Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court » (Reissue)

Edward Lazarus is the author of Black Hills, White Justice. He writes regularly for national publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Atlantic Monthly. A former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Lazarus is currently in private practice in California.

Lazarus, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, sees the Supreme Court of the Rehnquist years as an institution broken into unyielding factions in which the Justices often resort to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments and factual distortions in order to a achieve desired results. Juxtaposing history, memoir, and analysis, he uses Court dealings with the issues of the death penalty, race discrimination, and abortion as illustrative of the larger problem of the breakdown of the Court's internal culture. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR