A Fighting Chance - Elizabeth Warren (2014)

I don't know where to start with this review.  I was thinking maybe when I first became aware of Elizabeth Warren.  I was thinking maybe a warning that if you are a conservative, you should avoid reading so as to not give yourself a headache and start a thankless debate with me on some social media platform.  I was thinking maybe an actual quote from the text:

"Near the end of the line was a young man: early twenties, medium height, sandy-brown short hair.  When I reached him, he stepped forward and, with no preliminaries, blurted out that he had done everything he was supposed to do.  Counting on his fingers, he punched out the list.  Worked hard in high school.  Went to a good university.  Got good grades.  Graduated on time.  Everything--check, check, check.
And then...nothing.  No job.  No new apartment.  No bright future.  He'd been looking for work for more than a year, and still nothing.
Actually, it was worse than nothing.  Every day he fell a little further behind.  His student loan debt got a little bigger.  His stretch of unemployment got a little longer.  His fear that he would never build a secure, independent life cut a little deeper.
Now he had moved back in with his parents--and he had no idea when he would move out or how he would get his own life under way.
I met him in Worcester.  But I heard the same story in Falmouth and Dorchester.  In Marlborough, Marshfield, and Methuen.  In Weymouth and Westport and Ware.
I heard the story over and over and over, until I wanted to shout to the rooftops on behalf of these young men and women.  They were trying so hard, but they felt like their futures had broken apart before they had even begun." (274)

Everyone else reviewed this book when it came out--about three or four months ago (I put it on hold at the CPL and just got it now).  And they all pretty much started the same way: Elizabeth Warren says she is not running for President, but maybe, oh pretty please, she might!  And after this summer, and the multiple times she has reaffirmed that she has absolutely no intention of running, and after reading this book (which provides a pretty thorough treatment of the extraordinary anxiety she endured while mounting her senatorial campaign), I believe her, and I don't blame her.

***

The quote from above illustrates why I care enough about Elizabeth Warren to read her book.  All too often in this world it seems like nobody really looks out for you except for your family and friends.  It's passages like this in her book that reveal why Elizabeth Warren has become one of the most important political figures in the 21st century.  She really does care about serving the public.

A Fighting Chance is broken up into a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue.  The prologue is her thesis statement, so to speak, in which she explains how she was able to build a life decidedly worth living from the foundation of a lower-middle class background.  And how it probably couldn't happen today:

"Here's the hard truth: America isn't building that kind of future any longer.
Today the game is rigged--rigged to work for those who have money and power.  Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to supports laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor.  Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they'll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children." (2)

The first chapter, "Choosing Battles," is 42 pages long and is basically the purest "autobiography" in the book.  It tells her story from her childhood in the early 1960's through her second marriage and professorship at Harvard Law in the early 1990's.  It's pretty concise and appropriately details all of the sometimes idiosyncratic changes she made over the course of thirty years.  It will again prove to anyone that life is not always a straight path with obvious signposts along the way to help you achieve the best possible outcome.

The second chapter, "The Bankruptcy Wars," is 34 pages long and is probably my favorite section.  I am sure plenty of people expect that reading about her efforts to maintain actual consumer protections in the law that would come to be known as the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (or BAPCPA) will be boring--unless they happened to study it, and realize how fascinating it can be.  To those unfamiliar with BAPCPA, the first thing to note is that its title is extremely misleading.  The banking industry began lobbying for changes in the Bankruptcy Code sometime in the late 1990's, and Elizabeth Warren served on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission.  I won't talk about the changes--I am sure you can look it up on wikipedia.  But I was particularly surprised to see how the number of bankruptcy filings fluctuated over the years.  In 1980, there were 287,570 non-business bankruptcy filings.  In 1990, there were  718,107.  In 2004, there were 1,563,145 filings (however I think this figure includes business bankruptcies).  In 2005, before BAPCPA kicked in, the number hit 2,039,214.  The next year, it dropped down 597,965.  Just reading Warren try to explain these figures is illuminating.

The third chapter, "Bailing Out the Wrong People," is 54 pages long and primarily about the 2008 financial crisis and her role on the Congressional Oversight Panel (or COP, which she loves the idea of being).

The fourth chapter, "What $1 Million a Day Can Buy," is 43 pages long and reads like an extension of the previous chapter.  There doesn't appear to be much appreciable difference about the content or tone.

