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Tarfumes.com - The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
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List Price: $27.95
Our Price: $18.45
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Manufacturer: Doubleday
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 347.7326
EAN: 9780385516402
ISBN: 0385516401
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: 2007-09-18
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: 2007-09-18
Studio: Doubleday
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Editorial Reviews:
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Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal 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 election—where the future of the Court will be at stake—Toobin 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 Nine tells the story of the Court through personalities—from 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 of Bush v. Gore—and Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office.
The Nine is the book bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin was born to write. A CNN senior legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, no one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Nine
Comment: Anyone who watches much cable news is familiar with Jeffery Toobin. As the chief legal analyst for CNN, and a frequent guest on other networks, Toobin is one of the experts who provide commentary on crime, trials, and other aspects of the law. He has written books about O.J., the Clinton Impeachment, and the 2000 Recount, and now turns his skills to the modern Supreme Court. There are other books about the Rehnquist-era court, but this one is probably the most accessible for the layman. Toobin is not a particularly lively writer, but he produces an easy to follow profile of the justices and some of their more important decisions, and the politics behind their appointments. Worth mentioning are his chapters dealing with the Thomas nomination, the daily life of the justices and the effects international law can have on their opinions. As a lawyer, he can provide more insight than the average journalist, and he certainly has a gift for putting legal jargon into terms the general public can understand. No doubt critics will accuse him of `dumbing down' the material, but they cannot argue with the result: a sympathetic, honest, and readable history of the Court during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Nine
Comment: This is a fascinating, thought-provoking book which should be required reading for any civics or political science student. Toobin provides an insightful look into the selection of justices as well as their evolution once on the bench. He has clearly done his homework in researching the backgrounds, selection process, politics, and personalities of the nine decision makers we call our Supreme Court. Highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good, and Should've Been Better
Comment: There are several things about The Nine that make it an absorbing and worthwhile read. As stated in the dust jacket, Jeffrey Toobin has great narrative skills. He shows them in abundance when giving us memorable portraits of each justice. Furthermore, he does an outstanding job summarizing the most important Supreme Court cases from 2000 onward; and distilling the complex issues that each case presents re: abortion, affirmative action, free speech, separation of church and state, federalism, the death penalty, and habeas corpus etc. In these respects, it is an ideal resource for the casual follower of the Supreme Court.
However, I am a paralegal well-versed in legal research, and am fascinated by the Supreme Court. I expected much more from the book, but was greatly disappointed with several omissions. First, Toobin did not offer citations to any of the cases he summarized so well(from Bush v. Gore to Rasul v. Bush, or the Kelo case re: eminent domain). Maybe it was an editorial decision by the publisher not to list the citations; and if true, I would've appreciated knowing this at the outset. To list a case without giving its citation is an unforgivable omission for anyone familiar with how legal research is done. It made the book seem more shallow than I'm sure Toobin intended. Toobin's defense(at the end of the book) that these cases are readily available online is just not good enough. I also would've appreciated a much fuller discussion by Toobin of how and why the Justices have(since the Warren Court era) increasingly allowed political considerations to guide their jurisprudence rather than legal ones.
I have equally strong misgivings about Toobin's approach to the book.
Yes, he is a fairly high-profile legal analyst for CNN; and writes prominently on legal issues for the New Yorker Magazine. These facts alone, however, don't tell us what motivated him to write this book.
The dust jacket tells us that he was born to write this book. How so?
What goals did he set for the book? He didn't say. The book is touted as providing a valauble look inside the Supreme Court; and in some ways, he succeeds. For example, he gives a valuable overview of the Rasul, and Hamdan cases, two outgrowths of the Bush Administration's war on terror. However, Toobin largely had to rely on the information the Justices, and other Supreme Court experts were willing to provide him.
What did Toobin himself bring to the table to advance the goals of his book, other than admirable enthusiasm? Unfortunately, we are not told. He is a journalist, but has given us no idea of how he became one, and has not told us about his legal background(i.e., Has he been to law school?;
Is he an attorney?)
Having answers to these questions could've at least in part explained why he did not offer at least one case citations for people who just might want to do further(more in depth) reading. If he didn't want his book to be a scholarly appraisal of the Supreme Court, Toobin should have told us so beforehand in an introduction. Again, The Nine is quite a good book, as far as it goes. It could have been, and should have been so much better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Insightful
Comment: Awesome. An easy and fast read. The book rewards you with a perspective on the politics behind the Court for about the past two decades. A great indtroduction for young readers.
Conservatives are just upset that their goals and momentum have been exposed and possibly thwarted to some extent by the release of this widely-read book before the extremely important presidential election of '08.
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Summary: Why Presidential Elections Matter
Comment: Jeffrey Toobin makes a strong case in "The Nine" that the 2008 election is indeed a change election if only because another Republican president will doom Roe v. Wade and other constitutional protections hanging by the thread of a moderate Justice (Stevens, Souter or Ginsberg) stepping down during the next Presidential term.
The Nine looks at how the current Supreme Court Justices' personalities impact the process and outcome of deliberations and why those Supreme Court decisions matter in the lives of Americans. He focuses on various confirmation struggles as well as court rulings including Presidential elections (Bush v. Gore), abortion decisions (post Roe v. Wade), gay rights, affirmative action, the war on terror and the separation of church and state.
One of the themes of the book is the rise of the powerful Republican conservative judicial movement. Their ideology demands that justices to be pro-life, for increasing the role of religion in public life, against any and all affirmative action, for certain restraints on free speech except when it impacts public financing in which case they are champions of money as speech. They want Justices to uphold the sanctity of straight marriages and families and grant the Executive broad powers to wage war against terror. And yet despite most of the appointments having come from Republican Presidents, the court hasn't - until recently - surrendered to this conservative ideology. However, that has begun to change with the very conservative Alito taking O'Connor's seat.
Toobin does an excellent job of showing how the Justices' humanity plays out in how they work together, perceive their roles on the court and come to their judicial decisions. He isn't afraid to show them acting poorly but he also shows them as people with a real affection for one another and a commitment to the constitution and their role in American life. As a non-practicing lawyer, I was surprised at how much legal analysis he included but a friend of mine who isn't a lawyer wasn't put off by it at all.
The book isn't a big civic lesson bore. He includes a number of touching and funny stories that develop his larger themes; he relates the great reception Clarence Thomas gets when speaking before an RV convention, he pokes fun at Kennedy's high flown prose, at David Souter's disinterest in dating women and O'Connor's habit of handing out a congratulatory tee-shirt to parent of newborns and making sure that a gay clerk and his partner get one too.
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