Download or read book Nine Black Robes written by Joan Biskupic and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Editor's Choice "Biskupic, an accomplished and well-sourced journalist, knows the court as well as anyone now covering it... In her new book Biskupic has done something different and a good deal harder. She has written a group narrative that combines close accounts of the court's public business in the Trump years with a history of its private dramas and conflicts... The deeper message of 'Nine Black Robes' is that even with a new president in office we remain captive to the Age of Trump... A quiet urgency ripples through this informative, briskly paced and gracefully written book." —New York Times Book Review "Biskupic opens a window onto the opaque, insular world of the justices to show an institution sinking gradually into crisis . . . Biskupic is a longtime chronicler of the court, and "Nine Black Robes" puts on display her connections within its chambers." —Washington Post "[Biskupic] knows how to make news and illuminate the personalities atop the judicial org chart . . . The book reveals unseen sausage-making . . ." —Wall Street Journal "Fascinating and informative . . . [Biskupic's] long experience covering the court . . . has put her in an incomparable position to comment on its make-up, historical positions and direction. It has also made her privy to many significant, little-known secrets about Supreme Court personalities and their historical behaviors." —The National Book Review CNN Senior Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic provides an urgent and inside look at the history-making era in the Supreme Court during the Trump and post-Trump years, from its seismic shift to the Right to its controversial decisions, including its reversal of Roe v. Wade, based on access to all the key players. Nine Black Robes displays the inner maneuverings among the Supreme Court justices that led to the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade and a half century of women’s abortion rights. Biskupic details how rights are stripped away or, alternatively as in the case of gun owners, how rights are expanded. Today’s bench—with its conservative majority—is desperately ideological. The Court has been headed rightward and ensnared by its own intrigues for years, but the Trump appointments hastened the modern transformation. With unparalleled access to key players, Biskupic shows the tactics of each justice and reveals switched votes and internal pacts that typically never make the light of day, yet will have repercussions for generations to come. Nine Black Robes is the definitive narrative of the country’s highest court and its profound impact on all Americans.
Download or read book Behind the Black Robes written by Barbara C. Johnson and published by Booksurge Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marinated with the makings of sizzle, the book is filled with the courts' tricks and traps for the unwary---to alert readers both why their law cases failed and what must be done to effect court refor
Download or read book The Chief written by Joan Biskupic and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic Chief Justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far. John Roberts was named to the Supreme Court in 2005 claiming he would act as a neutral umpire in deciding cases. His critics argue he has been anything but, pointing to his conservative victories on voting rights and campaign finance. Yet he broke from orthodoxy in his decision to preserve Obamacare. How are we to understand the motives of the most powerful judge in the land? In The Chief, award-winning journalist Joan Biskupic contends that Roberts is torn between two, often divergent, priorities: to carry out a conservative agenda, and to protect the Court's image and his place in history. Biskupic shows how Roberts's dual commitments have fostered distrust among his colleagues, with major consequences for the law. Trenchant and authoritative, The Chief reveals the making of a justice and the drama on this nation's highest court.
