Justice on the Brink
A Requiem for the Supreme Court
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Supreme Court reached a tipping point and lurched rightward with the arrival of Amy Coney Barrett, according to this probing examination of recent decisions. Pulitzer-winner Greenhouse (Becoming Justice Blackmun) surveys the fallout from the death in 2020 of liberal feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by Barrett, a conservative Catholic with antiabortion personal views. Barrett's impact is most visible in clinching conservative majorities that struck down Covid-19 restrictions on religious services, part of the Court's trend, Greenhouse writes, toward using religious-freedom claims as "an off-ramp from a law intended to apply to everyone." Greenhouse also discusses abortion-rights cases that might undermine Roe v. Wade, and the Court's rightward drift on voting rights and affirmative action. Though the treatment of Barrett, who's described as the conservative judicial movement's "chosen one," is somewhat melodramatic, Greenhouse incisively dissects the crucial struggle between doctrinaire conservatives Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts, whose preferred strategy is to gradually change Court jurisprudence through subtle rulings on low-profile cases. Distinguished by Greenhouse's vivid profiles of the justices and lucid unraveling of their knotty legal theories, this is a revelatory study of the Supreme Court in flux.
