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Product Description: Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.
Just in time for the 2008 presidential election—where the future of the Court will be at stake—Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.
Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves, The Nine tells the story of the Court through personalities—from Anthony Kennedy's overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas's well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter's odd nineteenth-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story of Bush v. Gore—and Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office.
The Nine is the book bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin was born to write. A CNN senior legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, no one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices. Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-03
Good, and Should've Been Better
There are several things about The Nine that make it an absorbing and worthwhile read. As stated in the dust jacket, Jeffrey Toobin has great narrative skills. He shows them in abundance when giving us memorable portraits of each justice. Furthermore, he does an outstanding job summarizing the most important Supreme Court cases from 2000 onward; and distilling the complex issues that each case presents re: abortion, affirmative action, free speech, separation of church and state, federalism, the death penalty, and habeas corpus etc. In these respects, it is an ideal resource for the casual follower of the Supreme Court.
However, I am a paralegal well-versed in legal research, and am fascinated by the Supreme Court. I expected much more from the book, but was greatly disappointed with several omissions. First, Toobin did not offer citations to any of the cases he summarized so well(from Bush v. Gore to Rasul v. Bush, or the Kelo case re: eminent domain). Maybe it was an editorial decision by the publisher not to list the citations; and if true, I would've appreciated knowing this at the outset. To list a case without giving its citation is an unforgivable omission for anyone familiar with how legal research is done. It made the book seem more shallow than I'm sure Toobin intended. Toobin's defense(at the end of the book) that these cases are readily available online is just not good enough. I also would've appreciated a much fuller discussion by Toobin of how and why the Justices have(since the Warren Court era) increasingly allowed political considerations to guide their jurisprudence rather than legal ones.
I have equally strong misgivings about Toobin's approach to the book.
Yes, he is a fairly high-profile legal analyst for CNN; and writes prominently on legal issues for the New Yorker Magazine. These facts alone, however, don't tell us what motivated him to write this book.
The dust jacket tells us that he was born to write this book. How so?
What goals did he set for the book? He didn't say. The book is touted as providing a valauble look inside the Supreme Court; and in some ways, he succeeds. For example, he gives a valuable overview of the Rasul, and Hamdan cases, two outgrowths of the Bush Administration's war on terror. However, Toobin largely had to rely on the information the Justices, and other Supreme Court experts were willing to provide him.
What did Toobin himself bring to the table to advance the goals of his book, other than admirable enthusiasm? Unfortunately, we are not told. He is a journalist, but has given us no idea of how he became one, and has not told us about his legal background(i.e., Has he been to law school?;
Is he an attorney?)
Having answers to these questions could've at least in part explained why he did not offer at least one case citations for people who just might want to do further(more in depth) reading. If he didn't want his book to be a scholarly appraisal of the Supreme Court, Toobin should have told us so beforehand in an introduction. Again, The Nine is quite a good book, as far as it goes. It could have been, and should have been so much better. Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-03
Insightful
Awesome. An easy and fast read. The book rewards you with a perspective on the politics behind the Court for about the past two decades. A great indtroduction for young readers.
Conservatives are just upset that their goals and momentum have been exposed and possibly thwarted to some extent by the release of this widely-read book before the extremely important presidential election of '08. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-15
Why Presidential Elections Matter
Jeffrey Toobin makes a strong case in "The Nine" that the 2008 election is indeed a change election if only because another Republican president will doom Roe v. Wade and other constitutional protections hanging by the thread of a moderate Justice (Stevens, Souter or Ginsberg) stepping down during the next Presidential term.
The Nine looks at how the current Supreme Court Justices' personalities impact the process and outcome of deliberations and why those Supreme Court decisions matter in the lives of Americans. He focuses on various confirmation struggles as well as court rulings including Presidential elections (Bush v. Gore), abortion decisions (post Roe v. Wade), gay rights, affirmative action, the war on terror and the separation of church and state.
One of the themes of the book is the rise of the powerful Republican conservative judicial movement. Their ideology demands that justices to be pro-life, for increasing the role of religion in public life, against any and all affirmative action, for certain restraints on free speech except when it impacts public financing in which case they are champions of money as speech. They want Justices to uphold the sanctity of straight marriages and families and grant the Executive broad powers to wage war against terror. And yet despite most of the appointments having come from Republican Presidents, the court hasn't - until recently - surrendered to this conservative ideology. However, that has begun to change with the very conservative Alito taking O'Connor's seat.
Toobin does an excellent job of showing how the Justices' humanity plays out in how they work together, perceive their roles on the court and come to their judicial decisions. He isn't afraid to show them acting poorly but he also shows them as people with a real affection for one another and a commitment to the constitution and their role in American life. As a non-practicing lawyer, I was surprised at how much legal analysis he included but a friend of mine who isn't a lawyer wasn't put off by it at all.