Download or read book American Original written by Joan Biskupic and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-scale biography of the Supreme Court's most provocative—and influential—justice If the U.S. Supreme Court teaches us anything, it is that almost everything is open to interpretation. Almost. But what's inarguable is that, while the Court has witnessed a succession of larger-than-life jurists in its two-hundred-year-plus history, it has never seen the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Combative yet captivating, infuriating yet charming, the outspoken jurist remains a source of curiosity to observers across the political spectrum and on both sides of the ideological divide. And after nearly a quarter century on the bench, Scalia may be at the apex of his power. Agree with him or not, Scalia is "the justice who has had the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about the law," as the Harvard law dean Elena Kagan, now U.S. Solicitor General, once put it. Scalia electrifies audiences: to hear him speak is to remember him; to read his writing is to find his phrases permanently affixed in one's mind. But for all his public grandstanding, Scalia has managed to elude biographers—until now. In American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the veteran Washington journalist Joan Biskupic presents for the first time a detailed portrait of this complicated figure and provides a comprehensive narrative that will engage Scalia's adherents and critics alike. Drawing on her long tenure covering the Court, and on unprecedented access to the justice, Biskupic delves into the circumstances of his rise and the formation of his rigorous approach to the bench. Beginning with the influence of Scalia's childhood in a first-generation Italian American home, American Original takes us through his formative years, his role in the Nixon-Ford administrations, and his trajectory through the Reagan revolution. Biskupic's careful reporting culminates with the tumult of the contemporary Supreme Court—where it was and where it's going, with Scalia helping to lead the charge. Even as Democrats control the current executive and legislative branches, the judicial branch remains rooted in conservatism. President Obama will likely appoint several new justices to the Court—but it could be years before those appointees change the tenor of the law. With his keen mind, authoritarian bent, and contentious rhetorical style, Scalia is a distinct and persuasive presence, and his tenure is far from over. This new book shows us the man in power: his world, his journey, and the far-reaching consequences of the transformed legal landscape.
Download or read book Justice on the Brink written by Linda Greenhouse and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gripping story of the Supreme Court’s transformation from a measured institution of law and justice into a highly politicized body dominated by a right-wing supermajority, told through the dramatic lens of its most transformative year, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times—with a new preface by the author “A dazzling feat . . . meaty, often scintillating and sometimes scary . . . Greenhouse is a virtuoso of SCOTUS analysis.”—The Washington Post In Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect. In a page-turning narrative, she recounts the twelve months when the court turned its back on its legacy and traditions, abandoning any effort to stay above and separate from politics. With remarkable clarity and deep institutional knowledge, Greenhouse shows the seeds being planted for the court’s eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, expansion of access to guns, and unprecedented elevation of religious rights in American society. Both a chronicle and a requiem, Justice on the Brink depicts the struggle for the soul of the Supreme Court, and points to the future that awaits all of us.
Download or read book Courtwatchers written by Clare Cushman and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2011-10-16 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first Supreme Court history told primarily through eyewitness accounts from Court insiders, Clare Cushman provides readers with a behind-the-scenes look at the people, practices, and traditions that have shaped an American institution for more than 200 years. Each chapter covers one general thematic topic and weaves a narrative from memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts by the Justices, their spouses and children, court reporters, clerks, oral advocates, court staff, journalists, and other eyewitnesses. These accounts allow readers to feel as if they are squeezed into the packed courtroom in 1844 as silver-tongued orator Daniel Webster addresses the court; eavesdropping on an exasperated Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1930 as he snaps at a clerk’s critique of his draft opinion; or sharing a taxi with future Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005 as he rushes home from the airport in anticipation of a phone call from President Bush offering him the nomination to the Supreme Court. This entertaining and enlightening tour of the Supreme Court’s colorful personalities and inner workings will be of interest to all readers of American political and legal history.
Download or read book The Most Activist Supreme Court in History written by Thomas M. Keck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When conservatives took control of the federal judiciary in the 1980s, it was widely assumed that they would reverse the landmark rights-protecting precedents set by the Warren Court and replace them with a broad commitment to judicial restraint. Instead, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has reaffirmed most of those liberal decisions while creating its own brand of conservative judicial activism. Ranging from 1937 to the present, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History traces the legal and political forces that have shaped the modern Court. Thomas M. Keck argues that the tensions within modern conservatism have produced a court that exercises its own power quite actively, on behalf of both liberal and conservative ends. Despite the long-standing conservative commitment to restraint, the justices of the Rehnquist Court have stepped in to settle divisive political conflicts over abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, presidential elections, and much more. Keck focuses in particular on the role of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, whose deciding votes have shaped this uncharacteristically activist Court.
