The Nine:

Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

By Jeffrey Toobin
336 pp. Doubleday, 2007 $27.95

Reviewed by Sona Pai

The United States Supreme Court has always been shrouded in a bit of other-worldly mystery. There’s something about the robes, the lifetime appointments, and the power of the final say at the end of the legal road. Supreme Court judges seem to exist on a plane apart from the average American citizen.

In Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, we learn that Supreme Court judges are, in fact, just regular people like the rest of us. They are eccentric, and they can be petty. They have fun, and they can be fragile. Clarence Thomas loves NASCAR, and Sandra Day O’Connor likes salsa dancing. David Souter eats an apple every day—core, seeds and all—and does all of his writing with a fountain pen. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy crave attention.

Toobin, a staff writer for The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN focuses his attention on the personal and professional lives of the justices who served together from 1993 to 2005, the longest period of stability in the history of the nine-justice court. Toobin interviewed the justices themselves as well as more than 75 law clerks to paint a colorful picture of the court that included William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

Toobin’s narrative weaves tales of the justices’ personalities and personal histories with examinations of their judicial philosophies and political leanings. The details that result add context and depth to the deliberations and decisions spurred by some of our generation’s most significant legal questions: the contested presidential election of 2000, challenges to Roe v. Wade, school-sanctioned prayer, gay rights, and the legal rights (or lack thereof) of enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay.

Along the way, Toobin tells us as much about what goes on outside of the court as he does about what happens within it. We learn how law clerks can be incredibly influential on the judges and their opinions. We see how presidents agonize (or don’t) over selecting a new justice, a choice whose significance lasts long after a chief executive’s final day in office. And, we learn about a growing conservative movement determined to use the court as its greatest weapon in “the culture wars.”

The history and legal lore help illuminate the court’s inner workings, but Toobin’s greatest accomplishment is his use of fact and anecdote to reveal the human beings beneath the black robes. In his final years, Chief Justice Rehnquist grew cynical about the true value of the court’s opinions. Sandra Day O’Connor left a job she loved, and that gave her the distinction of being the most powerful woman in America, to care for her ill husband. After the court ruled in favor of George W. Bush in Gore v. Bush, David Souter wept.

Details like these serve an important role in our understanding of American democracy. They remind us that, even at the highest levels of government, decisions that affect all of us are made by people just like us—people with flaws, people who change their minds, and people whose jobs are inevitably affected by their lives off the clock.