Jan Crawford Greenburg
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 54
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
WARNING: CONSERVATIVE BIAS; but still an informative read. 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
I'm a second-year JD/MBA student at one of the nation's best law and business schools, and I picked up on the conservative bias in the book by about 50 pages in.
I have three reasons so far for saying the book is biased in favor of the right. The book sets out to portray the court's shift rightward, first of all, and focuses on conservative justices, sources of information, and issues.
Second, liberals are usually not mentioned for long, and Greenburg takes care to point out personality flaws in the liberals more than the conservatives. Blackmun, for example, is described as "touchy" at one point for no reason, without it being relevant to the topic, and without Greenburg providing a supporting quotation or evidence. She also spends a lot of time on how big of a disappointment justices like Kennedy, Souter, Blackmun, etc. turned out to be, and even talks about Rehnquist failing to turn the Court sufficiently rightward. Greenburg is supposedly an impartial journalist, but her bias is revealed because of the book's heavy reliance on conservative sources of information.
Thirdly, the book casts Kennedy and O'Connor as "moderates," when both were/have been/are solid conservative votes, except for some high-profile cases on social issues. If you don't believe me, just look up vote counts and see how often Kennedy and O'Connor vote and voted with Rehnquist and company. The only people who would try to label O'Connor and Kennedy moderates would be staunch conservatives, in order to shift the perceived spectrum of American politics rightwards.
This is a book by what I figured must have been a conservative, and my research corroborates it. I'm not saying the book is bad or anything; it still provides a lot of insight into conservative thinking. For example, it gives illuminating looks into the workings of the Justice Department in aiding nomination processes.
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UPDATE: I finished the book, and my view of it as being biased in favor of the right is cemented. Greenburg spent two pages on each of Clinton's nominees to the court; the vast majority of the book is spent on conservatives. The justices on Rehnquist's court are criticized heavily for failing to stop the "liberal agenda." I could go on.
Editorial Review:
Drawing on unprecedented acc ess to the Supreme Court justices themselves and their inner circles, acclaimed ABC News legal correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg offers an explosive newsbreaking account of one of the most momentous political watersheds in American history. From the series of Republican nominations that proved deeply frustrating to conservatives to the decades of bruising battles that led to the rise of Justices Roberts and Alito, this is the authoritative story of the conservative effort to shift the direction of the high court—a revelatory look at one of the central fronts of America’s culture wars by one of the most widely respected experts on the subject.
