74 ILLUSTRATION BY RODRIGO CORRALCulture & CriticsBOOKSA template for popular books about the Supreme
Court has emerged since Bob Woodward and Scott
Armstrong’s Th e Brethren was published in 1979. It
goes like this: Interweave case histories with biographi-
cal material on the justices and add anecdotes about
their unseemly horse-trading. Th en pack in as much
gossip as you can. Journalists including Jeff rey 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 Ste-
phen Wermiel’s Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion.
Th ese books function like windows in a brick wall.
Th e 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 con-
ventions and written a book that is almost pure law.
Supreme Inequality: Th e 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 fi nd 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.”
Yet in this age of the judge as celebrity, the deci-
sion to focus not on the personalities of the Court but
rather on the ideas that fi ll its opinions has obvious
allure. I admire Ruth Bader Ginsburg as much as the
next feminist, but I have seen enough movies about
her for now. Th e late Antonin Scalia developed such a
cult of personality among Federalist Society members
that he felt emboldened to make an obscene gesture
to a reporter and did not recuse himself from a case
in which his impartiality was in serious question. And
most recently, Brett Kavanaugh’s confi rmation hear-
ings caused some Court watchers to turn away in
disgust. Given individual justices who can sometimes
seem too big for their robes, Cohen’s wonky emphasis
on cases rather than characters off ers a steady perspec-
tive. After all, the ideas at stake in Supreme Court
decisions are what touch our daily lives.
Cohen takes as his subject the Supreme Court’s
trajectory, and its footprint, since Earl Warren’s rights
revolution of the 1950s and ’60s. Th e Court, CohenTh e 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