In The Oath, journalist and attorney Jeffrey Toobin takes up where his 2007 book, The Nine, leaves off, painting a portrait of an activist Supreme Court, headed since 2005 by Chief Justice John Roberts, whose treatment of judicial precedent has been anything but conservative.
The foundation of Toobin's reportage is his interviews with the justices and more than 40 of their law clerks. The insights he gleans from these conversations, including the light they shed on the personal relationships among the justices (highlighted by the unlikely friendships between Antonin Scalia and his "Democratic" colleagues Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan) and their sharply divergent judicial philosophies, make for lively reading.
But the liberal-leaning Toobin offers much more than an inside-the-robing room tell-all; his research points him to a disturbing conclusion about where the law is headed as long as the Roberts/Scalia/Kennedy/Thomas/Alito bloc remains intact. Toobin points out how, time and again, in the name of trying to divine the original meaning of the Constitution's text, the Court's conservative wing (led by an increasingly partisan Scalia) has overturned interpretations of the document that have been settled for decades.
With four of the nine justices aged 74 or older, the odds are high that the president elected in 2012 will have a chance to fill at least one or two vacancies. After reading Toobin's clear-eyed book, it should be apparent why those choices could be fateful ones. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer