Book 313: First

 

"She had an intuitive, almost uncanny sense of just how far to go—in almost any realm of human endeavor. Her deftness was useful in navigating the politics of the Junior League, but it was obvious to everyone, including the Junior Leaguers, that larger stages beckoned. She did not appear to chafe at the limited opportunities available to a young Phoenix society matron in 1965; rather, she made the most of them. But her ambition was palpable, if not articulated or yet fully formed."

Dates read: April 30- May 7, 2019

Rating: 7/10

When I was a little girl, my mom got me a set of encyclopedias for kids. I was (and am) a big weirdo, so I read those things cover to cover, and that's the first place I remember reading about Sandra Day O'Connor. I was fascinated with the story of the little ranch girl who grew up to be the first female Supreme Court Justice. I decided that I wanted to be one of those, and got all the way to being a lawyer and actually practicing before I figured out that maybe that might not be my destiny. But even after I left the legal profession, O'Connor's dignity and pragmatism meant that she remained one of my role models.

When I took Constitutional Law in law school, I found myself both often agreeing with but then frustrated by Justice O'Connor's jurisprudence. I felt that she usually reached a correct (or at least defensible) result, but the balancing tests she created often could be argued to support a decision that went either way. The law loves a bright line, but Justice O'Connor loved a compromise. The life that led her to be that kind of thinker is detailed in Evan Thomas's First, for which he was granted access to many family sources, as well as the expected interviews of friends and colleagues. What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose early years gave her a toughness, whose intelligence was innate and considerable, who had her ability to know when to charm and when to push honed by the political arena, and who never let go of her conviction that an attractive middle ground could be found on almost every issue.

Most people who are fans enough of O'Connor to pick up a book like this know at least the rough outlines of her life: childhood on the Lazy B ranch in Arizona, excellence at both Stanford undergraduate studies and law school being unrewarded with job offers suiting her skills after graduation, marriage to dynamic fellow attorney John O'Connor, motherhood, service in the Arizona Legislature, then moving up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court, where she became the first female Supreme Court Justice. After decades on the bench, she left to spend more time with her husband, but his dementia was too far advanced to give them much time together before he needed more intense care than she was able to give. She championed the cause of civic engagement in her post-Court life until announcing her own Alzheimer's diagnosis and taking a step back to live as a truly private citizen for the first time since she was a young woman.

I wanted this book to be more than it was, and perhaps my disappointment is my own fault for having expectations that it was never written to match. I was hoping for more psychological insight, more historical context...less a recitation of life details than a work that sought to explain her as a person and as a figure in the public imagination. To call First a mere catalogue of personal facts would be unfair. It's clearly intensely researched, and the people Thomas spoke to and accessed records from would be the ones who would be able to provide a look into the human behind the dignified portrait we all know. But either they were unwilling to divulge information that might paint a fuller picture, or she was truly so private that few people knew her well enough to give it. What this makes for is a book heavy on the who, what, and when, but light on the why.

I'll admit part of my opinion was shaped by my perception that Thomas has an ideological bent to his work. Obviously, O'Connor was a Republican, and Thomas seems to also have a conservative outlook. But when he announces early in the work that he believes her to be the kind of woman who would (this is a paraphrase) roll her eyes at the feminists of today and their objectives, it rankles. There is certainly a conversation to be had about the various waves of feminism and how their goals and methods have differed from/been in conflict with others, and O'Connor may or may not have even thought of herself as a feminist, but these and several other little editorial comments certainly irritated me while reading and made me wonder how well-rounded of a biography he was really seeking to create. In the end, if you want a thorough biography of the quietly trailblazing first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, you'll find a lot here. If you want a more nuanced or complex look at the person she was though, I'd skip it. 

One year ago, I was reading: Brideshead Revisited

Two years ago, I was reading: The Woodcutter

Three years ago, I was reading: The Goldfinch

Four years ago, I was reading: The Games

Five years ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Six years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 313: First

Book 248: My Own Words

"The institution we serve is ever so much more important than the particular individuals who compose the Court’s bench at any given time. And our job—the job of judging in a U.S. federal court generally—is, in my view, the best work a U.S. lawyer could wish for. We serve no client, our commission is to do what is right—what the law requires and what is just."

Dates read: July 11-17, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Growing up, my role model (and let's be honest, idol) was Sandra Day O'Connor. I wanted to be a lawyer and judge, and the first woman on the Supreme Court was the greatest person I could imagine. As I got older and better able to understand legal writing, she become a justice whose opinions I always appreciated reading, because in her fondness for balancing tests (while tricky to consistently administer) she seemed to always remember that while The Law is a mighty and important thing, it applies to actual people with actual lives and that is not less important than one's judicial philosophy. She remains someone who I profoundly admire, along with the other women who've been appointed to the highest court in the land: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and everyone's favorite pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the past several years, she's had books written about her, a documentary and a biopic hit theaters, and been made into an action figure (which I have on my desk as I type). She's become almost more of an idea than a person, which made My Own Words, a collection of her writings/speeches, organized with her co-writers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, all the more relevant to read. There is an actual woman beneath the mythologizing, and that woman is whip-smart and has a lot of important things to say that can't be slapped on a photo and turned into a meme. Not that I have any beef with that picture of her that says "all them fives need to listen when a ten is talking" in the Beyonce font, but in a world where complex thought is increasingly rare, we owe it to one of our best thinkers to really listen to what she has to say.

The book's collection of her writings has examples all the way from pre-teen editorials submitted to the school paper to oral announcements of Supreme Court dissents. That she is a serious, thoughtful person is obvious even in the early writings, and examples of her work as she pushed for gender equity at the ACLU and then was elevated to the federal bench demonstrate her prodigious intellect and ability to distill arguments to their essence. But it's not all ponderous and serious. There's a written version of remarks about the role of lawyers in opera and an excerpt from the comic opera that was written about Justices Scalia and Ginsburg's close personal friendship, which included trips to the opera, despite the gulf between their views on the law. There are a few pieces that were written/delivered by Gibsburg's beloved husband Marty, whose wit made me giggle in few places.

The co-authors are apparently working on an authorized full biography of Justice Ginsburg, and the way they've worked with the material they have here gives me high hopes that it'll be excellent. It can be challenging to edit down legal writing into something that can be understood by an audience not trained to read it, but between what's clearly Ginsburg's own facility with language and careful tweaks, the material will definitely require attention but isn't difficult to understand. That it's just relatively short vignettes may disappoint some who are looking for something more like a traditional biography, though there is interstitial writing to fill in the gaps and provide context. You do definitely get a sense of who she is through reading it, though. I'd highly recommend this for anyone who's interested in the law, as well as any RBG enthusiasts.

One year ago, I was reading: Death Prefers Blondes

Two years ago, I was reading: Oryx and Crake

Three years ago, I was reading: The Idiot

Four years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

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Book 248: My Own Words

Book 61: Supreme Justice

"The next time he watched, Reeder concentrated on the shooter. As the man turned and blasted Venter, he was calm, not panicky, and took time to set his feet and aim. Hell, the shooter even slowly exhaled before he fired. This wasn't a stickup artist reacting to movement, freaking, and shooting. No."

Dates read: June 12-13, 2016

Rating: 4/10

When you spend time studying the Supreme Court, you grow a fondness for its members. Even the ones you disagree with. The way their personalities come through in their writing: Scalia's fierce intelligence and flair for drama, Ginsberg's incisive mind and iron will. You feel like you know them a little bit. So when they pass away, there's a sense of loss even if you're okay with that vote being gone on a personal level. I was gutted when I heard about Scalia dying even though I couldn't be farther from him, politically speaking.

There's never been a single successful Supreme Court assassination. I wonder why. Not that I think there should be, of course, but the executive and legislative branch don't seem to have any immunity. Even the lower levels of the court system see judges murdered. But not the nine. Not so far. Until a near future time in Max Allan Collins' Supreme Justice, anyways. Then suddenly there is not just one justice killed, but two. Two conservative justices, during the term of a Democratic president.

Joseph Reeder, a retired Secret Service agent, has earned the scorn of the law enforcement community for two reasons: his devotion to techniques of body and facial language reading to investigate crimes (earning him the nickname "Peep", which is never really satisfactorily explained) and the fact that when he took a bullet in an assassination attempt against a very conservative president, he was vocal about his regret for doing so, since Reeder is himself a liberal and believes that the country would have been better off without the continued leadership of that president. But when Gabe Sloan, one of Reeder's closest friends and godfather to his daughter, is named head of the task force investigating the assassinations, Reeder is drawn back into the fold to help. He's paired with Patti Rogers of the FBI, Sloan's usual partner, and the two try to figure each other out as they also try to solve the crime.

