This collection of 11 narratives provides a terrific resource for civic and college education in living rooms or classrooms. Accessible to readers at the high-school level but engaging to more sophisticated readers as well, this pithy volume (about 200 pages in all) will enhance libraries of specialists and generalists alike.
The editors have gathered narratives from accomplished reporters who have covered the U.S. Supreme Court extensively in print or broadcast media, including such established experts as Lyle Denniston, Fred Graham, and Nina Totenberg. Each reporter has related fascinating details from oral arguments in a single case from the Court's docket. The editors have also provided an introductory chapter for the book and an introductory paragraph for each reporter's chapter. The introductory chapter surveys justices' assessments of the value of oral arguments succinctly, thereby acquainting readers with questions they might want to pose as they go through the reporters' chapters. The editors' introductory paragraphs deftly complement reporters' contextualizations of cases. The brief bibliography will not intimidate tyros or laypersons.
The editors have also festooned the margins of the book with icons that index excerpts of oral arguments stored at http://www.goodquarrel.com, the Web site designed to enhance the book with auditory experiences. These excerpts enable readers to deepen their appreciation of the give and take between justices and advocates in which the former tend to treat the latter as if they were research assistants or gofers. As the reporters characterize the major features of the arguments, readers may listen to confirm some characterizations or to question others.
Some of the Supreme Court cases are landmarks; some are less famous or infamous. Most instructors will be far more familiar with Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004) than with Forsyth County, Georgia v. the Nationalist Movement (1992), in each of which litigants insisted on representing themselves before the Court. Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Bush v. Gore (2000) may be familiar to some readers, but Glickman v. Wileman Brothers and Elliott Inc. (1997) and Chandler v. Miller (1997) will be recognized by few. The most dated case, Time Inc. v. Hill (1967), should interest readers for Richard Nixon's argument before the Warren Court. Two cases from 2006 are the most recent and yield insights into Chief Justice John Roberts' and Associate Justice Samuel Alito's participation in arguments.
Among other things, these chapters illuminate the crafting of precedents and construction of strategies and tactics by adversaries; the justices' probing of advocates concerning alternatives, consequences, and hypotheticals; the importance of flexibility, fleetness, and felicity in a taut forensic setting; and the challenges of reaching justices open to persuasion without antagonizing justices who may sidetrack arguments in ways that defeat litigants' designs. Readers will learn the perils of laypersons or novices who argue their own cases and may be amused that one such advocate broke all the rules of oral argument but was effective in a losing cause while another such advocate broke all the rules and was ineffective. Readers cannot miss the degree to which arguments and cases concern policy as much as law.
This book also features tales of coin-flips, of charges of legal malpractice when clients disagreed with their lawyers' tactics, of justices who rescued lawyers whose causes the justices favored and of other justices who stumped lawyers whose causes those justices disfavored, of the hapless attorney assailed by an entire Court, of styles of interacting with and among justices, and of abject mismatches between or among adversaries. Readers who cringe as a lawyer informs the Court that Justice Antonin Scalia would never provide his wife with green plums lest they give her diarrhea may relax when Justice Scalia states that he would never give his wife a green plum and, indeed, has never seen a green plum. As should be expected, the reporters and editors have collected other mysterious and boneheaded utterances.
Professors Goldman and Johnson have performed a signal service in assembling these reports and the accompanying Web site.
