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The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
by: Jeffrey Toobin

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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: September 18, 2007
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: September 18, 2007
Sales Rank: 428
Studio: Doubleday

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Product Description:

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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Good, and Should've Been Better
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, federalism, and the death penalty, 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 ... Read More

Rating:

- Insightful
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.

Rating:

- Why Presidential Elections Matter
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 ... Read More

Rating:

- The Nine or "The Sun Queen, Madam Chief Justice O'Connor, and her inferiors"
I regrettably cannot recommend this book. I listened to the Audio CD, and I suspect that such medium makes the content more palatable (in the auditory sense) then trudging through the written prose with the days or weeks-long commitment that might entail.

I have renamed the book to better reflect its content, which, to its ultimate undoing, comprises mostly a hagiography or reification of Ms. Sandra Day O'Connor. It is in his near puppy-doggish love for Justice O'Connor that Toobin betrays the same lack of understanding of the limited constitutional role of the Court likely shared by millions of Americans who focus only on the provision of Good, irrespective of its source. This love of result over principle is never clearer than Toobin's analysis of the Court's "affirmative action in education" cases from 2003, known popularly as the Grutter and Gratz decisions, wherein Justice O'Connor surmised that, notwithstanding ... Read More

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