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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Nine:
Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Ideology In
his new book, The Nine:
Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin makes the
case that when it comes to the members of the Supreme Court, it’s all about
ideology. As a staff writer for The New
Yorker and CNN’s legal analyst, Toobin brings a journalist’s skill at
making a story interesting to every chapter of this book. While occasionally
repetitive, Toobin reinforces with anecdotes key revelations about the
ideology of each current and recent justice on the Supreme Court. Here’s an
excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 17, “The Green Brief,” pp. 215-217: The period leading up to the Grutter
and Gratz decisions the early part of 2003 was not an easy time
for O'Connor. Her husband John's condition had continued to deteriorate. He
had started to accompany her to work every day, and the justice hired his
former secretary to keep an eye on him as he sat on the couch in her office,
chatting or reading the newspaper. No one uttered the word Alzheimer's at
the Court, but the nature of John's problem was increasingly obvious to all. The justice and her husband
would arrive together in time for her exercise class in the morning, stay
through their lunch together, and then return home at about two, when she
would read briefs. Even then, they never stopped going out at night, to
embassy parties, museum openings and the like, just as O'Connor had
continued making the rounds fifteen years earlier, when she was weakened by
her chemotherapy for breast cancer. In her forthright, determined way, O'Connor
did not believe in making concessions to illness, her own or anyone else's. O'Connor's own health was fine,
despite a persistent tremor that she had had for years. For her morning
exercise class, she added salsa dancing to step aerobics and Pilates. She
still loved the work of the Court and always sought more of it. O'Connor
never signed on to Rehnquist's crusade to cut the Court's docket and thus was
always urging her clerks to scour the petitions for cases where she could
vote for cert. "Find us some good cases!" she would say. Still,
like many older people, O'Connor resisted changes to her routine, especially
the one promised by an impending renovation project at the Court. The
building had not been upgraded since it opened in 1935, and Rehnquist had
prevailed upon Congress to fund a full overhaul. Each of the justices would
have to vacate his or her chambers for a while, and O'Connor was slated to be
the first evacuee, in 2004. A pack rat who loved her view and her office,
especially now that John was joining her there every day, O'Connor dreaded
the prospect of moving to the By now, O'Connor usually had
little trouble making up her mind about how to vote. She assigned one clerk
to write a bench memo on each case to be argued and then invited the other
clerks to write counter-memos if they did not agree with their colleague's
recommendation. This was the year that O'Connor cut back to a five-day
schedule—there were no more crockpot lunches for her clerks on Saturdays—but
she still went over each case with them before oral arguments. She did not
agonize. Having laid out her views for her clerks, she had them help her
craft some questions for the lawyers for both sides. She didn't believe in
playing devil's advocate, either. The tilt of her questions at oral argument
almost always showed the way she was going to vote. But Grutter
and Gratz
were
different. They were not easy cases for O'Connor. This time, she did
agonize. In
the first place, the stakes were enormous. Unlike some high-profile cases
before the justices, the In the weeks leading up to the
argument, O'Connor sequestered herself in her office, poring over the briefs
of the parties and the amicus briefs as well. Stewing over the "I need to be consistent
with what I said in Croson and Adarand."
This suggested
a vote for the plaintiffs. (O'Connor thought that a justice being
inconsistent was . . . unattractive.) "Race consciousness is a
pernicious thing." But O'Connor also said: "What if these schools
become all-white? Can we live with that?" "This isn't government
contracting. This is education. And Lewis said that education was
different." "Lewis" was Lewis
Powell, O'Connor's mentor on the Court and her predecessor as its swing vote.
The key precedent in the area was Powell's opinion from 1978 in Regents of
the University of California v. Bakke, where the Court struck down a
rigid quota system for minorities at the state medical school at But Powell justified
affirmative action because of what it did for everyone, not just for its
immediate beneficiaries. In his view, diver- sity a buzzword that came into
wide use only after Bakke helped all students of all races. "The
nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the
ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples,"
Powell wrote, so "race or ethnic background may be deemed a `plus' in a
particular applicant's file." (Powell quoted at length from the
admissions plan at Harvard College, which stated, in part, that "the
race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic
origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates'
cases.") In the subsequent twenty-five years, Powell's rationale had
become the dominant intellectual justification for affirmative action not as
a handout to the
downtrodden but as a net benefit to the society as a whole. The question in Grutter and
Gratz was whether Powell's ruling should remain on the books. As the
justices emerged from behind the red curtain to hear argument on the morning of
April 1, 2003, not even O'Connor's clerks knew how she would vote. As shown in the excerpt, Toobin’s
writing is lively in The Nine,
and his message is an important one for readers to consider: the ideology of
the justices will influence American life for a long time to come. Steve
Hopkins, June 20, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Nine.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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