The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made

The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the countrywith consequences that endure today By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justicesthe most by any president except George Washingtonand handpicked the chief justice. But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president. The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justicesfrom the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDRs initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelts former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson. The justices shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Courts finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloans intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.