Justice on the Brink
The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“This landmark book gives us an invaluable perspective on the Supreme Court in democracy’s hour of maximum danger.”—Jon Meacham
The gripping story of the year that transformed the Supreme Court into the court of Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times
At the end of the Supreme Court’s 2019–20 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the court would move irrevocably to the far right hadn’t come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions in cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could respond to the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020–21 term, much about the nation’s highest court had changed. The right-wing supermajority had completed its first term on the bench, cementing Donald Trump’s legacy on American jurisprudence.
This is the story of those twelve months. From the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Coney Barrett, from the pandemic to the election, from the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in American life, the Supreme Court has been at the center of many of the biggest events of the year, with the liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer outnumbered six to three. Throughout Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her Supreme Court coverage, 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.
Ultimately, Greenhouse asks a fundamental question relevant to all Americans: Is this still John Roberts’s Supreme Court, or does the court now belong to Donald Trump?
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.