Perhaps I'd have been less harsh on this had I not just read an unspectacular thriller two books ago. While I enjoyed The Barkeep more than I thought I would, it also represented a break from a long stretch of literary fiction and high-intensity non-fiction that made it a nice diversion and a chance to get outside my usual box a little. Supreme Justice, coming so close in time, was more irritating than anything else. The characters are pure tropes, plot developments are telegraphed miles away (when Reeder's daughter is introduced early, it's eye-rollingly obvious that she is going to be put into peril at some later point in the book), and Collins is heavy-handed enough with his political statements that even though I share most of the expressed philosophy, I was over it pretty quickly. The writing isn't especially elegant or expressive. There's just not much here in the way of reasons to recommend it, so I'll recommend that you seek your thrillers elsewhere.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever read Supreme Court decisions? Do you have a favorite justice?

One year ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 61: Supreme Justice

Book 49: The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel

"What a wonderful tribute to the US Constitution that a minority subculture with traditions, habits, beliefs, and practices that are so different from the prevailing culture can flourish and live their lives as they wish, unfettered by the majority."

Dates read: May 5-7, 2016

Rating: 6/10

Before I went to law school, one of the reasons I wanted to go was because I loved reading about and studying the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. I've already outed myself as a big giant nerd, so there's more fuel for the fire, eh? Growing up in a small, conservative town, I felt like an outsider because I didn't go to church on a regular basis (I was raised Catholic but stopped attending mass during middle school, and by the time I hit high school, I identified as agnostic). I studied everything I could about the separation of church and state, especially in schools, and dreamed about arguing the issue in court one day. It didn't work out that way, obviously, but I've retained a real interest in the topic.

Louis Grumet's The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel tells the inside story of one of the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause cases: Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet. That's the same Grumet in both places: he was the president of the New York State School Boards Association at the time a law was passed in the New York State Legislature creating a school district for a small village in upstate New York that was home exclusively to the Satmar, a sect of strict Hasidic Jews. The Satmar, a community that previously lived in Brooklyn but found the modern world to be too intrusive in the middle of New York City, bought up large chunks of land outside a town called Monroe and founded a village that they called Kiryas Joel after their leader, a rabbi who had survived the Holocaust. They shunned contact with the outside, established their own private yeshivas to educate their children, and caused a lot of strife within the larger Monroe community by doing things like blatantly ignoring building codes with impunity, crying anti-Semitism anytime they were challenged. The issue arose because, like any small group that intermarries extensively, there came to be many children with genetic disorders and resultant learning disabilities. The Satmar were not equipped to educate these children, so they sought to take advantage of the legal obligation of the Monroe school district to provide appropriate education to the local children and sent their kids to public school. It did not go well: the children, who already had special needs, struggled in a radically different environment and the district made several problematic blunders. The Satmar kids were pulled out of the district, and an idea was hatched: to give the village its own district, which would be able to take in and spend public money for the education of these children.

That's a problem under the Establishment Clause, because the law was designed to benefit and was exclusive to one particular religious group. So why would this bill have even been drafted? And then passed? And then signed? The answer: politics! The Satmar are a relatively small group, but they're powerful: they vote as a bloc the way their rabbi tells them to...and they don't have an ideological purity test to pass. They support whoever helps steer money and services to them. Politicians like winning elections, and so they're willing to do what they can to lock down those votes. Grumet was there as it all was happening, and guides the reader through the process: fleshing out the details of who the Satmar are, how they came to settle at Kiryas Joel, their conflicts with the local population, why sending their kids to public school failed, and how the bill came to be conceived and passed.

A lot of the political behind-the-scenes stuff was familiar and understandable to me as someone who does this kind of thing for a living, but if that's not you, Grumet lays it out in a way that's logical and easy to follow. I think a lot of people don't quite understand how the sausage is made (I know I didn't before I started doing what I do), and the way Grumet tells the story helps shed light on the process. He also helps illuminate what it actually means to take a case to the Supreme Court: it starts small, with a lawsuit in district court, and goes up from there. The court portion of the book is actually the weakest part...it mostly copies and pastes sections of transcripts to show the arguments made and the decisions reached. 

At the end of the day, this book is almost certain to only be interesting to those already inclined to enjoy the subject matter. Some broader context is provided, but the story is almost entirely about this situation and case and doesn't go out of its way to make it easy to understand the legal issues if you're a layperson. It's not especially well-written, and suffers for Grumet's insistence on telling his own story as much as the case's story. It's not a bad book per se, but it isn't one I'd recommend to anyone but people with some already existing background and interest in the subject matter.

Tell me, blog friends...is there a Supreme Court case you'd be interested in reading a history of?

One year ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Chicago Review Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

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Book 49: The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel