Supreme Inequality

December 2, 2019
Conservative justices are giving the rich more money and power and the rest of America more inequality, discrimination, and jail time, according to this impassioned but one-sided indictment of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. Journalist and lawyer Cohen (Imbeciles) recaps the Court’s rightward drift since the 1969 retirement of Chief Justice Earl Warren as majorities led by Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts have, in his view, turned a cold shoulder to welfare recipients; undermined unions and restricted workers’ rights to sue employers for discrimination; abandoned school desegregation; disenfranchised minority voters by gutting the Voting Rights Act and upholding voter ID laws; eroded criminal due process protections and condoned draconian sentencing laws; shielded companies from lawsuits; and overturned campaign-finance laws and boosted the political influence of wealthy donors and corporations. Cohen highlights such questionable Court rulings as a 2003 decision upholding a defendant’s 25-years-to-life sentence for shoplifting videotapes, but dismisses the free-speech considerations informing the 2010 Citizens United campaign-finance ruling. His criticisms of the Court often center on its refusal to impose progressive policies such as mandatory busing to integrate schools and basic income guarantees. The result is a blistering critique in which politics overshadow constitutional principles. Agent: Kristine Dahl, ICM.

December 15, 2019
Equality is supposedly enshrined in the law of the land, but inequality reigns supreme thanks to a battery of rulings by the Supreme Court. From the time of the New Deal until the end of the Warren Burger era, the Supreme Court was an instrument of social policy for the benefit of the poor, shattering such things as the "anti-Okie laws" that made it a crime to transport a poor person across the borders of some 28 states and made it a highly desired career track to be a "poverty lawyer." This track was followed by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who made her first Supreme Court argument against an Air Force policy that awarded higher benefits to male than female officers. However, writes Cohen (Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, 2016, etc.), the Nixon era saw the emergence of a right-tending court that poverty lawyers sought to avoid, one that, after Burger retired in 1986, took a definite shift toward favoring corporate interests over individual ones. The inequalities that ensued are of several kinds. Court rulings in the field of education, for example, have validated "the widespread model of overwhelmingly minority urban school districts surrounded by largely white suburban ones," with the money flowing away from those urban centers and the concomitant "extremely high levels of school segregation." A different ruling might have created equality of opportunity instead of a clear path to failure, Cohen suggests. Similarly, rulings on political campaign finance have favored corporations, as in the case of Citizens United, and other interventions in politics, as with Bush v. Gore, have worked against the "fundamental principle of American law that court rulings have precedential value." Throughout, Cohen examines roads not taken, ones that might have "built a different society," while noting that the court is likely to take an even more rightward tack in coming years. A provocative and maddening study of judicial activism for the benefit of the haves over the have-nots.

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Starred review from January 1, 2020

Since the tenure of former Chief Justices Warren Burger and William H. Rehnquist, the U.S. Supreme Court's increasingly conservative bent and legal decisions have unfairly impacted poor and marginalized Americans while benefiting the rich and powerful, argues best-selling author Cohen (Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck). Moving from decision to decision, Cohen demonstrates how uninterrupted conservative control of the Court has dismantled the liberal legacy of the Warren Court (1953-1969), which heard cases on school desegregation, racial exclusion and discrimination, wage workers and labor unions, women's rights, voting rights, and more. The result, Cohen maintains, has been a trajectory of increasing inequality; this is pushing the country into an unsustainable society disconnected from the fundamental aspects of the nation's founding as a land where upward mobility is a promise for the many, rather than a path of the few. VERDICT Weaving legal, political, and social history, Cohen creates a richly detailed, but accessible, account for all interested in the personalities and politics that have shaped and are continuing to shape not only the U.S. criminal justice system but also the fabric of American life. A must-read.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

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Starred review from January 1, 2020
Look beyond the impact of individual Supreme Court rulings, as Cohen (Imbeciles, 2016) does here, and its impact on American society comes into focus. Cohen persuasively argues that the court's five-decade pattern of "siding with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak" bears at least some of the blame for our historic levels of socioeconomic inequality. Using its decisions since the end of the 1960s, when shady dealings around the retirement of liberal activist Chief Justice Earl Warren allowed Republican President Richard Nixon to install a conservative majority, he traces its sustained attacks on the social safety net, workers' rights, access to education, and equal protection, all areas in which the court has left many Americans poorer and more vulnerable. Conversely, the Supreme Court's pro-business and campaign finance rulings have helped the rich and powerful to grow more so, while its unwillingness to wrest political control from those who hold it through foul means like gerrymandering and voter suppression makes it less likely that the electorate will successfully challenge the status quo. In a lament for what might have been as well as an attack on what is, Cohen clearly and forcefully reminds us of the power of this institution.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)