Book Report: Becoming Justice Blackmun

Well, and Linda Greenhouse, the NYTimes Supreme Court reporter, wrote Becoming Justice Blackmun more, it seems, out of opportunity than anything else. There was the archive, and there she was. I suspect she would rather have written a book on Chief Justice Burger, but his papers won’t be open for years. So there it is.

I enjoyed the book immensely, myself. I find the Supreme Court fascinating. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that the nine Justices are nine people, each with complicated backgrounds that affect their judicial temperament in different ways, and each changing over the course of a lifetime tenure on the bench. With Justice Burger and Justice Blackmun, of course, the changes are obvious, boyhood friends becoming high court adversaries, Justice Burger becoming narrower in view and Justice Blackmun broader. People. Difficult to think of the current court this way, and of course the Justices prefer not to be thought by the citizenry as people. Because, of course, in addition to being people, they are the embodiment of our court system, and then individually they are the embodiment of their judicial philosophies, which are intellectual matters, rather than matters of personality, with sympathies this way and that, infinitely complex.

I imagine myself as a Justice, sometimes, as I read opinions and dissents, and I think about what I would do. I’d make a rotten Justice. I’d be awful. Not just because of my total lack of mental discipline, although that alone would be appalling. No, it’s that I have too many sympathies, and then I try to correct for them, over-analyzing what should be fairly direct. And I see what happened to Chief Justice Burger. He entered the court with a view I find totally sympathetic, that the courts were being used to overturn bad laws, rather than unconstitutional laws. Not everything is a court case. The solution to a bad legislature must be elections, or else the entire experiment in representative democracy fails.

But where Chief Justice Burger wound up straitjacketed by that reluctance to accept the expanded role of the judiciary, I hope I would continue to see the broader issues. True, the solution to bad legislation is elections, but in the meantime, we have to do something about the actual harm that comes to people from the bad legislation. Myself, I would become paralyzed and depressed, and hide in my chamber refusing to talk to anybody. I’m glad there are other people to do this stuff.

The book, by the way, is full of fascinating stuff, tidbits of information on the Court and how it works. I got a very different impression of the people and process than I did from The Brethren, particularly because Ms. Greenhouse portrays Chief Justice Rhenquist somewhat more favorably (and far more favorably than I think he deserves). But also there’s a difference sense of the people and the ways they interact (or don’t). I’m particularly pleased about the differences, as they combine to give YHB a greater, if fractured, sense of the actual stuff the writers are looking at. Are there other books on the Court that I should read?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.