The fifth chapter, "An Agency for the People," is 44 pages long and details her efforts at starting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  While I laud the CFPB, it seems pretty much impossible for me to get a job there, so reading this chapter made me feel slightly depressed.

The sixth chapter, "The Battle for the Senate," is 65 pages long and will probably be the highlight for most readers.  I had followed Warren's campaign in 2012 pretty closely and I remembered a lot of the events she described, so it was very fun to read about her private thoughts on formerly public matters.

The epilogue briefly mentions her bill to cap student loan interest rates.  Like most of the legislation she has tried to affect, her dreams did not completely come true--compromises were made, but a few more people would be helped:

"And student loans?  No, I didn't get the Bank on Students Act passed.  But at least the final deal on student loan interest rates was better than where it started: $15 billion better for students over the next ten years.  An, in the end, I wasn't alone.  More than a dozen senators from around the country stood up with me to say no to any deal in which the government makes a profit off the backs of our students.  That's not a bad place to begin the next round in this battle--and believe me, we will come back to this issue again." (275-276)

That may be cold comfort to people with 6.8% and 7.8% interest rates on debt with a principal of $95,000, especially since the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act was blocked (thank you, Mitch McConnell).  Nevertheless, after reading A Fighting Chance, I am confident that Warren is not going to stop until she secures another victory--even if it is only a partial one.

To be honest this feels like kind of a toothless review.  I like the way Warren breaks up each chapter into mini-chapters.  The book is very reader-friendly.  It's very detailed, and I enjoyed reading it.  I am a huge fan of Senator Warren so obviously my review is going to be a bit biased.  I must admit that sometimes the book feels repetitive--in particular it seems like she mentions the support of the Firefighters in Boston twice, where the second time is a more detailed account (and includes the only f-bomb, expurgated, in the text--earlier on Warren spells out "Bullshit Whistle" and apologizes for the dirty word).  Sometimes certain turns of phrase show up several more times than seems necessary.  But I suppose this is all part-and-parcel of writing a "political" book.

One of the most annoying things to me in the world is reading internet comments after news stories.  I have to admit that it is a guilty pleasure of mine, and an interesting way that the "marketplace of ideas" from the First Amendment plays out.  I do it, but I hate myself for doing it.  Some stories on Warren are filled with comments that say how wonderful she is and proclaim that they will write her name in at the next Presidential election; others snipe that she lied about being Native American so that she could get treated favorably for a job at Harvard.  It's a pretty pathetic attempt to attack her, considering it seems like it's just been made out of thin air from the paranoid fantasies of privileged white conservative pundits, but Warren's description shows just how crass they can be:

"Right-wing blogs took to calling me 'Fauxcahontas.'  Someone took out a billboard with a picture of me in a Native American headdress, declaring, 'Elizabeth Warren is a joke.'  One sunny afternoon, as I marched in a parade and shook hands and waved at people, a group of guys standing together on a corner started making Indian war whoops--patting their mouths as if they were some kind of cartoon braves.  It was appalling." (240-241)

Warren is salient on the details of bankruptcy, TARP funds, and consumer protection.  Plenty of lay readers will have a good start at exploring more complex areas of financial regulation with this book.  It doesn't really talk about the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act, but Warren does mention that after BAPCPA passed, third-party debt collectors were telling the people they called that the new law made it illegal to file for bankruptcy, or so difficult to qualify that they would never be eligible.  No doubt some details will bore a fair number of readers, but Warren is great at practically explaining what complex changes to the law mean in real-life terms.

She also writes extensively about her family, and her series of dogs in very loving terms.  And then some moments of the book are downright hilarious:

"Vicki Kennedy called with thoughtful advice borne of years of campaigning across the state.  Former governor Mike Dukakis, who was now in his late seventies, took Bruce out to show him the finer points of knocking on doors, setting a blistering pace that kept them half-running from house to house.  At one home, no one answered the front door, but the governor thought perhaps someone was in the backyard.  While Bruce was thinking about the laws of trespass--he's a professor of property law and takes this sort of thing pretty seriously--the governor bounded to the side of the house and began fiddling with the gate to the backyard.  Just as he got it open, a big dog came racing around the corner, barking wildly, slobber flying everywhere.  The governor never missed a step.  After jumping onto a small side porch, he called over his shoulder to Bruce with the first lesson of political door knocking: 'Ignore the dog.  You won't change his mind anyway.'" (242)

At another point, a couple of supporters wave and shout at her from across the street, and she waves back and walks straight into a telephone pole.

