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.

Cohen is uniquely qualified to write this book ... Cohen’s lucid writing makes even the most difficult court cases understandable as he expertly details the evolution of the law in areas as diverse as the workplace, criminal law, campaign contributions and the corporate boardroom. Cohen’s greatest strength, however, is his ability to explain clearly and urgently how the court, supposedly the least political of the three branches of the government, has relentlessly pursued a political agenda that has made Americans less equal and less secure ... If nothing else, Supreme Inequality reveals the extensive role the court plays in everyday American life. More importantly, it is a sobering history of how the court has disregarded precedent, statutory law and common sense to achieve its political agenda. The only question that remains is if it’s too late to do anything about it.

Readers 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.

Cohen, in his new book, explores the court's opinions over the past five decades and comes to a rueful conclusion: These decisions have greatly exacerbated America's gap between rich and poor ... Cohen shows, the Supreme Court has narrowed individuals' rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, awarded police more power, severely limited federal tools to address voter suppression and much more. Read Supreme Inequality for a breathtaking, if depressing, catalogue ... Cohen proves his argument that the Supreme Court's decisions have widened the wealth gap, diminished consumers' abilities to right wrongs, limited individuals' say in our democracy and greatly empowered corporations. His objections are clear, but he does not offer a path forward other than the unstated: Since the court fostered this concentration of corporate power and exacerbated the 1%'s rise, it has the power to reverse itself. At the dawn of 2020, it is unimaginable that the Roberts court would do so. On the contrary, this reviewer observes that conservative justices continue to actively seek cases that allow them to overturn decades of precedent favoring ordinary people.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Supreme Inequality is a howl of progressive rage against the past half-century of American jurisprudence. Cohen, a former New York Times and Time magazine writer, builds a comprehensive indictment of the court’s rulings ... While his legal analysis is accurate, Cohen’s fury makes him overstate the Supreme Court’s role.

There’s no shortage of important cases he has to cover from the past half-century. There’s no shortage of justices, either, a majority of whom are introduced in Supreme Inequality via crucial backstories, which are both necessary to the book’s arguments and detrimental to its pace ... The reason that Supreme Inequality works —and the reason its arguments should replace our oft-recycled legal narratives and representations — is due to Mr. Cohen’s relentless focus ... Mr. Cohen is also infuriatingly good at revisiting poorly written majority opinions ... a tour guide such as Mr. Cohen is invaluable. He understands both the 'what' and the 'why' of the court’s past 50 years.

Cohen makes a passionately partisan and powerfully persuasive case ... Cohen provides an informative and detailed analysis of dozens of cases involving education, campaign financing, voting rights, employment discrimination, collective bargaining, punitive damages, class-action suits, health care and criminal justice.

Cohen’s ambitious, well-written book makes a convincing case that the court has contributed to growing inequality through its rulings on everything from election law and education to corporate law and crime ... This is not news ... Cohen, a former New York Times editorial writer, still deserves credit for tying the threads together. He has a particular knack for writing about the court’s impact on society’s most vulnerable people.

In Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen argues that for half a century, America’s highest court has waged 'an unrelenting war' on the poor while championing the rich ... Supreme Inequality offers a damning indictment. With disciplined fury, Cohen patiently collates and dissects cases whose connective tissues are often overlooked, bringing to light a subject that should receive more attention than it does: the Supreme Court’s inequality jurisprudence ... Cohen writes in a lively, accessible fashion. He is attentive to the oft-neglected people behind the lawsuits named after them, he is careful to explain and humanize difficult legal abstractions, and he shows with sobering particularity the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decisions.

Cohen persuasively argues that the court’s five-decade pattern of 'siding with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak' bears at least some of the blame for our historic levels of socioeconomic inequality ... In a lament for what might have been as well as an attack on what is, Cohen clearly and forcefully reminds us of the power of this institution.

Throughout, Cohen examines roads not taken, ones that might have 'built a different society,' while noting that the court is likely to take an even more rightward tack in coming years ... A provocative and maddening study of judicial activism for the benefit of the haves over the have-nots.

... impassioned but one-sided ... Cohen highlights such questionable Court rulings as a 2003 decision upholding a defendant’s 25-years-to-life sentence for shoplifting videotapes, but dismisses the free-speech considerations informing the 2010 Citizens United campaign-finance ruling. His criticisms of the Court often center on its refusal to impose progressive policies such as mandatory busing to integrate schools and basic income guarantees. The result is a blistering critique in which politics overshadow constitutional principles.