Storm center : the Supreme Court in American politics /

As the author of many highly regarded books and articles on the federal judiciary and on judicial policy-making, O'Brien is well qualified to write this text on the role of the Supreme Court in American politics. The book explores such questions as the process of appointing justices to the High Court, how the justices manage their staffs and caseloads, the internal workings of the Court, and how the Court chooses to communicate decisions to the public. O'Brien makes excellent use of interviews with the current justices and the private working papers of past and present members of the Court. The writing style is compelling and easy to follow, somewhere between the journalistic mode of Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's The Brethren (1979) and the drier, academic approach of David Rohde and Harold Spaeth's Supreme Court Decision Making (CH, Jul '76). For students and general readers.-R.A. Carp, University of Houston

With the abortion and school desegregation decisions, O'Brien contends, the Supreme Court has ceased to be Hamilton's ``least dangerous branch.'' Increasingly activist, it has in fact become a ``storm center'' of national politics. Ever mindful of our judicial past, O'Brien likewise finds the Court is markedly more bureaucratic. His lucid text describes the inner rules and procedures the cost of filings, screening procedures, certiorari petitions, the justices' give-and-take negotiations, their tentative votes and maneuverings, the oral arguments, the growing number of dissents and plurality opinions. O'Brien finds the Court rife with heated personal clashes. Rather than above the battle, it is highly sensitive to external pressures, from the President, Congress, public opinion. This is an illuminating, first-rate primer for those seeking to understand the workings of the Court. Milton Cantor, History Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

O'Brien's overview of the Supreme Court falls somewhere between the backstairs gossip of Woodward and Bernstein's The Brethren and the in-depth analysis of Supreme Court wrangling over desegregation and busing of Schwartz's Swann's Way (p. 125). The Supreme Court is far less remote from the practicalities of American life than most of us have perhaps come to think--and the political appointee who rises to the highest level of jurisprudence is a clichÉ. Moreover, the Court has consistently shown a collegial instinct for knowing which issues are ripe for decision, not only in terms of their legal framework but also in terms of acceptance by the majority of the American people. O'Brien (government/Virginia) sets out to show us how all this has come about, but alas it may be that the process defies analysis. Anecdotal evidence about presidential/judicial interaction, formal and informal, is cheek-by-jowl with historical facts regarding the development of Supreme Court composition and jurisdiction. O'Brien zeros in on the intra-Court administrative procedures that have put many firstline decisions in the hands of law clerks still in their late 20s, but he stops just short of drawing any conclusions as to what this means for American justice--would Clarence Earl Gideon's hand written petition, which led to the landmark ruling on the right of indigents to counsel in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), ever make it to the Court now? O'Brien's facts suggest no, but he himself seems unwilling to venture an opinion. Some of the best portions of the book deal with more remote eras--when the Court Reporter was a patronage position and the justices rode circuit. But the historical perspective of the book seems foreshortened--perhaps because of the recent ""information explosion"" that makes modern Courts so much more accessible. The chronology of the Court is likely to elude non-specialists as well, although a listing of all the justices at the end of the book provides a point of reference. O'Brien alternately studs his chapters with statistics on everything from case; load to how long it takes individual justices to write opinions, and background on some of this century's more sensational cases (Roe v. Wade--abortion rights; Griswold v. Connecticut--birth control legislation); in short, something for everyone, and his style is sufficiently ingratiating so that he may please most. Despite the title, however, there's no eye to the storm here, and O'Brien falls back on appeal to the merely curious rather than the intellectually inquisitive. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.