MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe more Mr. Breyer describes \"interpretation\" along such lines—illustrated with detailed accounts of various cases from his time on the court—the harder it is to understand what he means by \"interpretation\" ... Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Reading the Constitution is its attempt to anchor Mr. Breyer’s jurisprudence in the American founding.
Stephen Vladeck
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Vladeck’s book starts with a history of how the Court picks its cases in the first place ... Discussions of the election cases, religious-liberty cases and abortion cases make up the rest of Mr. Vladeck’s book, and here its tone changes substantially. He launches invective against the Court’s conservative justices ... His sweeping judgments only make it harder for readers to ascertain the legal and factual questions at hand.
Peter S. Canellos
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Canellos rescues these cases from law-school casebooks and situates them in American history ... Harlan’s account of our \'color-blind\' Constitution will surely (and rightly) attract attention in the years ahead. And his criticism of monopoly power will echo in today’s debates over big-tech companies and social-media platforms. We would all do well to look more deeply into the ideas and ideals that informed his dissents and the qualities of character that enabled him to stand alone in their defense.
John Fabian Witt
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Witt ranges widely, roping together into the Quarantinist State such disparate examples as sensible colonial-era quarantines for overseas arrivals, abominable anti-Chinese laws of the early 20th century, and \'America’s prison archipelago\' today. Pandemics begin to seem little more than a loose organizing principle for Mr. Witt’s laundry lists of policy complaints ... Despite the political bent to the book’s second half, Mr. Witt criticizes the \'hyper-partisanship\' of today’s controversies—symptoms of which, in his analysis, seem to present only among Republicans ... Politics aside, Mr. Witt’s history of pandemics and civil liberties illustrates a crucial constitutional challenge ... American Contagions leaves too many crucial questions unanswered, sometimes even unasked.
Adam Cohen
MixedThe Wall Street JournalReaders not already familiar with the relevant cases and constitutional text will receive little help from Supreme Inequality, which reduces nuanced arguments to brief descriptions of winners and losers. Meanwhile, Mr. Cohen offers biographical descriptions to explain why judges have voted for the poor or against them ... A \'different set of blueprints would have built a different society,\' Mr. Cohen concludes. The blueprints he prefers are not the Constitution’s original meaning but progressive activists’ modern agenda.
Lawrence Cappello
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Cappello brings together several aspects of \'privacy\' in American life and law to show how changing technologies and cultural values shaped our expectations of privacy ... Mr. Cappello focuses on constitutional law but not particularly on the Constitution itself; his analysis doesn’t grapple with the actual limits set by the text of our founding legal document. Recalibrating the modern right to privacy might be good policy, but is it good law? Does the Constitution actually protect that right? If not, why should judges, rather than legislators, be the ones protecting it? ... The modern world of private surveillance gets only cursory treatment in this book, even though it begins with an anecdote about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. One can safely say the modern world of social media is Brandeis’s anti-privacy nightmare ... Is the \'right to be forgotten\' a \'right to be let alone,\' or does it protect litigious powerful figures from the sunshine that is the \'best disinfectant\'? Mr. Cappello’s historical analysis only begins to shed light on those questions.
Stephen Budiansky
MixedThe Wall Street JournalHere [in his account of Holmes\'s fighting in the Civil War] Mr. Budiansky’s account shines, especially his depiction of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff ... His reputation will benefit still further from Mr. Budiansky’s work, which interlaces insightful discussion of his jurisprudence with touching portraits of Holmes’s devotion to his wife, Fanny; famous friends like Louis Brandeis; and less famous friends ... Mr. Budiansky writes with admirable lucidity about Holmes’s life experience and general outlook, but he flinches from some of some of the darker implications of Holmes’s extreme judicial self-restraint ... Holmes wrote the majority opinion refusing to order Alabama to register 5,000 disenfranchised black voters. And in Buck v. Bell (1927), Holmes’s most infamous moment, the justice wrote the majority opinion refusing to find constitutional fault in a Virginia law requiring the sterilization of those found to be mentally defective ... Mr. Budiansky draws only a minimal connection between these cases and Holmes’s overall jurisprudence.
David A. Kaplan
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Kaplan’s critique of judicial power will resonate with the court’s critics on both right and left, though they will disagree about which precedents should be abandoned ... Mr. Kaplan’s bipartisan approach ends abruptly. He is routinely negative about the court’s conservatives ... By contrast, the liberal justices generally shine in Mr. Kaplan’s account ... The political lens through which Mr. Kaplan surveys the scene not only undermines his account of the court; it undermines his treatment of court opinions, too ... Like today’s Supreme Court, The Most Dangerous Branch too often shows a lack of self-restraint that undermines its credibility.
Adam Winkler
MixedThe Wall Street JournalIs a corporation an artificial \'person\' with rights and duties independent of its members? Or is it a collection of people associating with one another? And, in turn, what constitutional rights protect it? As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler details in We the Corporations, the controversy is as old as the republic itself ... Throughout his narrative, Mr. Winkler describes corporations as \'constitutional first movers.\' It is a generous sentiment but not entirely accurate. Often the true first mover was a government asserting coercive power; the corporations who defensively asserted constitutional rights were \'second movers,\' or perhaps \'first responders.\' It is possible that the court’s decision in Citizens United, bolstered by Hobby Lobby’s successful challenge, on religious-liberty grounds, to ObamaCare’s contraception mandate, has cemented the status of corporations as \'persons\' enjoying broad constitutional liberty. If so, those now denouncing the court for such pro-corporate decisions might find themselves happily adapting to the new normal. Mr. Winkler’s book teaches that the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies.
