Lawless
How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes
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4.5 • 15개의 평가
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- US$14.99
출판사 설명
An instant New York Times bestseller!
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Something is deeply rotten at the Supreme Court. How did we get here and what can we do about it? Crooked Media podcast host Leah Litman shines a light on the unabashed lawlessness embraced by conservative Supreme Court justices and shows us how to fight back.
With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what’s gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it’s running on vibes. By “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials whose views are no longer shared by a majority of the country.
Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice meets Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad as Litman employs pop culture references and the latest decisions to deliver a funny, zeitgeisty, pulls-no-punches cri de coeur undergirded by impeccable scholarship. She gives us the tools we need to understand the law, the dynamics of courts, and the stakes of this current moment—even as she makes us chuckle on every page and emerge empowered to fight for a better future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Litman, a lawyer and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, debuts with a scathing takedown of the Roberts court. She argues that the court's conservative justices operate under the belief that "Republicans are being treated unfairly by the increasingly diverse society that no longer shares their views" and craft their decisions accordingly, with an eye toward protecting their "oppressed minority" (in the words of Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas) rather than attempting to adhere to legal precedent. Litman traces this "no laws, just vibes" attitude through recent controversies and decisions, ranging from Justice Samuel Alito's flying of an upside down flag in support of the Stop the Steal movement ahead of the January 6 insurrection to the court's obsessive "hunt for discrimination against religious and social conservatives" supposedly hidden within Covid lockdown measures. Along the way, Litman ingeniously mines the past half century of conservative politics for comedy gold as she builds her case that the movement's bugbears are now driving the court, from Richard Nixon's taped Oval Office rant about how ancient Greek civilization was destroyed by gay people to Trump adviser Stephen Miller's ominous suggestion that "what is happening with Taylor Swift is not organic." It's a clear-eyed and alarming view of a court captured by far-right conspiracy theories.
사용자 리뷰
Necessary legal analysis for this era in American history.
5/5 for the substantive analysis. L. Litman is brilliant—hard to find anyone who makes complex legal concepts so digestible, and so easy to connect to the world around us.
But the pop culture references (oowwee, there are a lot) wore thin pretty quickly for me. If you like them, you’ll love them! But I could’ve done without them.