Politics & Government
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court
"This landmark new book gives us an invaluable perspective on the Supreme Court in democracy's hour of maximum danger."-Jon Meacham
The gripping story of the year that transformed the Supreme Court into the court of Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times
At the end of the Supreme Court's 2019–20 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the court would move irrevocably to the far right hadn't come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions in cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could respond to the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020–21 term, much about the nation's highest court has changed. The right-wing supermajority had completed its first term on the bench, cementing Donald Trump's legacy on American jurisprudence.
This is the story of that term. From the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Coney Barrett, from the pandemic to the election, from the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in American life, the Supreme Court has been at the center of many of the biggest events of the year. Throughout Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her Supreme Court coverage, gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect.
Ultimately, Greenhouse asks a fundamental question relevant to all Americans: Is this still John Roberts's Supreme Court, or does it now belong to Donald Trump?
The gripping story of the year that transformed the Supreme Court into the court of Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times
At the end of the Supreme Court's 2019–20 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the court would move irrevocably to the far right hadn't come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions in cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could respond to the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020–21 term, much about the nation's highest court has changed. The right-wing supermajority had completed its first term on the bench, cementing Donald Trump's legacy on American jurisprudence.
This is the story of that term. From the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Coney Barrett, from the pandemic to the election, from the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in American life, the Supreme Court has been at the center of many of the biggest events of the year. Throughout Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her Supreme Court coverage, gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect.
Ultimately, Greenhouse asks a fundamental question relevant to all Americans: Is this still John Roberts's Supreme Court, or does it now belong to Donald Trump?
Editorial Reviews
"Linda Greenhouse has written what is, hands down, the best book about the Supreme Court, its inner dynamics, and its place in the nation's political and social life at least since Alexander Bickel's classic, The Least Dangerous Branch, written in 1962. Choosing this pivotal moment in the flow of America's history to open a revealing window into the history and workings of our highest court and a peek into its future and our own was a stroke of genius. Her account of the court from the death of Ruth Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Barrett moves at the pace of a thriller and teaches more about the court as an institution and the law as a discipline than any book of its length has any right to do."-Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus, Harvard Law School
"Linda Greenhouse's surpassing ability to decode the Supreme Court and consummate storytelling illuminate a truly watershed year. This is the book to read and reread for anyone wanting to understand what lies behind this pivotal time for American law and the legitimacy of American institutions."-Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University, and former dean, Harvard Law School
"Linda Greenhouse is a kind of Gibbon of the Supreme Court, a chronicler of such perception and such depth that it is difficult to imagine how we could understand this vital and opaque institution without her. As Americans, we are nearly overwhelmed by coverage of the presidency and of the Congress, but the court remains stubbornly elusive―except to Greenhouse."-Jon Meacham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Linda Greenhouse, one of America's most astute writers about the Supreme Court, has written a remarkable book: a month-by-month narrative of Amy Coney Barrett's first year on the court that combines a riveting account of the legal arguments in pathbreaking cases―including cases involving religion, abortion, voting rights, and affirmative action―with compelling insights about how each of the nine justices resolved them. Justice on the Brink is invaluable for all citizens who want to understand the future of the court and the Constitution."-Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer, National Constitution Center
"A revelatory study of the Supreme Court in flux."-Publishers Weekly
"Linda Greenhouse's surpassing ability to decode the Supreme Court and consummate storytelling illuminate a truly watershed year. This is the book to read and reread for anyone wanting to understand what lies behind this pivotal time for American law and the legitimacy of American institutions."-Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University, and former dean, Harvard Law School
"Linda Greenhouse is a kind of Gibbon of the Supreme Court, a chronicler of such perception and such depth that it is difficult to imagine how we could understand this vital and opaque institution without her. As Americans, we are nearly overwhelmed by coverage of the presidency and of the Congress, but the court remains stubbornly elusive―except to Greenhouse."-Jon Meacham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Linda Greenhouse, one of America's most astute writers about the Supreme Court, has written a remarkable book: a month-by-month narrative of Amy Coney Barrett's first year on the court that combines a riveting account of the legal arguments in pathbreaking cases―including cases involving religion, abortion, voting rights, and affirmative action―with compelling insights about how each of the nine justices resolved them. Justice on the Brink is invaluable for all citizens who want to understand the future of the court and the Constitution."-Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer, National Constitution Center
"A revelatory study of the Supreme Court in flux."-Publishers Weekly
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter one
July • The Triumph of John Roberts
Just as baseball fans relish statistics, so do Supreme Court watchers: how often a justice votes with the majority, how often in dissent, how often allied with this colleague or that one. With the numbers, a portrait takes shape to reveal a justice's power and role on the court. For Chief Justice Roberts, the portrait that emerged from the term that ended on July 9, 2020, was one of triumph.
Of the term's fifty-three cases decided with signed opinions-an unusually low number, due to the postponement of cases scheduled for argument early in the shutdown-he was in dissent in only two, fewer than any of his colleagues and his own record low for his fifteen years on the court. The easiest way to keep track of the court during the term's nine months was simply to look for John Roberts, finding him in the majority in decisions on presidential immunity, immigration policy, religion, abortion, protections for LGBT employees, and nearly everything else.
He managed at crucial moments to navigate across the court's ideological divide. He maintained the court's focus when the pandemic drove the justices from their chambers and their courtroom, leaving them to hear cases not on a fancy Internet platform but over their home telephones. And as important as anything else was this: Under a hot election-year spotlight, he kept the Supreme Court out of trouble. After the court handed down its last decisions on July 9, two weeks later than usual, he was entitled to feel both relief and pride.
