Eight legal correspondents and two law professors submit
workmanlike essays on some major decisions of the 1992-93 Supreme
Court. Editor Smolla (Marshall-Wythe School of Law at William and
Mary College; Free Speech in an Open Society, 1992) had a fine
idea: Assign top Supreme Court cases to top Supreme Court reporters
and gather their reflections to provide a sense of constitutional
"process" for a single year. But the result is a drab, myopic
collection, too technical and bloodless for lay Court-watchers, yet
too superficial and pedantic for lawyers. The essays, notably
uniform in style and perspective, fail to do justice to some
inherently fascinating subjects: hate-speech laws, habeas review of
death-penalty cases, age discrimination, warrantless drug searches.
Occasionally the reporters include a revealing bit of gossip (such
as Anthony Kennedy's distaste for Antonin Scalia's "slashing"
internal memoranda, known as "Ninograms"), but the more common
practice here is to insert, sometimes irrelevantly, a boilerplate
mini-bio of a justice casting a critical vote. Two essays stand
out: Writing on the Zobrest case (in which the Court found no First
Amendment problem in providing a state-appointed interpreter for a
deaf student attending a religious school), Knight-Ridder reporter
Aaron Epstein briskly explores the facts and speculates
knowledgeably about future church/state issues facing the Court.
And Stephen Wermeil, former Supreme Court correspondent for the
Wall Street Journal, contributes a humane, lucid account of a
Georgia teen suing her school district for damages when the
school's football coach sexually harassed her. Smolla's editorial
comments, however, are redundant, patronizing, and oddly worshipful
of Scalia ("a magnificent conservative"). A yawner from the Fourth
Estate. (Kirkus Reviews)
Despite its importance to the life of the nation and all its
citizens, the Supreme Court remains a mystery to most Americans,
its workings widely felt but rarely seen firsthand. In this book,
journalists who cover the Court--acting as the eyes and ears of not
just the American people, but the Constitution itself--give us a
rare close look into its proceedings, the people behind them, and
the complex, often fascinating ways in which justice is ultimately
served. Their narratives form an intimate account of a year in the
life of the Supreme Court.The cases heard by the Surpreme Court
are, first and foremost, disputes involving real people with actual
stories. The accidents and twists of circumstance that have brought
these people to the last resort of litigation can make for
compelling drama. The contributors to this volume bring these
dramatic stories to life, using them as a backdrop for the larger
issues of law and social policy that constitute the Court's
business: abortion, separation of church and state, freedom of
speech, the right of privacy, crime, violence, discrimination, and
the death penalty. In the course of these narratives, the authors
describe the personalities and jurisprudential leanings of the
various Justices, explaining how the interplay of these characters
and theories about the Constitution interact to influence the
Court's decisions.Highly readable and richly informative, this book
offers an unusually clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the
most influential institutions in modern American life.
General
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