This is probably the worst book about the Supreme Court that I have ever read. The structure is intriguing: Rosen looks at a few pairs of Supreme Court justices (or, in one case, Thomas Jefferson, who was not a justice but had an effect) and contrasts their temperaments. Ostensibly, he is making the point that a justice's temperament, specifically in a flexible willingness to compromise to achieve consensus, is the most important factor to the justice's long-term effectiveness. In practice, though, Rosen fails to make the point at nearly every opportunity.

The chapters read like a spray of trivia, with gossipy bits about justices' personal affairs and loving quotes from their dissenting opinions. Although references to temperament and lasting legacies are awkwardly forced in among the trivia items, the facts do not support the conclusions. For example, Rosen uses Justice Harlan as an example of a good temperament, but it looks like Harlan never gets his way on the Court and is instead loved after his time for having ideas that we like today. If that is how Rosen views effectiveness, he needs to explain it more clearly.

I can recommend that someone flip through this book to study up for trivia night at a bar, especially one near a law school, but it has no other value that I can see.

What makes a US supreme court justice effective or influential? What quality must one possess? According to Jeffrey Rosen's The Supreme Court, the answer is something called judicial temperament. Rosen develops this idea and illustrates what he means by judicial temperament by contrasting personalities that have influenced how the court evolved.

He looks at the first effective chief justice, John Marshall and compares him with President William Jefferson. Marshall established the principle of judicial review, or the idea that the Supreme Court could invalidate a law if it ruled it conflicted with the constitution. Rosen then turns to a pair of justices from the end of the 19th century: Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Marshall Harlan. Holmes was a radical skeptic who rejected all claims to moral certainty and instead favored the idea of majority rule while Harlan sought to use the constitution and the court's rulings to guard civil rights. Harlan was passionate and ultimately his views were vindicated by history but because he was not effective at convincing his fellow justices to vote his way, he won few verdicts and expressed himself in dissenting opinions.

The last two pairings are especially interesting. Rosen first takes two liberals, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, one competent and effective (Black) and one brilliant but ineffective (Douglas). The following chapter does the same thing with two conservative justices, William Rehnquist (competent and effective) and Anthony Scalia (brilliant but relatively ineffective).

For Rosen, an effective justice displays judicial temperament by promoting collegiality among his colleagues, by promoting the idea that it is *the Court* that pronounces itself, and not individual justices. Effectiveness means caring about the Court as an institution, and accepting compromise (e.g. by softening the language in an opinion) in order to get a vote. Marshall, Black, and Rehnquist all did this, while Harlan and Scalia tended to be ideological purists.

The book ends with a chapter on the current chief justice, John Roberts. Appointed by George W. Bush, Roberts is devoting himself to reshaping the court along the collegial lines John Marshall envisioned; as a consequence the first Roberts court had more unanimous decisions in a row than any other court in recent history. This is a surprise, since Bush had originally promised to appoint purists and strict textualists like Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Enlightening and highly recommended!

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

Jeffrey Rosen doesn't always demonstrate persuasively the importance of temperament in determining the success of justices. That's ok, because it's not quite enough to hang an entire book on. His examples are reasonable, with perhaps Justice Holmes given the weakest argument and the Marshall - Jefferson case the strongest. (This is not a book for committed Jeffersonians.)

Instead, Mr. Rosen aggressively reviews the policies and decisions of the Court, with the spin on temperament and personality brought into play when it may have been an important factor. Mr. Rosen certainly doesn't hide his own opinions, which might annoy some readers, but gives the book more spark. Justices who were slow to support African-Americans or who resisted the growth in federal power or otherwise were behind the historical direction were presented less attractively than those who were more in sync with Rosen's views. For example, Justice Holmes was praised more for his later career, when his policies came around to more acceptable positions.

Not that this was all black and white in the book. Mr. Rosen comments positively on each, even Justice Scalia, and points out faults in his favorites. That more complete view adds balance and value, especially when tied back to the original premise on personality and temperament and their origins.

