Recently published: The Most Powerful Court in the World by Stuart Banner (Oxford Univ. Press 2024). Here is the book description from Amazon:
An authoritative, even-handed, and accessible history of the Supreme Court of the United States, the most powerful court in the world and the final arbiter of the world’s oldest constitution.
Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? May colleges prefer black applicants over white ones? These are among the most bitterly contested issues in the United States today. We answer these questions, and many more, by presenting them to nine lawyers–the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. No other nation commits so many important questions to its highest court.
Stuart Banner’s The Most Powerful Court in the World is an authoritative history of the United States Supreme Court from the Founding era to the present. Not merely a history of the Court’s opinions and jurisprudence, it is also a rich account of the Court in the broadest sense–of the sorts of people who become justices and the methods by which they are chosen, of how the Court does its work, and of its relationship with other branches of government. It is about how the Court acquired so much power, how it has retained its power in the face of repeated challenges and criticisms, and what it has done with its power over the years. Rather than praising or criticizing the Court’s decisions, Banner makes the case that one cannot fully understand the decisions without knowing about the institution that produced them.
Offering a fresh analytical window into today’s contentious debates about the Court–debates that often rest on dubious ideas about the Court’s history–The Most Powerful Court in the World helps readers see cases through the justices’ eyes.
Via Ed Whelan at Bench Memos, who is enthusiastic:
I read several excellent books over the summer about the Supreme Court and the Constitution. I was hoping to find time to write extensively about them, but having failed to do so, I figured that I would mention them briefly.
I’ll start with law professor Stuart Banner’s superb history of the Supreme Court, The Most Powerful Court in the World. I was spurred to purchase the book by legal historian David Garrow’s glowing review of it. Garrow calls the book “simply the finest and most valuable book ever written about the U.S. Supreme Court, a work of such erudite breadth and interpretive sophistication that in a world governed by merit, it would be a slam-dunk winner of an upcoming Pulitzer Prize.” (His emphasis.) I evidently missed Adam White’s earlier, and likewise very positive, review: “thorough, nuanced, evenhanded and, above all, eminently readable.”
I’ll confess that I wondered whether I had been misled when I read the two opening sentences of the book (and the first two sentences on the jacket), “Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry?” These tendentious questions of course confuse the issues that the Court has addressed (is there a constitutional right to abortion and to same-sex marriage?) with the policy question whether states should allow these things. But given how intelligent and fairminded the rest of the book is, I’m guessing that an editor insisted on this opening. …
Posted at 8:27 PM