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America Meets The Justices: Explaining The Supreme Court To The General Reader, Laura Ray

Laura K. Ray

Curiosity about the Justices of the Supreme Court has increased dramatically since the New Deal era, when Americans first became aware of how directly the Court’s decisions affected their lives. That interest is reflected in three books about the Court written for a general audience, all of them provoking controversy and attracting substantial numbers of readers. In 1936 Washington columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen published The Nine Old Men, a partisan attack on the conservative members of the Court as political actors driven by their individual attitudes rather than by the law. Over forty years later, investigative journalists …