the modern supreme court

Once I started reading this book, I found it difficult to put it down. Toubin brings to life the personalities of each of the justices. His way of words constructs a reality where one feels as though they are in a court room or in a justice's chambers. After reading the book, I felt I had a good sense of how the court changed over the past three decades and how the court changed the country.

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A book to necessarIly put on TO READ list

Not just for the law professionals, and those interested in politics ... This is a real book for everyone.

reviews: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, page 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

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