Download or read book Breaking In written by Joan Biskupic and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I knew she'd be trouble." So quipped Antonin Scalia about Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court's annual end-of-term party in 2010. It's usually the sort of event one would expect from such a grand institution, with gentle parodies of the justices performed by their law clerks, but this year Sotomayor decided to shake it up—flooding the room with salsa music and coaxing her fellow justices to dance. It was little surprise in 2009 that President Barack Obama nominated a Hispanic judge to replace the retiring justice David Souter. The fact that there had never been a nominee to the nation's highest court from the nation's fastest growing minority had long been apparent. So the time was ripe—but how did it come to be Sonia Sotomayor? In Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice, the veteran journalist Joan Biskupic answers that question. This is the story of how two forces providentially merged—the large ambitions of a talented Puerto Rican girl raised in the projects in the Bronx and the increasing political presence of Hispanics, from California to Texas, from Florida to the Northeast—resulting in a historical appointment. And this is not just a tale about breaking barriers as a Puerto Rican. It's about breaking barriers as a justice. Biskupic, the author of highly praised judicial biographies of Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, now pulls back the curtain on the Supreme Court nomination process, revealing the networks Sotomayor built and the skills she cultivated to go where no Hispanic has gone before. We see other potential candidates edged out along the way. And we see how, in challenging tradition and expanding our idea of a justice (as well as expanding her public persona), Sotomayor has created tension within and without the court's marble halls. As a Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor has shared her personal story to an unprecedented degree. And that story—of a Latina who emerged from tough times in the projects not only to prevail but also to rise to the top—has even become fabric for some of her most passionate comments on matters before the Court. But there is yet more to know about the rise of Sonia Sotomayor. Breaking In offers the larger, untold story of the woman who has been called "the people's justice."
Download or read book The Roberts Court written by Marcia Coyle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts has been at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Here, the much-honored, expert Supreme Court reporter Marcia Coyle's examination of four landmark cases is "informative, insightful, clear and fair...Coyle reminds us that Supreme Court decisions matter. A lot." (Portland Oregonian). Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the US Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action. Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside analysis of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began and how they exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United case. Most dramatically, her reporting shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups have strategized to find cases and crafted them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority. The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat to the struggle to lay down the law of the land.
Download or read book Life Animated written by Ron Suskind and published by Disney Electronic Content. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now an award winning motion picture! Imagine being trapped inside a Disney movie and having to learn about life mostly from animated characters dancing across a screen of color. A fantasy? A nightmare? This is the real-life story of Owen Suskind, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind and his wife, Cornelia. An autistic boy who couldn't speak for years, Owen memorized dozens of Disney movies, turned them into a language to express love and loss, kinship, brotherhood.The family was forced to become animated characters, communicating with him in Disney dialogue and song; until they all emerge, together, revealing how, in darkness, we all literally need stories to survive. This edition has been updated with additional material from the Suskind family.
Download or read book Nine Scorpions in a Bottle written by Max Lerner and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's great legal scholars and most respected journalists shares half a century of observating and writing about the Supreme Court. This life's work covers the Court from its beginnings to its recent moments of crisis. Lerner has written about the judicial process for over 50 years.
Download or read book Scorpions written by Noah Feldman and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2010-11-08 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed. Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius. They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. Scorpians tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself.
Download or read book The Brethren written by Bob Woodward and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 717 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Brethren is the first detailed behind-the-scenes account of the Supreme Court in action. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong have pierced its secrecy to give us an unprecedented view of the Chief and Associate Justices—maneuvering, arguing, politicking, compromising, and making decisions that affect every major area of American life.
Download or read book Black Robe written by Brian Moore and published by New Canadian Library. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Robe, an account of the 17th-century encounter between the Huron and Iroquois the French called "Les Sauvages" and the French Jesuit missionaries the native people called "Blackrobes," is Brian Moore's most striking book. No other novel has so well captured both the intense--and disastrous--strangeness of each culture to one another, and their equal strangeness to our own much later understanding.