This is about as good of a political autobiography as you can do while you are still in office.  I am not sure exactly what the reason is for it--Warren also writes about earlier books (the influential but policy-oriented The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke and its more utilitarian follow-up All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan) and they seem to deliver the same kind of information she researched in her bankruptcy studies.  This may be a way to bring more attention to the legislation she supports, rather than an effort to publicize herself for the presidency.  It seems she is happy with what she can do as a senator, and is aware of the parameters in which the President must operate.  It may also be a way to help other Democratic hopefuls in this election year--by publicizing herself, when candidates drop her name, more voters will know what kind of issues they support.

In summary, A Fighting Chance is similar to My Beloved World.  They're both very compelling, but I'm tempted to say I like My Beloved World better.  That is just a matter of preference.  Justice Sotomayor seemed a little more unpredictable and allowed her narrative to unfold in ways that sometimes felt more like literary fiction.  By contrast Warren is very business-like in her prose.  Regardless, the book is a pleasure and I am very grateful that Senator Warren has sacrificed herself in a way (certainly opened herself up to many painful attacks) on behalf of struggling Americans.  I have yet to feel any relief on my own putrid financial state, but I am optimistic that something positive may happen in the next few years.  In short, this book can give you hope.

My Beloved World - Sonia Sotomayor

It is appropriate that My Beloved World will be my final post on Flying Houses before I leave Brooklyn Law School.  I expected to put the blog on hiatus for most of law school, but I ended up remaining somewhat prolific and increased its popularity exponentially.  "My Beloved World" refers to Puerto Rico in this book, but my beloved world will be the library at Brooklyn Law School, which I will be sad to leave.  There have been many miserable things about law school, and while aesthetically our library cannot compete with say, Pepperdine's (which features a view of the Pacific Ocean that surely puts it at the very top), I have always felt that there has been such a wealth of knowledge and information here that learning about the "legal aspect" of any topic was within my grasp.  In my case it came in the form of the biographical accounts of Supreme Court Justices--truly the best models one could hope to have in trying to achieve excellence.

Of course, it is extraordinarily unlikely that I will ever be a federal judge, but at the very beginning of this book, Sotomayor assures all that it is okay to dream:

"A student recently posed another question that gave me pause: 'Given that there are only nine Supreme Court Justices, each with life tenure, can anyone realistically aspire to such a goal?  How do we hold on to dreams that, statistically, are almost impossible?'  As I tell in these pages, the dream I first followed was to become a judge, which itself seemed far-fetched until it actually happened.  The idea of my becoming a Supreme Court Justice--which, indeed, as a goal would inevitably elude the vast majority of aspirants--never occurred to me except as the remotest of fantasies.  But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to their odds of coming true.  Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.  That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward.  And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today."  (viii)

Most striking about My Beloved World is Sotomayor's natural flair as a storyteller.  It is written almost as if it were a novel, and even has a couple of moments of "magical realism" that would not be out of place in a Marquez novel.  However, Sotomayor ends the story when she is appointed as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York in 1992.  Of course many law students and legal scholars will want to hear about Citizens United or Sebelius or other landmark decisions that were heard sufficiently long before publication, but no such treats are offered.  And it is probably for good reason: Sotomayor (like almost all federal judges) is politically savvy.  Later on in the book she rebuffs a colleague's suggestion to join the Republican party in order to have a better chance of nomination, deciding instead to register without any party affiliation.  Of course people view her as one of the "liberal Justices" and for the most part she has lived up to that stereotype.  However, I was quite surprised to read about her feelings on the criminal justice system.  While I am sure that she considers all cases fairly and without bias, I would generally presume that a "liberal Justice" would show slight bias to the Defense, and not the Prosecution.  However, Sotomayor started her career at the New York County District Attorney's Office, and I was shocked to read some of her statements regarding criminal law:

