America Meets the Justices: Explaining the Supreme Court to the General Reader

Curiosity about the Justices of the Supreme Court has increased dramatically since the New Deal era, when Americans first became aware of how directly the Court’s decisions affected their lives. That interest is reflected in three books about the Court written for a general audience, all of them provoking controversy and attracting substantial numbers of readers. In 1936 Washington columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen published The Nine Old Men, a partisan attack on the conservative members of the Court as political actors driven by their individual attitudes rather than by the law. Over forty years later, investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong used insider sources to describe the decisionmaking behavior of the Burger Court in The Brethren, a sometimes unflattering behind-the-scenes account of the personal interactions of the Justices with one another and with their Chief Justice. Most recently, in 1999, the former Supreme Court law clerk Edward Lazarus harshly criticized the Justices’ decisionmaking process during his clerkship year in Closed Chambers, a self proclaimed “eyewitness account” of the Justices’ abandonment of rational discourse in favor of partisan manipulation. Although these three books vary widely in their methodology, their sources, and their perspectives, viewed in sequence they reflect both the strong public curiosity about the individuals who sit on the Court and the challenge of presenting the work of a complicated legal institution in a way that is both accurate and accessible to a general audience.