The optimistic assessment of John Roberts after one year makes for an intriguing snapshot. I write this a few days after the controversial 5-4 "Citizens United" campaign finance decision. One would think that Mr. Rosen probably feels that some of potential has been lost. Then again, he never really made a solid case that "consensus' was that important. We can appreciate how it helps when the Chief and the Associate Justices get along, work efficiently and respect each other. Perhaps I am naive to wish for a collegial court even in a world dominated by 5-4 and 6-3 decisions.

Rosen has written an entertaining study of the Supreme Court that is organized in an interesting fashion by contrasting four sets of comtemporary jurists in four different eras. He ends with an excellent interview with Chief Justice Roberts, who stresses the need for the Court to act like a collegial body and to do so by trying to write unanimous opinions in small cases. Collegiality and consensus can become a habit, Roberts points out.

I question Rosen's criticisms of Holmes and his unvarnished admiration for the first Justice Harlan, as well as for Justice Black. To dismiss Holmes as someone who viewed law as politics by other means is simply wrong. Holmes was not that cynical, and his academic writing is perhaps the finest expression of mainstream American legal philosophy. And Holmes was a more successful Justice than Rosen is willing to concede. As for Harlan, his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson was terrific, and his story is quite interesting. But to say he was, on balance, a better exemplar for the judicial temperament than Holmes is a reach. The younger Harlan, by contrast, was a truly great jurist whose opinions are universally admired. Black has lost some of his luster (at least among liberals), as his originalist school of interpretation is not sustainable. The Founding Fathers intended great and general priciples which have to be applied in changing contexts that could not possibly have been specifically foreseen. I don't think that an automatic assault rifle is necessarily within the right to bear "arms", and a narrow linquistic study of what "arms" meant in 1790 does not advance the inquiry very much. The question is how to achieve the balance between government regulation and individual freedom that was clearly intended by the text and the history of the Second Amendment and of the Constitution as a whole.

As for the Rehnquist vs. Scalia discussion, I've read a generation of Rehnquist opinions, and he was a right-wing judicial activist who did not do an exceptionally good job of crafting his opinions. Although he compares favorably with Scalia, so what? When Judges like O'Connor and even Rehnquist are described as "liberal", or "moderate", or "centrist" it just goes to show how far right the Court has moved.

As for Rosen's emphasis on judical temperament, it is certainly important. But no discussion of the Court is complete without an inquiry into underlying judicial philosophy and the ability to express it well in written opinions. However entertaining, the emphasis on personalities and judicial temperament is overdone.

Here's an interesting technique of historiography: match up pairs of historical figures, making sure that in each pair you agree with one, and disagree with the other. Then praise the one in almost every way, while denigrating the other. Lastly, declare that the first was on the side of truth and justice, while the other was merely self-serving. Rosen applies this rubric to pairs of Supreme Court Justices through the ages (although, oddly, he pairs John Marshall with Thomas Jefferson, who of course was never on the Court). Rosen is somewhat ambivalent about the actual role of truth and justice on the Court, but he pulls no punches in proclaiming his thesis that a jurist who looks only to his own legacy will, in the end, have a very poor legacy indeed. He holds in high regard those Justices who essentially play along to get along, and work toward consensus and unity on the Court (he includes Marshall, Harlan, Black, and Rehnquist as the more collegial Justices), rather than those Justices who carve their own jurisprudential path and stick to it (Jefferson, Holmes, Douglas, and Scalia get labeled as "ideologues" under this rubric). Rosen's thesis may seem unbiased, but he doesn't give us enough of a reason to believe that consensus is a virtue in its own right. As hard as it is to come down on the same side of any issue as Justice Scalia, I find myself wondering if developing a clear and consistent legal theory, and then applying it fairly, isn't more important than trying to get people to agree with you.

