Jed Rakoff's review of

 

I just read Jed Rakoff's review of 

Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment

by Brad Snyder

in the New York Review of Books. I like Rakoff's critique of what is an important new biography, and I here quote Rakoff's conclusion because it says exactly what I too see:

"[T]he [Supreme] Court has now returned to its historically conservative tendencies with a vengeance that can only be called reactionary. And if you put aside arguments over judicial philosophy and look at the practical results, it is worse than that. In the last few days of its most recent term, the Court released a series of decisions that, whatever their purported rationales, made the world a more dangerous place: more dangerous for poor people of color, who can no longer effectively seek redress for certain forms of police misconduct; more dangerous for women, who in many states must now resort to backroom abortions and face imprisonment for doing so; and more dangerous for Americans generally, who can no longer hope to meaningfully curb the increase in gun violence now plaguing our nation and whose government will find it ever more difficult to alleviate the climate change that imperils our planet. . . ."

The book review is here--I recommend it!: 

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/11/03/a-prisoner-of-his-own-restraint-felix-frankfurter-supreme-court/?utm_source=nybooks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share

And I am going to read Snyder's biography next.