



The Court at War
FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the country—with consequences that endure today
By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice.
But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.
The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.
The justices’ shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan’s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sloan (The Great Decision), a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, offers an astute look at the Supreme Court during WWII, an era that tested the Court's ability to balance the Constitution's protections of individual rights against the extraordinary measures the government thought necessary to win the war. Sloan views the Court's protection of individual rights in a positive light, pointing to the 1942 opinion in Skinner v. Oklahoma denying a state's ability to forcibly sterilize a criminal defendant, a decision that has become a precedent underlying the right to same-sex marriage; and West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, a 1943 decision that protected the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to salute the U.S. flag on religious grounds. On the other hand, Sloan argues the 1944 opinion in United States v. Korematsu that found government had authority to move hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the name of national security stands as one of the worst opinions in the Court's history. Alongside astute case analyses, Sloan vividly explores the fractious relationships between justices whose judicial philosophies, personalities, and backgrounds radically differed. The result is an accessible narrative that highlights how the forces of history, politics, and personality influenced one of America's most important institutions at a critical time in history. It's an entertaining and worthwhile account. Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the Supreme Court decision the protected the right to refuse to salute the flag on religious grounds.