The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court Books Review

In this new book, Toobin examines the rightward shift of the current Supreme Court.  The book opens with the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in September, 2005.  Moving back to the end of the Warren Court and the eventual election of Ronald Reagan, Toobin recounts the origins of The Federalist Society and how it would come to impact the Court.  Turning to the raising of Rehnquist to Chief Justice in 1986, Toobin discusses how Rehnquist impacted the Court.  Most of the changes were in efficiency in how the Court was run.  Rehnquist made an excellent administrator.  In interesting asides, Toobin fills us in on the biographies of the justices throughout the book and looks at their selections and hearings.  Of particular interest are, of course, the hearings for Bork, Thomas and Alito.  Also of interest, is the tortuous process Clinton used to eventually nominate Ginsburg and George W. Bush's missteps in nominating Harriet Miers.

Of course no book on the recent Court could be complete without a review of the key cases decided by the Court.  These reviews start with Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania in 1992.  This case was the one in which the conservatives thought that Roe v. Wade would finally be overturned.  And at first, Rehnquist thought he had the votes.  However, the troika of O'Connor, Souter and Kennedy, wrote a joint opinion which kept the core of Roe intact replacing the trimester framework of Blackmun's original opinion with an undue burden framework of O'Connor's devising.  Other cases discussed were the decisions involving affirmative action in regards to the Michigan Law School (Grutter v. Bollinger) and the undergraduate program (Gratz v. Bollinger).  And of course, a lengthy discussion of the Court's intrusion into the 2000 election (Bush v. Gore).  There are also discussions of the cases involving US imprisonment of enemy combatants ((Rasul, Hamdi, and Padilla).  Toobin even has the results of the major cases of the most recent term, the free speech case from Alaska and the two joined affirmative action cases involving public schools from Kentucky and Seattle.

This was a very readable book, although there is little new information that is revelatory. Perhaps the one piece that was often reported prior to the book's release was the possibility of Souter resigning following Bush v. Gore in 2000.  Because the Court is such a closed society, there is an intense curiosity about the justices and how they reach their decisions.  This book is a fascinating read, and although for people who follow the Court closely, there is little new here, the writing is well done and easy to read.  This book assumes a rightful place on the bookshelf with the other recent Court book, Supreme Conflict by Jan Crawford Greenburg.