Justice on the Brink

September 20, 2021
The Supreme Court reached a tipping point and lurched rightward with the arrival of Amy Coney Barrett, according to this probing examination of recent decisions. Pulitzer-winner Greenhouse (Becoming Justice Blackmun) surveys the fallout from the death in 2020 of liberal feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by Barrett, a conservative Catholic with antiabortion personal views. Barrett’s impact is most visible in clinching conservative majorities that struck down Covid-19 restrictions on religious services, part of the Court’s trend, Greenhouse writes, toward using religious-freedom claims as “an off-ramp from a law intended to apply to everyone.” Greenhouse also discusses abortion-rights cases that might undermine Roe v. Wade, and the Court’s rightward drift on voting rights and affirmative action. Though the treatment of Barrett, who’s described as the conservative judicial movement’s “chosen one,” is somewhat melodramatic, Greenhouse incisively dissects the crucial struggle between doctrinaire conservatives Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts, whose preferred strategy is to gradually change Court jurisprudence through subtle rulings on low-profile cases. Distinguished by Greenhouse’s vivid profiles of the justices and lucid unraveling of their knotty legal theories, this is a revelatory study of the Supreme Court in flux.