"However caustic, Judge Rothwax was no cynic, though like many a cynic he had been disillusioned, having started his career as a Legal Aid attorney and civil rights advocate before becoming a prosecutor.  That early experience led him to conclude that given all the elaborate protections of the rights of the accused, any defendant whose case eventually came to trial was almost certainly guilty.  In a controversial book, the judge proposed abolishing the Miranda warning and other rules that he believed handicapped the police and prosecutors; he also argued that a 10-2 jury verdict was close enough to unanimous for conviction.  I wasn't prepared to accept his presumption of guilt, though it is borne out statistically: policemen don't normally make arrests on sheer caprice; most defendants do turn out to be guilty.  But a probability of guilt doesn't seem reason enough to revise our standards of due process.  These are designed to protect everyone from the human frailties of those whom we entrust to enforce the state's tremendous powers.  Even if the vast majority of the law's agents exercise these powers scrupulously, it is unconscionable that anyone should pay for a crime of which he was unjustly accused.  Blackstone's famous ratio ('better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer') still speaks to a deep-seated sense of what is just." (208)

Thus, Sotomayor covers herself--at least in this regard.  She does offer up some incredible stories and is not afraid to write about sensitive topics.  I would say that this book should be required reading for anybody that would like to be a prosecutor (or a criminal defense attorney, for that matter), if only because she offers valuable tips for success.  It is extremely difficult to argue with Sotomayor: she is wise, and what the book beautifully captures is how she turned her "humble beginnings" into an asset rather than a liability.  But first, two tips for criminal trial attorneys.  The first is emotion:

"Granting myself permission to use my innate skills of the heart, accepting that emotion was perfectly valid in the art of persuasion, amounted to nothing less than a breakthrough.  Warren [Murray] would teach me much else in the way of trial skills, as had John Fried, Katie Law, and others at the DA's Office.  But that was the single most powerful lesson I would learn.  It changed my entire approach to jurors, from the voir dire to the structure of my summations, and the results spoke for themselves: I never lost a case again.  I had hung juries a couple of times, and once or twice a conviction on fewer than all counts of the indictment, but never an acquittal.
Leveraging emotional intelligence in the courtroom, as in life, depends on being attentive; the key is always to watch and listen.  You don't need to take notes with the court reporter getting down every word.  Lower your eyes to your pad, and you're bound to miss that hint of a doubt that flits across the witness's face.  Scribble instead of listening, and you won't notice the split second of hesitation in which a witness hedges a choice of words, avoiding the ones that would flow naturally in favor of the ones whose truth he or she is more certain of." (210)

The second is jury selection, debunking a myth that still seems to creep into the minds of attorneys today:

"Other lessons I would figure out for myself, often contrary to conventional wisdom.  Some prosecutors, for instance, would look for legitimate reasons to eliminate black and Hispanic juror candidates in the voir dire, the assumption being that minorities are biased in favor of defendants.  But to me that made sense only if you saw all people of color as potential perpetrators and believed, even more implausibly, that they all saw one another that way, too.  It was obvious to me that any black or Latino who held a job, or went to school, or stay home to care for an elderly parent was likely as law-abiding as anyone in my own family and, if anything, far likelier to be the victim of a crime than to commit one.  The notion that such a person would, on the basis of racial or ethnic solidarity, let anyone walk who might pose a danger to the community would have seemed laughable where I came from.  And so I packed my juries with the kinds of people I'd grown up among; the results, again, spoke for themselves."  (211-212)

While I do not believe this book will get any "bad reviews," it is not perfect (I found two typos: "Riven" instead of "Driven" near the beginning; "judge (last name)").  Some might decry sections of the book as being too "touchy-feely" and lacking in clues to Sotomayor's jurisprudence--but she anticipates this in the preface.  I would have liked to see a section on her decision that ended the Major League Baseball strike in 1994, but perhaps we will need to wait until she retires for her "judicial autobiography."  I must say that I read the book in a week, as "pleasure reading" while studying for the Bar, and was dismayed that she did not devote a single word to her experience of taking it (perhaps some memories are better forgotten).  But while I cannot say it is one of the best books I have reviewed on Flying Houses, it contains unmistakable wisdom, clarity and value.  And I found Chapter 24 to be the single best moment of the book.  Justice Sotomayor indulges in a fair bit of self-deprecation, which is welcome in a book where she has to explain how she achieved such magnificent heights.  She is also extremely funny at times.

In Chapter 24 she describes her life after her divorce from her high-school sweetheart, moving to Carroll Gardens and getting advice from friends on dating, with which she did not have much experience.  She writes about her prospects of giving birth to a child and her life as a diabetic.  She writes about adoption.  She writes about her circle of friends and how they have kept her from feeling alone.