The book isn't a big civic lesson bore. He includes a number of touching and funny stories that develop his larger themes; he relates the great reception Clarence Thomas gets when speaking before an RV convention, he pokes fun at Kennedy's high flown prose, at David Souter's disinterest in dating women and O'Connor's habit of handing out a congratulatory tee-shirt to parent of newborns and making sure that a gay clerk and his partner get one too. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-06
The Nine or "The Sun Queen, Madam Chief Justice O'Connor, and her inferiors"
I regrettably cannot recommend this book. I listened to the Audio CD, and I suspect that such medium makes the content more palatable (in the auditory sense) then trudging through the written prose with the days or weeks-long commitment that might entail.
I have renamed the book to better reflect its content, which, to its ultimate undoing, comprises mostly a hagiography or reification of Ms. Sandra Day O'Connor. It is in his near puppy-doggish love for Justice O'Connor that Toobin betrays the same lack of understanding of the limited constitutional role of the Court likely shared by millions of Americans who focus only on the provision of Good, irrespective of its source. This love of result over principle is never clearer than Toobin's analysis of the Court's "affirmative action in education" cases from 2003, known popularly as the Grutter and Gratz decisions, wherein Justice O'Connor surmised that, notwithstanding the Equal Protection Clause, race (qua diversity) could form some basis in the selection of student candidates by state university and that, in 25 years or so, perhaps the Nation shall have progressed to the point that such race-conscious statecraft shall no longer be constitutional, effectively giving our holy Constitution the magnificence of an egg-timer. All the while having hailed Justice O'Connor's knack for crafting CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, whether intentionally or not, to mesh with public opinion (whatever happens to be prevailing at the time of course), Toobin effectively breaks the spine of his book with the embarrassing conclusion that O'Connor's equal protection ruling and timetable was the eminent jurist at her worst (he does not explain) and her best (he goes on to say "[it] was INDEFENSIBLE IN THEORY, AND IMPECCABLE IN PRACTICE (or "application," or words to that effect). My jaw nearly dropped as I listened to Toobin laud any Supreme Court rule making that could be both indefensible as a matter of constitutional theory but impeccable in its prescient steering toward the course of public opinion. That moment alone nearly ruins the book.
Mr. Toobin, like far too many, seems satisfied with a Court unanchored from constitutional limitations of any kind. He wants the Court, like some blind but psychic sentry, to propound reasoned opinions that just so happen to equate with prevailing public opinion, presumably guided by American values. One wonders how such advocates for a fluid if not "living" constitution would regard Court rulings that coincide with a public opinion of a future generation that rejects Progressive values and causes. Would he then, demand fewer rulings "indefensible in theory" but concordant with the desires of "ordinary" Americans, as THEN defined. (Of course, thanks to stare decisis-the rule that prior precedents of the Court should be respected as entrenched constitutional law, immune to overruling except in limited circumstances, the liberal's policy preferences-constitutional rights to abortion, a limitless federal commerce power, e.g.-may be difficult to erode notwithstanding the shift in public opinion of future generations and the willingness of judges like O'Connor to placate it.)
The Constitution, if anything, represents a fundamental structural check on the power of public opinion to soil the vision of the Framers which the People, our political ancestors, ratified through their State governments. This is the Consent that we live by, the Premise of our social community. Should not the fact that the Constitution could not be changed but by Supermajority vote of the States suggest that it ought to be the most cautiously expanded document in our combined lexicon ? Why, instead, should the Constitution be the vehicle of ensuring that modern laws, notwithstanding the popular support that prompted their very enactment through their ELECTED representatives, be ultimately approved or rejected as sufficiently co-extensive with the American experience as viewed by five law professors (i.e. the 5-4 majority necessary to produce a binding constitutional holding). One should hope instead, that public opinion have little if anything to do with expositions on the nature of the delicate but constant document that binds the several branches and several governments of this nation together. Justice O'Connor's failure to serve her true Master, i.e., the Constitution of the United States, instead arrogating the Power to herself as swing vote and guardian of the public's happy regard in a growing Nanny State, in the end makes her less a jurist and more a Soft Tyrant. We Americans should hope that our policy preferences that might otherwise be enacted into law, for experimentation purposes if not ultimately the prevailing Good, do not one day offend the pulse-taking of popular opinion as read by a judge who wants to be loved as Louis XIV, the Sun King.
Liberal, heal thyself. Rating:
Date: 2008-05-30
Slanted View of the Court
An interesting, but ultimately disappointing, look at the USSC and how it functions. I can't write a better critique than can be found via this chain of posts by Eugene Volokh of UCLA law school and Orin Kerr of George Washington University law school:
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