PositiveThe Washington PostThe 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.