She also writes about smoking:

"I had been a smoker since high school, burning through three and a half packs a day for much of my life.  I made my first serious attempt at quitting in my final year of law school: every time I felt the urge, I ran around the block, often with Kevin and Star chugging alongside in solidarity.  Going cold turkey during exams may sound like a needlessly brutal rigor, but in retrospect it seems less perversely self-punishing than lighting up again two years later when Kevin and I split.  There would be further attempts, using various methods, including hypnosis, but nothing worked for good until I saw little Kiley holding a pencil between two fingers, blowing imaginary smoke rings.  The guilt of endangering the health of a loved one is by far the best motivation I've discovered." (284)

She also writes about Puerto Rico's strange situation as an American territory, but not a State.  I do not know if Puerto Rico will ever become a State, but if it does, I think Sotomayor will be considered an important figure in bringing the issue back to the forefront.  However, her feelings on the matter are somewhat masked:

"Again and again, the conversation returned to the island's political status.  Did we want to remain a commonwealth, with some self-rule and a preferential trade relationship with the mainland?  Half the class believed that was no better than being a colony of the United States, living as second-class citizens.  But if we should aspire to statehood, the full rights of citizenship would come at the price of the full obligations, including a tax burden that, arguably, might have crippled our economy at the time.  Some proposed, with passionate conviction, that full independence was the only way to preserve our culture and the proper dignity of self-determination.  The economic repercussions of each position were as inscrutably complex as they were critical to the arguments.  And for those who are eager to discern my present views on the status question, I can only advise you not to give too much weight to whatever ideas vied for prominence in a young student's mind." (152)

All I can say is that this book really made me appreciate Sotomayor and the contributions she continues to make to our country.  If I ever get the chance to meet her, I will ask her for a hug.  I would imagine she gives amazing hugs.

Here is a clip that perhaps better encapsulates what is so great about her: her willingness to be a public figure and to serve as a role model par excellence:

The Oath - Jeffrey Toobin

The Nine: The Sequel

by Jack Knorps

The Nine  was a difficult book to review because I deigned to describe each Justice.  While it was a terrific book, and more even-handed than The Brethren, I criticized the amount of material the author included on Supreme Court appointments and Bush v. Gore.  Toobin has, in fact, written an entire other book on the subject (Too Close to Call), and I do not think I will be reading that.  However, I have heard good things about The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson and would consider reading that.  Toobin is a talented writer, and at times the words flow off the page.  He is a "quality author."  

That being said, The Oath is a better book than The Nine though there is almost nothing to distinguish the two from one another.  True, The Nine was about the period between 1993 and 2005--the longest period in which the same nine justices served together, and there is more material because the "length of the story" is longer.  The Oath is about the period between 2005 and 2012 (though primarily '08-'12) and clocks in at a perfect length of 300 pages.

A friend recently asked me what the perfect length for a book was.  It is a hard question and depends on the book but I have to say now that it is between 250 and 300 pages.

And I have to say that, though my review of The Nine (published January 1, 2012) was probably not read by Toobin himself, it is almost as if Toobin took my criticisms to heart and wrote a better book, substantially similar though it may be.

It is a subject that is hard to write about briefly.  The Brethren was very long, too.  So much has happened, but when we last left off, I had reviewed Five Chiefs and was bemoaning the Conservative Court--that is, the moment Justice Thomas replaced Justice Marshall (not the moment Justice Souter replaced Justice Brennan): the Court seemed like it was "fixed."

However, The Oath makes the point more than once that Justice Stevens, Justice O'Connor, and Justice Souter were all Republicans, and slowly but surely became part of the "liberal wing" of the Court.  I don't think this point can be emphasized enough.  If you look at the Court, you are looking at a group of extremely distinguished individuals, some of the most intelligent professionals in America.  That three of them abandoned their former party highlights my distaste for the conservative movement.  Toobin, I would imagine, shares this view.

When I reviewed The Nine I provided snippets about each Justice, and it was an extremely long review.  I will do my best to stick to the highlights in this review.  

The book is divided into five parts.  Part One focuses on Obama, his election, and the Court as it stood when he took office.  Part Two focuses on Second Amendment concerns and introduces Justice Sotomayor.  Part Three is basically about Citizens United.  Part Four introduces Justice Kagan.  Part Five is basically about the Affordable Care Act cases.  Oh and Part One also discusses Stern v. Marshall (briefly).  

