Noah Feldman - Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDRs Great Supreme Court Justices

Copyright 2010 by Noah Feldman

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Second eBook Edition: October 2011

ISBN: 978-0-446-57514-0

A wealth of anecdotes Mr. Feldman tells these stories in a graceful narrative, cutting back and forth between different characters, situating personal doings in the great events of the era. Its effective popular history.

Wall Street Journal

The pleasure of this book comes from Feldmans skill as a narrator of intellectual history. With confidence and an eye for telling details he relates the story of the backstage deliberations This is a first-rate work of narrative history that succeeds in bringing the intellectual and political battles of the post-Roosevelt Court vividly to life.

Jeffrey Rosen, Publishers Weekly

One is grateful for what the author has accomplished: a book blessedly free of legal jargon, nuanced without being cryptic, and full of high-stakes intellectual drama.

Washington Post

Taking readers into the conference room, Feldman shows this unpolished side of the Supreme Court in cases of the 1940s The interpersonal factor in court politics is knowledgeably displayed in [this] intriguing account.

Booklist

In this splendid biography, Noah Feldman sets out to tell the story of the making of the modern Constitutionand thus of modern America itself The result is a terrific tale of politics and principle, personality and vision Feldmans excellent book is a powerful and original contribution to our understanding of the twentieth centuryand our own.

Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of American Lion

Noah Feldman has succeeded where many others have failed. He has crafted a book about the Supreme Court that is delightfully entertaining and significantly informative a vivid, understandable, and lasting portrait of this past centurys most important jurists.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Terrific The most fascinating part of the book is the drama that unfolds once all four are seated at the high court.

Slate.com

The first half of the book shows how their very different backgrounds and ties to Roosevelt signaled the divisions that unfold in the second half, in often riveting detail.

Dallas Morning News

An immensely readable history that goes behind the faade of our most august institution to reveal the flesh-and-blood characters who make our laws.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

FDR appointed larger-than-life characters to the Supreme Court, and SCORPIONS brings them vividly to lifeand reminds us why, strangely enough, they matter today more than ever.

Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

For intellectual heft, it is hard to match Mr. Feldmans portrait of Americas most inscrutable institutionand the men who, sometimes despite themselves, carried it through one of historys most critical periods.

Economist

A deft and sophisticated panoramic history of a fascinating era Through excellent storytelling and absorbing case histories about interesting, ambitious men grappling with profound and complicated issuesand with each otherFeldmans approach will satisfy constitutional scholars as well as inform readers in the general public. His broad canvas is both accessible and thoughtful.

Washington Lawyer magazine

An important work of popular history Its importance comes from what it tells readers about the interaction between the men and how their battles influenced the direction of the Supreme Court during an important era.

BookReporter.com

Intriguing Feldman describes each of those cases and many others in engaging detail, and he deserves credit for making a text that could have been a dry legal history into an emotional story of the interaction between people and the laws that govern them.

Roll Call

Noah Feldmans book is more than a fascinating group biography of four complicated, brilliant, and ambitious men, and more than a precise and illuminating account of liberalism and constitutional law. Its also a window on historyfrom Sacco and Vanzetti and the Great Depression to Pearl Harbor, the Nuremberg Trials, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement. There is adventure on every page.

Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club

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A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as Americas leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Ku Klux Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed.

Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius.

They began as close allies and friends of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who appointed them to the Supreme Court in order to shape a new, liberal view of the Constitution that could live up to the challenges of economic depression and war. Within months, their alliance had fragmented. Friends became enemies. In competition and sometimes outright warfare, the men struggled with one another to define the Constitution and, through it, the idea of America.

This book tells the story of these four great justices through their relationships with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. At the same time, another story emerges from the vicissitudes of their battles, victories, and defeats: a history of the modern Constitution itself. These four men reinvented the Constitution; and they did so along four divergent paths. The triumph of our Constitution is a story of controversy and competitionand of the greatness that can emerge from them in the realm of ideas.

The Supreme Court is nine scorpions in a bottle.

ALEXANDER BICKEL, LAW CLERK TO JUSTICE FELIX FRANKFURTER, 195253

T he mingled smells of oiled mahogany paneling, polished brass, and good tobacco were familiar ones to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Folding his slim frame into a leather-upholstered chair in the new, three-story clubroom of the Harvard Club of New York, the recent graduate was exactly where he belonged. He had a job working in an elite Wall Street law firm, intended as a brief interlude before he sought political office. His starting position was enviable. The previous year he had married his cousin Eleanor, the favorite niece of the president of the United States.