Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices by Noah Feldman

This is the story of the court that FDR inherited, and then follows the nine justices that he appointed to the court (a recrod unlikely to be broken) to the end of their working days. The most important of those appointments—Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, and Robert Jackson—are the 'scorpions' of Noah Feldman’s highly readable and often absorbing book: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices.
The author has a great story and he tells it well. All these men came from obscure backgrounds and rose to great prominence under Roosevelt. With their judicial appointments, they became the core of the liberal bloc that pulled the Court out of the way of the New Deal. Feldman provides vivid biographical portraits of all these men, but what makes this book more than biography is the emphasis he places on the development of the judicial philosophy of each of his subjects.
Hugo Black brought what Feldman intriguingly calls “the distinctively Protestant” method to his reading of the Constitution and became the “inventor of originalism.” To be sure, it was in many ways a crude originalism, particularly with respect to Black’s obtuse no-law-means-no-law reading of the first amendment. Still, Black steered clear of many of the excesses of the Warren Court because of his adherence to constitutional text.
William Douglas pursued the extreme libertarianism that became his hallmark. The problem for him was his abrasive personality, which alienated his colleagues and essentially eliminated any influence he might have had on the direction of the Court. His autonomy-obsessed individualism, however, was later adopted by William Brennan, whose smooth and accommodating personality turned it into majorities during the Warren Court.
Robert Jackson was a pragmatic jurist. His influence was predicated on his ability as a writer and his problem-solving approach to cases. Jackson’s skill is most conspicuously on display in Barnette, the 1943 case that struck down a compulsory flag salute. Moreover, Jackson’s pragmatism made him especially adept at sorting out the nebulous issues of executive power, so compelling in his day--and more recently with the Bush Administration--where is his heir? His concurring opinion in the 1952 steel-seizure case, which thwarted President Truman’s seizure of the steel industry, remains a central precedent on the breadth of presidential authority.
Feldman is best in his analysis of Felix Frankfurter. He correctly sees Frankfurter’s principled judicial restraint as the stumbling block for many in accurately assessing his jurisprudence. Frankfurter—-to his astonishment—-found himself transformed into a conservative. Frankfurter’s critics, then and later, have tried to explain how it could be that the country’s best-known liberal became its leading judicial conservative. But the source of the change was not Frankfurter, whose constitutional philosophy remained remarkably consistent throughout his career. It was the rest of liberalism that abandoned him and moved on once judicial restraint was no longer a useful tool to advance liberal objectives.
Feldman’s book closes with the four scorpions all putting their intense differences aside in order to effect the unanimity of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
With the exception of Douglas, all these men made genuine,lasting contributions to constitutional law. Great read!