"'About this Book' At the end of the Supreme Court's 2019-2020 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the Court would move irrevocably to the radical right hadn't come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions on cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could handle the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020-2021 term, much about our the nation's highest court will have changed. The right-wing supermajority will complete its first term on the bench, cementing Donald Trump's legacy on American jurisprudence. This is the story of that year. From the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Coney Barrett, from the pandemic to the election, from the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the storming of the Capitol across the street, the Supreme Court has been at the center of many of the biggest events of the year. Throughout Justice on the Brink, award-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse gives us unique insight into a Supreme Court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect"--

A look at the confirmation process for Clarence Thomas' appointment to the Supreme Court.

Assesses the impact of the Supreme Court on our daily lives, looks at the results of previous appointments to the Court, and describes the Supreme Court's constitutional role

In this landmark book, a leading authority on lower federal court judicial selections tells the riveting story of how nine presidents over a period of fifty-six years have chosen federal judges. Sheldon Goldman has interviewed participants, and he has mined published and unpublished government documents and archives, along with memoranda, letters, and other documents in the papers of every president from Franklin Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan, to bring to life the judicial selection process. His book is filled with richly drawn and dramatic accounts of each president's use of judicial appointments to further policy, partisan, and personal agendas. Goldman analyzes political and social changes that have occurred over the years and the impact of those changes on the profile of those selected for the bench.

The Supreme Court appointments process is broken, and the timing couldn't be worse--for liberals or conservatives. The Court is just one more solid conservative justice away from an ideological sea change--a hard-right turn on an array of issues that affect every American, from abortion to environmental protection. But neither those who look at this prospect with pleasure nor those who view it with horror will be able to make informed judgments about the next nominee to the Court--unless the appointments process is fixed now. In The Next Justice , Christopher Eisgruber boldly proposes a way to do just that. He describes a new and better manner of deliberating about who should serve on the Court--an approach that puts the burden on nominees to show that their judicial philosophies and politics are acceptable to senators and citizens alike. And he makes a new case for the virtue of judicial moderates. Long on partisan rancor and short on serious discussion, today's appointments process reveals little about what kind of judge a nominee might make. Eisgruber argues that the solution is to investigate how nominees would answer a basic question about the Court's role: When and why is it beneficial for judges to trump the decisions of elected officials? Through an examination of the politics and history of the Court, Eisgruber demonstrates that pursuing this question would reveal far more about nominees than do other tactics, such as investigating their views of specific precedents or the framers' intentions. Written with great clarity and energy, The Next Justice provides a welcome exit from the uninformative political theater of the current appointments process.