It might so easily have been otherwise, as he surely knew. Had the 2016 presidential election turned out as most people expected, a President Hillary Clinton would have filled the Scalia vacancy, and Roberts would have found himself facing the prospect of near irrelevance. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as the senior justice among five liberals on the court, would have been able to shape the course of events, leaving the chief justice a bystander.
Of course, not every Supreme Court case turns on ideology. Most do not; during the term that included the 2016 election, the court decided more than half its cases unanimously. But when ideology matters, it matters greatly. The loss of a reliable conservative majority would have doomed two projects on which Roberts, with Scalia as a reliable ally, was making steady progress. Those two projects lay at the center of the national conversation, indeed at the heart of the country's struggle to define itself during the opening decades of the twenty-first century. One involved race, the other religion. Roberts's long-term plan was to change how the Constitution understood both, and now, with Donald Trump having filled the Scalia and Kennedy vacancies, he was in a position to achieve his goal.
There had not been a case concerning racial equality on the docket for the 2019–20 term, but that was an anomaly-a fortunate one for any chief justice interested in his court's keeping a low profile, given the urgent racial reckoning that shook the country following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis on May 25. Race would certainly be back, and Roberts was ready, even though he might not have been aware that an important new Voting Rights Act case had arrived at the court in April, filed by Arizona Republicans seeking to limit the use of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to attack measures that result in suppressing the vote. It would be early fall before the petition made its way to the justices for action.
The debate over public policy concerning race-voting rights and affirmative action, to which he referred, dismissively, as "racial balancing"-had drawn Roberts's interest since his earliest days as a lawyer. In 1981, direct from a Supreme Court clerkship, he had joined the Reagan administration, where he was an eager participant in the administration's program to dismantle or at least curtail race-conscious policies across the government and in the private sector as well. Serving first as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith and later as a lawyer in the White House counsel's office, he wrote strongly worded memos marshaling opposition to efforts under way in Congress to renew an expiring section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and to restore another section that a 1980 Supreme Court decision had undercut. These internal memos came to light in 2005 when President George W. Bush nominated Roberts to be chief justice, and they provided what little substance there was to the Democrats' tepid opposition to his confirmation.
On becoming chief justice, John Roberts had moved quickly to convert his long-held views into law. A case known by the shorthand Parents Involved reached the court during his ...
July • The Triumph of John Roberts
Just as baseball fans relish statistics, so do Supreme Court watchers: how often a justice votes with the majority, how often in dissent, how often allied with this colleague or that one. With the numbers, a portrait takes shape to reveal a justice's power and role on the court. For Chief Justice Roberts, the portrait that emerged from the term that ended on July 9, 2020, was one of triumph.
Of the term's fifty-three cases decided with signed opinions-an unusually low number, due to the postponement of cases scheduled for argument early in the shutdown-he was in dissent in only two, fewer than any of his colleagues and his own record low for his fifteen years on the court. The easiest way to keep track of the court during the term's nine months was simply to look for John Roberts, finding him in the majority in decisions on presidential immunity, immigration policy, religion, abortion, protections for LGBT employees, and nearly everything else.
He managed at crucial moments to navigate across the court's ideological divide. He maintained the court's focus when the pandemic drove the justices from their chambers and their courtroom, leaving them to hear cases not on a fancy Internet platform but over their home telephones. And as important as anything else was this: Under a hot election-year spotlight, he kept the Supreme Court out of trouble. After the court handed down its last decisions on July 9, two weeks later than usual, he was entitled to feel both relief and pride.
It might so easily have been otherwise, as he surely knew. Had the 2016 presidential election turned out as most people expected, a President Hillary Clinton would have filled the Scalia vacancy, and Roberts would have found himself facing the prospect of near irrelevance. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as the senior justice among five liberals on the court, would have been able to shape the course of events, leaving the chief justice a bystander.
Of course, not every Supreme Court case turns on ideology. Most do not; during the term that included the 2016 election, the court decided more than half its cases unanimously. But when ideology matters, it matters greatly. The loss of a reliable conservative majority would have doomed two projects on which Roberts, with Scalia as a reliable ally, was making steady progress. Those two projects lay at the center of the national conversation, indeed at the heart of the country's struggle to define itself during the opening decades of the twenty-first century. One involved race, the other religion. Roberts's long-term plan was to change how the Constitution understood both, and now, with Donald Trump having filled the Scalia and Kennedy vacancies, he was in a position to achieve his goal.
There had not been a case concerning racial equality on the docket for the 2019–20 term, but that was an anomaly-a fortunate one for any chief justice interested in his court's keeping a low profile, given the urgent racial reckoning that shook the country following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis on May 25. Race would certainly be back, and Roberts was ready, even though he might not have been aware that an important new Voting Rights Act case had arrived at the court in April, filed by Arizona Republicans seeking to limit the use of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to attack measures that result in suppressing the vote. It would be early fall before the petition made its way to the justices for action.
The debate over public policy concerning race-voting rights and affirmative action, to which he referred, dismissively, as "racial balancing"-had drawn Roberts's interest since his earliest days as a lawyer. In 1981, direct from a Supreme Court clerkship, he had joined the Reagan administration, where he was an eager participant in the administration's program to dismantle or at least curtail race-conscious policies across the government and in the private sector as well. Serving first as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith and later as a lawyer in the White House counsel's office, he wrote strongly worded memos marshaling opposition to efforts under way in Congress to renew an expiring section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and to restore another section that a 1980 Supreme Court decision had undercut. These internal memos came to light in 2005 when President George W. Bush nominated Roberts to be chief justice, and they provided what little substance there was to the Democrats' tepid opposition to his confirmation.
On becoming chief justice, John Roberts had moved quickly to convert his long-held views into law. A case known by the shorthand Parents Involved reached the court during his ...
