MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe title suggests that the volume is a creation-account involving modern judicial conservatism. In fact, it is the story of the fall. The hero of the tale is not the Supreme Court under Warren Burger but rather its predecessor, the Supreme Court as presided over by Chief Justice Earl Warren ... If the narrative the authors offer is a familiar one, they nevertheless bring sterling credentials to the storytelling...Over 13 succeeding chapters, the authors explore the Burger Court’s treatments of crime, race, privacy rights, gender equality, business and the presidency. They waste little time in revealing their sympathies. The opening pages praise Earl Warren’s Supreme Court for achieving a 'revolution in constitutional meaning'...The theme of the chapters that follow—which is to say, the whole book—is the Burger Court’s steady undoing of the Warren-era advance ... Their story is no glancing treatment. The narrative stretches out over more than 350 dense pages, with readers marched from one case to another. Indeed, the text at times reads like a law-school casebook. Still, for all their prolixity, the book’s basic storyline proves hard to sustain ... The authors would have been on firmer ground arguing that the Burger Court proved somewhat less adventurous on some issues than its predecessor while still increasing the power and importance of the courts in American life. But that would not have fitted the authors’ grander narrative—that myth about paradise lost.
