Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices [Paperback]

A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed.

Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius.

They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. SCORPIONS tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself.

Noah Feldman is the author of four previous books:The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State(Princeton University Press, 2008),Divided By God(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005);What We Owe Iraq(Princeton University Press, 2004); andAfter Jihad(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). Scorpions is a deft and sophisticated panoramic history of a fascinating era, an important one of Supreme Court jurisprudence, told simply without losing substance . . . Through excellent storytelling and absorbing case histories about interesting, ambitious men grappling with profound and complicated issues-and with each other-Feldman's approach will satisfy constitutional scholars as well as inform readers in the general public. His broad canvas is bothlóå