From New York Times-bestselling author Adam Cohen, an examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years since the Nixon administration.
Weaving legal, political, and social history, Cohen creates a richly detailed, but accessible, account for all interested in the personalities and politics that have shaped and are continuing to shape not only the U.S. criminal justice system but also the fabric of American life. A must-read.
The book is a liberal cri de coeur, a lamentation of the many distinct and specific ways American society might be fairer, more equal and more humane if that one consequential change, the court’s decisive shift to the right under Nixon, had not occurred ... Most of the cases Cohen describes are well known to lawyers and law professors who work in those fields. But Cohen’s project is to bring these stories to a much broader audience. In that way, the book succeeds ... The book is less successful in drawing tight links between the court’s lurch to the right and the promise of the book’s title: an explanation of the rising inequality in the United States. The first chapters, which cover the rise and fall of the court’s rulings protecting the poor, are excellent. But explaining why the court pulled back from its project of protecting the rights of the poor does not really tell us why inequality has skyrocketed in this country over the past half-century ... Unconcerned with inside tales of intrigue and contingency, Cohen is content to simply tell us what the court decided. The book uses almost no inside sources. It offers precious few tales of internal drama. The drama, for Cohen, is there on the surface of the opinions ... This story does not explain every decision of the court for the past 50 years. But it explains a very high share of the important ones, both the famous rulings and those a little further from the limelight, in which the court has worked gradually and with surprisingly little fanfare to unravel the achievements of the only significant period in American history in which it regularly sided with the poor and other marginalized people.
Given individual justices who can sometimes seem too big for their robes, Cohen’s wonky emphasis on cases rather than characters offers a steady perspective ... One of Supreme Inequality’s strengths is Cohen’s ability to spot parallels and draw connections for readers over a range of legal disciplines. This signposting is essential for a book that covers so much ground ... [But] Cohen risks populist overreach ... Cohen makes a respectable case that the Court has protected the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, but he downplays lines of case law that undercut his thesis. The result is a book that is frequently persuasive but overly pessimistic ... This unevenness shows up in the book’s rhetoric as well. Although Cohen is relentlessly substantive, his arguments can sometimes veer toward newsroom hot takes and away from scholarly reflection ... overheated language straight out of Orwell...reveals an ironic limitation of a book that declines to follow the justices into their conference room for a little backstage dish.
