The Supreme Court's Enduring Bias

Over the past half-century, siding with the powerful against the vulnerable has been the rule in almost every area of the law.

- By Michael O’Donnell

A template for popular books about the Supreme Court has emerged since Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s The Brethren was published in 1979. It goes like this: Interweave case histories with biographical material on the justices and add anecdotes about their unseemly horse-trading. Then pack in as much gossip as you can. Journalists including Jeffrey Toobin, Jan Crawford Greenburg, Marcia Coyle, and Joan Biskupic have mastered this form, producing books that are both entertaining and illuminating. Better still are judicial biographies that use the historical record to present seminal cases and the people—litigants and lawyers, as well as justices—who shaped them. Two outstanding examples are Linda Greenhouse’s Becoming Justice Blackmun and Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel’s Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion. These books function like windows in a brick wall. The Court does its work in private, and the public understandably wants to know more.

Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, has dispensed with these conventions and written a book that is almost pure law. Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America does not pander to readers or mug for their attention. Occasionally a justice will get a brief sketch, but it is little more than what you could find in his or her entry on the Supreme Court Historical Society’s website. Cohen deals in cases and their impact on the country. He acknowledges the risk of a volume that is all medicine and no sugar, quoting a public-interest advocate who notes that the public has largely missed the harm the Court has been doing, because “issues like class-action rules and preemption and arbitration” can make “most people fall asleep.”