Having dispensed with the basic premise of Rosen's book, I did quite enjoy the book itself. It's very well written, and the anecdotes about both current and historical figures are very interesting. Any student of the Court, or even those with a more cursory interest, will find this book a valuable and enjoyable read.

This was a great book. It was a fairly short read but it covered the most influential figures on the bench. The author focused on temperament and how each judge's temperament changed and influenced the bench. Each chapter would compare and contrast two judges from the past to present.

I really enjoyed this book. It was interesting and the reader was able to see how individual personalities really did affect how they ruled and the political leanings of the Supreme Court.

I definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in learning a little bit about the U.S. Supreme Court.

Perhaps such a designation (Battle of the Titans) evokes thoughts of prize fighting: Ali vs Frazier, an unbridled Marciano, an ageless Archie Moore, the sweet science of a Sugar Ray Robinson,or an awesome powered George Foreman.The battles here are of greater significance than a battle for prizes. These legal/political discourses were for the hearts, minds and souls of a nation.

John Kennedy remarked at a formal dinner in the White House that no such assemblage of talent had gathered there before (his choices for his administration); the exception being when Thomas Jefferson dined alone at the White House. Mr. Jefferson, third president, revered, controversial, and certainly an opponent of exceptional importance and reputation. Nevertheless, he met a "check mate" in showdowns with Chief Justice John Marshall. In the Chief Justice, Jeffrey Rosen describes a person of exceptional intelligence, profound vision, and a superior legal mind; one comes to perceive the grandeur of Judicial Review. What would be the probability that Chief Justice Marshall would beat Thomas Jefferson at every legal/political confrontation they had? "The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America" starts with this contention of Marshall and Jefferson.

With such a dawning the book doesn't get any better,yet, it doesn't recind in quality. Other classic showdowns emerge with accompanying events of the durations.For example,Plessy v. Ferguson and the decision that overturned it, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Various Supreme Court Justices are distinguished as they rule on important cases along with their dissenting peers.The author accounts for an impersonal portrayal of these events.

What is the difference between the United States democracy and other democracies? Jeffrey Rosen answers it well: The United States Supreme Court. This book is a laudable read.

I found this account of the Supreme Court far less engaging than "The Nine". Rosen's main point - that judicial temperament determines success on the court, in the sense that justices who work well with others have more influence - hardly qualifies as an earth-shattering insight. But it causes him to adopt an awkward structure for the book, sorting through history to pick pairs of judges, who are then analyzed in a series of artificial head-to-head comparison. The result seems forced, and not particularly illuminating.

Rosen may have thought it a coup when he scored the in-depth interview with the new Chief Justice Roberts that rounds out the book. But it's basically a string of banalities, wherein Rosen seems like nothing more than a mouthpiece for Roberts's insubstantial, Pollyanna-ish platitudes. The effect is to undermine any credibility Rosen might have built up in the preceding chapters.

But how much respect does this kind of writing really deserve, anyway?

"If the pairings of judicial temperaments in this book suggest anything, it is that courting attention and partisan approval in the short term is no guarantee of judicial respect in the long term. In each of the pairings, there have been consistent tropes. The brilliant academic is less appealing over time than the collegial pragmatist. The self-centered loner is less effective than the convivial team player. The resentful braggarts wear less well than the secure justices who know who they are. The narcissist wields judicial power less sure-handedly than the judge who shows personal as well as judicial humility. The loose cannons shoot themselves in the foot, while those who know when to hold their tongues appear more judicious. (On the court, a justice often achieves more by saying less.) The ideological purists are marginalized, while those who understand when not to take each principle to its logical extreme are vindicated by history. Those who view cases in purely philosophical terms are less sure-footed than those who are aware of the cases' practical effects. Those with the common touch win broader support than those who live entirely in abstractions".

An author who indulges in eight consecutive repetitions of the same point (i) needs a better editor and (ii) must not have a very high opinion of his readers. This book was not terrible, but it wasn't very good either.

