Tell me about SCOTUS

My inter­est in the Supreme Court was rekin­dled recent­ly when I learned just pri­or to his retire­ment announce­ment that Jus­tice David Souter writes his opin­ions with a foun­tain pen, just as I’m present­ly writ­ing this review (the first draft, any­how.) It’s a triv­ial detail, but it moti­vat­ed me to seek more infor­ma­tion about the Justice.

I browsed Books Ink, the store occu­pied by the space where A Clean Well-Light­ed Place For Books used to be. They did not have the book I was look­ing for, David Hack­ett Souter: Tra­di­tion­al Repub­li­can on the Rehn­quist Court by Tins­ley E Yarbrough, but I kept pok­ing around until I stum­bled across Jef­frey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

The Nine is a bit lighter than the book I was look­ing for, and quite a bit more gen­er­al. For a casu­al read, it had a rea­son­able amount of sub­stance. I detect­ed a bit of sym­pa­thy for one polit­i­cal per­sua­sion over the oth­er, but over­all I found it to be even­hand­ed. Facts are facts, and Toobin’s lean­ings col­ored only some of the inter­pre­ta­tion. The events as well as the moti­va­tions of the Jus­tices are essen­tial­ly the result of research, and Toobin did his home­work well and most­ly kept the book evenhanded.

One exam­ple of his even­hand­ed­ness is that his por­tray­al of Jus­tice Clarence Thomas as a per­son was much more sym­pa­thet­ic than any oth­er I’ve encoun­tered. Far from any attempt to pro­mote a point of view by the inclu­sion of per­son­al­i­ty traits and con­tro­ver­sy, Toobin instead relates the con­tro­ver­sial events with­out judg­ment. He reports the events and shows how the Jus­tices’ back­grounds and beliefs gave rise to con­tro­ver­sy and con­flict, and allows the nat­ur­al dra­ma to unfold.

Toobin’s style is a bit on the trans­par­ent side, prob­a­bly a good thing for this kind of book. It’s pos­si­bly what saves it from being ruined by his own prej­u­dices; he rarely gives him­self room to let his writ­ing betray his own opin­ions. At the same time, this style robs The Nine of some of the per­son­al­i­ty it could have. It is a fair­ly engag­ing read, but there is very lit­tle of the author’s voice appar­ent. The result is a book with a lot of inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion that remains—as a book—somewhat for­get­table. Still, Toobin does­n’t need to do much to make this mate­r­i­al engaging.

My only real dis­ap­point­ment with The Nine is that the book cov­ers only the last few decades. I had hoped to read more about the tra­di­tions of the Court before cur­rent times. There is only a lit­tle back­ground infor­ma­tion about the Court before the 1980s. There is plen­ty of mate­r­i­al to cov­er in the last three decades, but I sus­pect greater con­text would have helped.

It would be out­side the scope of a book like this, but some of the cas­es real­ly left me want­i­ng more detail. I don’t think the book would have been improved much by adding a lot more depth, but I may well be con­sult­ing Toobin’s bib­li­og­ra­phy for addi­tions to my read­ing list.

Souter’s pen is an Ester­brook. You won’t find that in The Nine—I will keep my source on this confidential.