Unlike Bush v. Gore, Citizens United and the ACA cases (which I wrote an extensive article and roadmap on) are both extremely interesting cases.  So obviously I like those parts.  Part One is good because it tells us some thing about Barack Obama that, shockingly, we probably did not know:

he went to law school when he was my age:

"His life as a public figure began in 1990, when he was twenty-eight and won election as president of the Harvard Law Review, the first African American to hold that position.  Obama practiced law for a dozen years and taught at the University of Chicago Law School for nearly as long.  But by the time he ran for president, Obama was above all a politician, and a cautious one.  Obama admired the heroes of the civil rights movement, including the lawyers, but he did not model his career on theirs.  Obama did not believe the courts were the principal vehicle for social and political change.  Elections, rather than lawsuits, were his battlefield of choice, and by 2008 he knew that the way to win the presidency was, in part, to embrace the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment." (22)

The Oath is quite timely but Toobin might revise that last sentence in light of the events that have transpired over the past four months.  We are living in an increasingly insane world where people are isolated and would rather go out in a blaze of glory and kill dozens of innocent people than attempt to grab that increasingly fictitious concept known as the "American Dream."  Chief Justice Roberts and Barack Obama, one might say, are both "living the dream"--but it would be wrong to say they are totally happy and their lives are perfect:

"Near the end of his memoir Dreams from My Father, which he published when he was thirty-three, Obama reflected on his education at Harvard Law School.  His tone was ambivalent.  'The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.'  Then, in a gesture that was common in the book, and in Obama's character, he gave the other side of the story: 'But that is not all the law is,' he continued.  'The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.'" (22-23)

The reason why I have no respect for republicans is because they lambast Obama as if he was the worst president ever and they have absolutely no idea what he has come up against.  Basically, whoever became president in 2008 needed to be FDR in order not to look like a douchebag.  Obama is not FDR.  People generally consider Lincoln the greatest President.  FDR is often near the top of the list, too.  For me, Obama is number three.  Some people put Kennedy up in the top five, but I'm not sure I could (shockingly I might even put Nixon above Kennedy).  I don't want to get into word games but I think Chief Justice Warren was probably the greatest Chief Justice (and Scott Brown took Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts) and in three years, in my fantasy world, a different Warren could potentially be the greatest President, too.  

You can't blame Obama for putting Sotomayor and Kagan on the Court.  Sotomayor has recently become popular for putting out a book of her own--and she claims that Obama's book greatly inspired her.  It is quite shocking, though, to think of Chief Justice Roberts.  I made this point in The Brethren review, but I'll make it again: it is such a better job than President!  He could be Chief Justice for like, twenty-five, maybe thirty years.  Clearly, the Justices are the ones that see the change in the country more clearly than anyone else. 

I basically hate Chief Justice Roberts because he is so perfect:

"There was never a student like John Roberts at the La Lumiere School in LaPorte, Indiana, a quiet town near Lake Michigan, on the outer edges of the gravitational pull of Chicago.  It was a Catholic school, but it was independent of any order or diocese; the founders, all laymen, built the institution around an ideal of academic excellence.

"Roberts was not just the valedictorian of the class of 1973.  He served as captain of the football team, a varsity wrestler, member of both the student council and the drama club.  (He played Peppermint Patty in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown; the school was all boys in Roberts's day.) He continued taking Latin, as a tutorial, after the school dropped the language as a requirement...." (8)

Toobin goes on to explain Roberts's excellent memorization skills and how ironic it was then that he messed up on The Oath that he gave to Obama at his inauguration.  But there is something sinister about Roberts's perfection: he is too much like Kennedy (except not quite as well-to-do from birth) and his conservatism is blind to the problems of society's have-nots.  However, he did get one case right--and it was an important one.

