The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most importantand secretlegal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land. Just in time for the 2008 presidential electionwhere the future of the Court will be at stakeToobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves,The Ninetells the story of the Court through personalitiesfrom Anthony Kennedy's overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas's well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter's odd nineteenth-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story ofBush v. Goreand Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office. The Nineis the book bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin was born to write. A CNN senior legal analyst andNew Yorkerstaff writer, no one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices.

1 THE FEDERALIST WAR OF IDEAS For a long time, during the middle of the twentieth century, it wasn't even clear what it meant to be a judicial conservative. Then, with great suddenness, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, judges and lawyers on the right found a voice and an agenda. Their goals reflected and reinforced the political goals of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Earl Warren, who served as chief justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969, exerted a powerful and lasting influence over American law. The former California governor, who was appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, put the fight against state-sponsored racism at the heart of his agenda. Starting in 1954, withBrown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public education, the justices began more than a dozen years of sustained, and usually unanimous, pressure against the forces of official segregation. Within the legal profession in particular, Warren's record on civil rights gave him tremendous moral authority. Warren and his colleagues, especially William J. Brennan Jr., his close friend and strategist, used that capital to push the law in more liberal directions in countless other areas as well. On freedom of speech, on the rights of criminal suspects, on the emerging field of privacy, the Warren Court transformed American law. To be sure, Warren faced opposition, but many of his Court's decisions quickly worked their way into the permanent substructure of American law.New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which protected newspapers that published controversial speech;Miranda v. Arizona, which established new rules for interrogating criminal suspects; evenGriswold v. Connecticut, which announced a right of married people to buy birth control, under the broader heading of privacyall these cases, along with the Warren Court's many pronouncements on race, became unassailable precedents. Richard M. Nixon won the presidency in part by promising to rein in the liberalism of the Court, but even though he had the good fortune to name four justices in three years, the law itself wound up little changed. Under Warren E. Burger, whom Nixon named to succeed Warren, the Court in some respects became more liberal than ever. It was under Burger that the court approved the use of school busing, expanded free speech well beyondSullivan, forced Nixon himself to turn over the Watergate tapes, and even, for a time, ended all executions in the United States.Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights decision that still defines judicial liberalism, passed by a 7-2 vote in 1973, with three of the four Nixon nominees (Burger, Lewis F. Powell, and Harry A. Blackmun) in the majority. Only Rehnquist, joined by Byron R. White, appointed by John F. Kennedy, dissented. Through all these years--from the 1950s through the 1970sthe conservatives on the Court like White and Potter Stewart did not differ greatly from their liberal colleagues. The conservatives were less willing to second-guess the work of police officers and to reverse criminal convictions; they were more willing to limit remedies for past racial discrimination; they deferred somewhat more to elected officials about how to organize and run the government. But on the big legal questions, the war was over, and the liberals had won. And their victories went beyond the judgments of the Supreme Court. The Warren Court transformed virtually the entire legal culture, especially law schools. *** It was not surprising, then, that on the day after Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980, Yale Law School went into mourning. On that day, Steven Calabresi's torts professor canceled class to talk about what was happening in the country. The mood in the room was one of bewilderment and hurt. At the end, the teacher asked for a show of hands among the ninety first-year students before him.