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Scorpions: The Battles And Triumphs Of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices (2010)

by Noah Feldman(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0446580570 (ISBN13: 9780446580571)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Twelve

review 1: Feldman is a good, smart dude. But for anyone who has been one of his students, there is a certain level of condescension and smarm that seems into his instruction. It also shows in his writing. Nevertheless, he is good at producing digestible vignettes that quilt together nicely into four interwoven biographies of truly American Americans. But since Roosevelt dies a quarter of the way through the book, and doesn't really play much of a role once he has appointed his justices, I don't know why Feldman has him on the cover.
review 2: I am a Supreme Court nerd so, of course, I enjoyed this. It starts very strong with mini-biographies of to be Justices Frankfurter, Douglas, Jackson, and Black, connecting them through New Deal liberalism. The latter half of the bo... moreok, where the fissures in that liberalism and the resulting disparate judicial approaches are discussed, is much more problematic. It feels more like "you are going to want ten pages on Japanese-American internment, steel seizure, and then twenty on Brown, right?" than a fully integrated narrative. A book rarely benefits from added length but the analysis here needs more depth. Still, an interesting overview and a nice reminder that the Court has always been hugely political and home to epic catty showdowns. less

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