Saturday, November 17, 2007 8:55 AM
Blawg Book Highlighter #10: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
When I studied journalism at the University of Illinois in the mid-1980s, “The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court,” Bob Woodward and David Montgomery’s uncloaking of the U.S. Supreme Court under then-Chief Justice Warren Burger, was required reading.
When I studied law at Northern Illinois University in the early 1990s, Woodward and Montgomery’s peek behind the closed chambers of the nation’s top court was not required reading – and that’s a shame, because it should have been. It provided not only a primer on good reportorial skills – the authors interviewed several justices and dozens and former law clerks to remove the shield of secrecy that the Court has hidden behind – but in opening those doors it also put all those decisions we read in law school into a historical context that pre-“Brethren” had been absent. We got a glimpse of the personalities, rivalries, politics and principles that went into those decisions.
Since the publication of “The Brethren” in 1979, there have been several notable attempts to follow in its footsteps and to pull back the curtains on the Court, including Edward Lazarus’ “Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court” and Mark Tushnet’s “A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law.”
The latest entrant into the field is Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.” Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN, does so with mixed reviews from the book critics.
David J. Garrow writes for the Los Angeles Times: “Toobin's insistent reductionism of justices' decision-making to the sole dimension of left-right ideology is far too shallow.”
David Margolick of the New York Times is a little more kind: “When it comes to covering the United States Supreme Court as a living, breathing, human institution rather than as a collection of icons, “The Nine” is state of the art," he says. "But it’s an art in need of a renaissance.” Margolick decries the absence of the kind of reporting that was done by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong in “The Brethren” a generation ago: “Much of Toobin’s book is based on oral arguments, briefs and opinions — nothing especially “secret” or “inside” about that.”
And Edward Lazarus, author of “Closed Chambers,” writes for The Washington Post that he could overlook the “lack of originality” in The Nine “if Toobin had used the material to give us a greater understanding of how the institution actually works.” “On this score,” Lazarus writes, “his book comes up a bit short.” In Lazarus’s assessment, Toobin is “prone to significant overstatements” and fails to “give us a coherent framework for thinking about the court.”
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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