Toobin covers the drama around the Affordable Care Act and the various legal challenges to it in an economical and entertaining fashion.  The same goes for Citizens United.  Thus, Part Three and Part Five are excellent reading for law students.  (Citizens United is only really studied, however, in classes on First Amendment Law and Campaign Finance law--it doesn't affect Americans as individuals as broadly as the ACA--but it has enormous philosophical implications: read thought control).  What is most upsetting about Citizens United is that we never got to read Souter's dissent:

"The new majority opinion--which transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law--shocked the liberals.  Stevens assigned the main dissent to Souter, who was in the last weeks of his tenure on the Court. (He was actually working on the opinion when he announced his departure.) The Kennedy opinion reflected everything Souter had come to loathe about the Roberts Court--its disrespect for precedent, its grasping conservatism, its aggressive pursuit of political objectives.  Worse yet, Robert's approach to Citizens United contradicted a position he had taken earlier in the term.  At the argument of a death penalty case known as Cone v. Bell, Roberts had berated at length, the defendant's lawyer, Thomas Goldstein, for his temerity in raising an issue that had not been addressed in the briefs.  Now Roberts--the chief justice--was doing precisely the same thing to upset decades of settled expectations.  

"Souter wrote a dissent that aired some of the Court's dirty laundry.  By definition, dissents challenge the legal conclusions of the majority, but Souter accused Kennedy and Roberts of violating the Court's own procedures to engineer the result Roberts coveted.  The dissent, had it been published, would have been an extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court by Souter." (168)

But "The Ninety-Page Swan Song of John Paul Stevens" is a pretty good thing to read, too. I have written at length on Justice Stevens and how he is my second-favorite Supreme Court justice so I will not add much, except that next time I go to Chicago I will take a picture:

"....Still, the family never recovered its former wealth, and it lost control of the hotel. (It is now known as the Chicago Hilton and Towers; the 'S' is still there.)" (187)

This book is not quite as gossipy as The Brethren but it is more gossipy than The Nine.  In The Nine Toobin makes some pretty incredible statements about Justice Thomas, but in The Oath he makes Thomas out to be some kind of enormous evil genius/fool.  I do not even want to repeat what Toobin wrote about Thomas (this is why I think writers are the only more hated group than lawyers: if I were Thomas I would go kick Toobin's ass for the things he suggests and reveals).  But now I know that "Lady Kaga" is not, in fact, gay, so I make this plea:

***

Dear Justice Kagan,

I know that you probably get lots of date offers but I want to ask you out.  I am a 29-year-old law student and that means there is only about 23 years separating us.  That is less than the difference between Justice Douglas and some of his wives.  I promise you that, if you give me a chance, I will be a good and loyal partner to you, and help you achieve whatever it is you hope to do in this life.  I will never "leak" anything.  I am a good cook and would make a great stay-at-home dad.  I also have a tremendous singing voice, and am a soon-to-be-acclaimed filmmaker.  

If you'd like, I would be your law clerk for a year if you wanted to test me out.  If that's too much trouble, I understand (my credentials are nowhere near as impressive as Sparkle's), but if you just want to grab dinner sometime and see if we'd get along, that could be really cool.  I'll take the Bolt Bus down to D.C. and meet you some Friday evening when you get off work.  I'd even be willing to pick up the tab!  Please respond via comment if you are so interested. (And yes I am being totally serious.)  

***

Kagan also apparently kicked a 20-year cigarette habit.  On that note, I am going out to have one....

Kagan was also a classmate and friend of Toobin's.  He can't recuse himself from writing this book, but it highlights his own achievements.  While I don't necessarily agree with some of his statements (for example, that Justice O'Connor is "the most influential woman in American history" (207)) The Oath is more often than not, erudite and sensitive to the political climate of our nation's capital:

"Stewart [not Potter-Ed.] was wrong.  Congress could not ban a book.  McCain-Feingold was based on the pervasive influence of television advertising on electoral politics, the idea that commercials are somehow unavoidable in contemporary American life.  The influence of books operates in a completely different way.  Individuals have to make an affirmative choice to acquire and read a book.  Congress would have no reason, and no justification, to ban a book under the First Amendment." (166)

It is an important book that everyone should read. (Many will not because reading about law is boring--and honestly, having studied the law for the past two-and-a-half years, sometimes I just don't want to read about all of those Commerce Clause cases over and over again...) It also taught me how to correctly use parenthetical sentences, so it may improve your writing also (though I would hardly call this review one of my finest moments).  

Basically, if you are pressed for time, read The Oath.  Then, if you want, you can read The Nine for the sake of nostalgia.  The only problem with this book is that it preempts its prequel.  But a lot of people still prefer the first Back to the Future to the second one.  I would imagine the debate between fans of those two movies is quite similar to the debate that fans of these two books would have: it largely depends on how accurate their vision of 2015 will be.  I, for one, hope that there is another Warren on the way to "reshape" American society, and not another Clinton.