Download or read book Tyrants in Black Robes written by Boydq Hartman and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Constitution denies to Congress the right to create titles of nobility or to allow any citizen the right to a foreign title of nobility. Yet, perhaps to gain the respect due their calling, judges, unlike any other office holders, are permitted to adorn themselves with black robes and conduct their trials in court houses of stately grandeur. These judges are indeed of a different pattern then other public servants. These judges are looked upon in virtual reverence and their judgments are added to those great volumes of decisions that make up our legal if not moral heritage. But what would be the consequences to our ordered society if judges found not the constraints of an ordered rule of law, but found instead that they had instead the ability to and passion to formulate the law without reference to peoples will? Such jurists could with such power become tyrants of an entirely different order.
Download or read book Sandra Day O Connor written by Joan Biskupic and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sandra Day O’Connor takes you behind the closed doors of the Supreme Court to reveal how Justice O’Connor helped craft landmark decisions on abortion, affirmative action, and a host of other critical issues. Joan Biskupic has broken new ground in reporting on O’Connor’s life and historic role on the high court. This lively, fast-paced account will make people rethink how they view this extraordinary woman and her fellow justices. An indispensable read for anyone interested in politics, the law, and power as exercised by one of the most fascinating women of our time.” -Andrea Mitchell Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned. She was called the most powerful woman in America, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Then, just one year short of a quarter century on the bench, she surprised her colleagues and the nation by announcing her retirement. Drawing on information from once-private papers of the justices, hundreds of interviews with legal and political insiders, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, Joan Biskupic examines O'Connor's remarkable career, providing an in-depth account of her transformation from tentative jurist to confident architect of American law. The portrait that emerges is of a complex and multifaceted woman: lawyer, politician, legislator, and justice, as well as wife, mother, A-list society hostess, and competitive athlete. To all appearances, she was the polite lady in pearls, handbag on her arm. But in the back rooms of politics and the law, she was a determined, focused strategist. O'Connor was the feminist who, rather than rebel against the male-dominated system, worked from within -- and succeeded. As Biskupic demonstrates, Justice O'Connor became much more than a "first." During her twenty-four-year tenure, she wrote the decisions on some of the most controversial social battles of our time. O'Connor's tie-breaking opinions on issues such as abortion rights, affirmative action, the death penalty, and religious freedom will have a lasting effect far into the future. O'Connor also cast one of the five votes that cut off the Florida recounts and allowed George W. Bush to take the White House in the 2000 contested presidential election. With an eye to the American people and a keen sense of public attitudes, she worked behind the scenes to shape the law and transform the legal standards by which future cases will be decided. From O'Connor's isolated upbringing on the Lazy B ranch in Arizona through her time as a state legislator to her rise as a justice -- along the way confronting her own personal challenges and crises, including breast cancer -- Biskupic presents a vivid, astute depiction of the justice -- and of the woman beneath the black robe. In so doing, Sandra Day O'Connor also provides an unprecedented look inside the exclusive, famously secretive High Court.
Download or read book I Dissent written by Mark Tushnet and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, a collection of dissents from the most famous Supreme Court cases If American history can truly be traced through the majority decisions in landmark Supreme Court cases, then what about the dissenting opinions? In issues of race, gender, privacy, workers' rights, and more, would advances have been impeded or failures rectified if the dissenting opinions were in fact the majority opinions? In offering thirteen famous dissents-from Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board of Education to Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas, each edited with the judges' eloquence preserved-renowned Supreme Court scholar Mark Tushnet reminds us that court decisions are not pronouncements issued by the utterly objective, they are in fact political statements from highly intelligent but partisan people. Tushnet introduces readers to the very concept of dissent in the courts and then provides useful context for each case, filling in gaps in the Court's history and providing an overview of the issues at stake. After each case, he considers the impact the dissenting opinion would have had, if it had been the majority decision. Lively and accessible, I Dissent offers a radically fresh view of the judiciary in a collection that is essential reading for anyone interested in American history.
