The Supreme Court

The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America

De: Jeffrey Rosen

Narrado por: Alan Sklar

A leading Supreme Court expert recounts the personal and philosophical rivalries that forged our nation's highest court and continue to shape our daily lives.

The Supreme Court is the most mysterious branch of government, and yet the Court is at root a human institution, made up of very bright people with very strong egos, for whom political and judicial conflicts often become personal.

In this compelling work of character-driven history, Jeffrey Rosen recounts the history of the Court through the personal and philosophical rivalries on the bench that transformed the law - and by extension, our lives. The story begins with the great Chief Justice John Marshall and President Thomas Jefferson, cousins from the Virginia elite whose differing visions of America set the tone for the Court's first hundred years. The tale continues after the Civil War with Justices John Marshall Harlan and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who clashed over the limits of majority rule. Rosen then examines the Warren Court era through the lens of the liberal icons Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, for whom personality loomed larger than ideology. He concludes with a pairing from our own era, the conservatives William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, only one of whom was able to build majorities in support of his views.

Through these four rivalries, Rosen brings to life the perennial conflict that has animated the Court, between those justices guided by strong ideology and those who forge coalitions and adjust to new realities. He illuminates the relationship between judicial temperament and judicial success or failure. The stakes are nothing less than the future of American jurisprudence.

The Supremes: listen to more about the Supreme Court.©2007 Jeffrey Rosen (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.

Supreme listen

You would not be reading this review if you were not interested in the subject. So I can highly recommend the book to you. It is well written with biographical outlines of the personalities involved and the case histories that exemplify the outcomes both at the time and in retrospect. Personal views of the author are evident but do not detract from the content.
Sklar’s narration makes the book. A lesser narrator could have made the author’s lecture like presentation dry. I will look for more of his work.

Good, but some bias

This book is very interesting and offers a look into some important personalities in the Court's history. The premise of the book is that judges are more effective when they compromise their ideals to gain incremental changes and when they build rapport with other justices. This is defined as "judicial temperament" by the author.

Each judge's judicial temperament and effectiveness is profiled in comparison to a contemporary with an opposite temperament. The author veers from his course when discussing Justice Scalia, though.

Jefferson is presented as brilliant, but idealistic. Holmes is brilliant, but self-absorbed. Douglas is brilliant, but self-aggrandizing. Scalia, who is also brilliant, is presented is little more than an acerbic dogmatist with a biting wit.

More than any other justice profiled, the author attempts to evaluate the merits of Scalia's legal opinion - uniformly drawing on the opinions of those opposed to Scalia's jurisprudential philosophy.

Much is made of the Bush v. Gore case, for example. The author quotes Scalia's recital of the legal basis for an injunction - something not terribly exciting in the real world. Yet, it is presented as a prediction of the outcome of the vote count. "Scalia's prediction was wrong," the author chides.

The real-world inconsequence of Scalia's statement in the injunction and the overzealous attention paid to it by some are traceable directly back to political flamethrowers working for Gore, not to any legal scholar. There are several other examples of heavily-biased criticisms that are uncharacteristic for this book.

In the end, I felt that I had been set up - that the book's premise was really just a pretense to launch an assault on Scalia. The author stretches legal reasoning to make Scalia seem inconsistent on issues where he is steadfastly consistent.

I still enjoyed the book, but I could have done without the bias.

A lot of fun.

No longer are these people just bobble heads on top of black robes. This is such a guilty pleasure. To discover that our justices are regular people with all of the quirks and brillance that make us human makes it so worth the download. Beware! If you are a Supreme Court geek like I am your just gonna want to know more. This really is Edu-tainment!

Excellent history

While not a comprehensive history of the Supreme Court, this book does illuminate key periods in the court's history by tying the judicial philosophies of justices such as Marshall and Warren to those of contemporary justices such as O'Connor and Scalia. The book is succinctly written and well-read, and while an academic work, it avoids being too dry. A must-read for anyone interested in legal philosophy or American history.

Excellent listen

This is an outstanding book -- thoughtful, well-researched, well-written, and well-narrated. Rosen's thesis is both intriguing and argued compellingly. He offers valuable insights about the court that apply to other dimensions of our public, political life.