Recently there have been many good books available about the Supreme Court. For a quick, no-nonsense straight to the heart of the matter history of Supreme Court, this is the book. A history of the Supreme Court derived from its major decisions and its major dissenters. The author shows that often justices that may be on the dissenting side of Supreme Court decisions are sometimes justices that are ahead of their time. Their lonely decisions often become basics to the American way of life in a later era. The Author, Jeff Rosen also relays a life's lesson to Supreme Court Justices, that in the interplay between majority vs. dissenters decisions, no matter how dedicated, wise, or oracle-like a justice appears, history bears out that the justices that "play ball", fraternizes, cajoles, and displays a good nature seem to win out. In other words the Law is not just the Law, the decisions cannot be divorced from the political impetus that brought them to the court and the most successful Justices are the most political Justices. Nothing underscores this more than the chapter on Justice Holmes and Justice Harlan. Justice Holmes was an ivory tower type justice and his reputation is somewhat revered today. Justice Harlan is lesser known, but the track record shows that modern American life revolves around decisions he made and that Holmes has been surpassed in almost all his major decisions.
A very rewarding book, that will make the reader feel that in one book you can gain an understanding of what make the supreme court tick, and some of the twists ands turns it has taken in its history

Jeffrey Rosen's accessible and engaging companion book to the PBS series offers not only a fine introduction to the U.S. Supreme Court (and many of the most important cases it's decided in its history) but also a perspective from which to understand the Court as an institution. This perspective is tantamount to Rosen's thesis: that "judicial temperament" is a quality possessed by the Court's most distinguished justices, those who subordinate their ideological leanings to the deliberative and practical process of establishing legal consensus.

Rosen illustrates his thesis with four case studies: Marshall and Jefferson (not a justice); Harlan and Holmes; Black and Douglas; Rehnquist and Scalia. In each case one justice is seen as embracing judicial temperament while the other (or Jefferson, in the first chapter) is cast as something of an ideological maverick, a flamboyant but ultimately less influential constitutional thinker. Like one reviewer here, I found the questions raised by such pairings to be productive rather than reductive: Rosen is making a legal-historical argument here, and so reading his history of the Supreme Court is necessarily an exercise in critical interpretation.

The chapters on the twentieth-century Court are excellent, with Rosen showing how the liberal-leaning Hugo Black and the conservative-leaning William Rehnquist had more in common with each other (in terms of judicial temperament) than with their respective colleagues: William O. Douglas and Antonin Scalia. Here Rosen parses the legacies of Black and Rehnquist by showing how their restrained judicial character helped them produce well-crafted decisions that advanced the Court's legitimacy in the public eye.

Douglas and Scalia, on the other hand, were/are so committed to the purity of their ideological beliefs that, whatever one thinks of their individual decisions (and I am decidedly aligned with Douglas over Scalia in this regard), one has to come to terms with the fact that their jurisprudence will not have a lasting influence on the law of the land. Douglas and Scalia are seen as larger-than-life personalities, self-aggrandizing justices who rarely spoke for the Court as such.

Again, you might agree or disagree with the specifics of Rosen's argument and framing of his historical examples. But the survey presented here is a solid, general introduction to Supreme Court history. And with judicial temperament Rosen gives us a lens through which we might view that history, and understand better exactly how the Court works.

For a look into some of the most well known figures in the Supreme Court, this book does a fantastic job. From in-depth analysis of their personalities to little anecdotes on each Justice, the Author clearly knows his history.

It's a tad short, and I think the specific cases could have been covered in greater detail. While it was informative, it didn't have that something special that had me anxious to keep reading. At times, I felt like I was reading a history book.

If you're someone looking to get some background into the Supreme Court and some of the characters that shaped it, this is a good book to start with. You may not feel completely entertained, but you will feel smarter after reading this book.