Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court

Mr. Lazarus' command of the legal implications of several decades of Supreme Court decisions is excellent. Extremely well-researched, brave, eloquent and incisive. I recommend this book to all legal professionals and anyone interested in critical legal thought and its social implications. I especially benefited from the author's discussion of the death penalty cases and his deft efforts at making sense of them. He is able to explain the highly complex reasoning of many Supreme Court decisions without sacrificing, like many authors, by "dumbing" down the explications.

I agree with most of what the other reveiwers have written about this book. It is a very well-written and accessible account of the Supreme Court and its development in recent times. As another reviewer mentioned, Mr. Lazarus is honest about his liberal views and biases, and he is quite clear about which of his observations are accurate historical accounts and which are colored by his poilitical view. I found the book to be enjoyable and informative, and to contain some good basic explanations of how the Supreme Court works.

It is about time that someone brings sunlight to the inner workings of the Supreme Court. In spite of his decidedly liberal political leanings, Lazarus provides an objective look at the inner workings of the supreme court circa 1988. Lazarus does an excellent job of showing how the polarization of the Court has been detrimental to the pursuit of justice, just as the polarization of Congress has been detrimental to the legislative process.

Although non-lawyers may find his writing a bit technical, particularly on esoteric legal issues, they will nonetheless appreciate his candid views on the justices' decisionmaking process.

And finally a challange to the critics who believe that Lazarus has betrayed his employer: Please explain why we are not entitled to know how the highest court in the land makes its decisions. Congress has public hearings that are broadcast on CSPAN. The President receives more media attention than any other person in the world (absent the late Princess Di) and his minions will write dozens of tell-all books after he leaves office. Why should the Court be exempt from scrutiny? If the justices are embarassed then maybe they should change their ways.

I approached CLOSED CHAMBERS in response to hearing that a Supreme Court Clerk--a coveted one-year position as assistant to the Justices gained by a handful of top law graduates each year--had written a book about the experience and the Court reacted by tightening its rules. Instead of scandal, however, in CLOSED CHAMBERS I found a profound analysis of burning legal questions, primarily the death penalty and abortion. The author does not use the clerk's vantage point to sully the reputation of the Court or to give the impression of arbitrariness in the process by which the Supreme Court reaches its decisions. This unique perspective is used to show the reader the human side of the process, and show how the democratic decisions of the electorate came to influence policy through the persons that the elected, mostly Republican, Presidents could get approved by the mostly Democratic Senate. Of course, this seems genuinely interesting to me, because I realize the unavoidably subjective and political nature of much legal decision-making. Others might see the same text as debasing the sanctity of the objectivity of the law. The decisions of the Supreme Court have not been considered objective application of the law' in many decades--but, yes, the few who might read CLOSED CHAMBERS believing in objective application of the law might be surprised to find acknowledgment of subjectivity, here as in practically every other book about law written in the last 100 years.

The book offers little, if any, gossip and much legal reasoning. The history of the death penalty litigation occupies the greater part of the book, and is given in rich historical detail. Somewhat less time is spent on abortion, but the analysis there is even stronger--perhaps because the author does not overextend his arguments in reaction to the outcome.

The outcome in the death penalty litigation is that the Supreme Court has not only considered the death penalty proper from the perspective of constitutional law, but has also curtailed the appeals process, has approved 'victim impact statements', and has accepted the disproportional application of the death penalty. All this runs strongly against the author's beliefs and sense of justice. His response is to document each expansion of the application of the death penalty extensively and to make it appear as a morally contra-indicated political decision. While I agree that it is a political decision, I cannot see that any argument based on 'objective legal reasoning' could be made either way. The content of the Constitution's 'cruel and unusual' punishment clause is defined by the Supreme Court, and the electorate who elected a string of tough-on-crime, Republican Presidents, caused the definition of 'cruel and unusual' to not preclude the death penalty. While this may contravene the sense of morality of a large minority, it is the result of persistent democratic will, which is well nigh unassailable. The political Left would be well advised to accept the majority's decision and avoid squandering political capital on a closed issue.

The author's strongest argument against the death penalty is based on statistical evidence. The death penalty is imposed more frequently if the victim is Caucasian than if the victim is African American. From this, the author concludes that prosecutorial discretion drives the difference. This would mean that prosecutors are racially biased, the same way as an employer with disproportionate hiring biases. But that is not necessarily the case. My view is that the disparity is consistent with the acceptance of victim impact statements. Juries and more generally the criminal justice system should impose different penalties for different harms to society. The statistics and the victim impact statements suggest that juries adjust deterrence by the social harm and the disruption caused by different murders. The identity of the victim matters for the degree of disruption suffered by a society and for its deterrence. It is telling that the statistical study shows that the racia bias diminishes (without disappearing) when all factors are included in the multiple regression.

With this caveat that the book wails a bit much about the death penalty, its analysis is extraordinarily appealing. The reader gets history, law, facts, the social environment between the Justices and the clerks at a politically charged time. The legal scene of the eighties and early nineties is transmitted as high drama.

Then, just as dramatically, the author produces the same synthesis for abortion. After the fall of the liberal cause in the case of the death penalty, the book's abortion narrative is truly suspenseful. Still, the author shares the resentment of the left at the restrictions placed on reproductive freedom and its unequal availability, as a result of the Supreme Court's upholding of federal and state refusal to finance abortions. In the abortion segment of the book, the analysis is stronger. In addition to the privacy concern, the author reveals the much more recent and persuasive argument--and an argument that appears to be the author's own--that abortion is not only about privacy but also about equality between the sexes. A policy that forces the gestation of embryos burdens women but not men. Only women must give their body, time, and freedom. The recent statistical findings of Donahue and { that legalized abortion reduced the crime of offspring without reducing the number of children that women had, adds a crucial additional argument that has recently surfaced.

To conclude, CLOSED CHAMBERS is a fascinatingly thoughtful book, a rivetingly dramatic account of a tumultuous period of the legal history of the nation. If you are interested in these legal battles, you will love the book.

Given that a fairly large number of my classmates at Harvard had high aspirations of clerking on the Supreme Court, it was always surprising to me that none of them had read this book. Reading through the (often unfair) reviews here, it is not surprising why.

Several complaints of Lazarus' 'unfair' attitudes are evinced: Lazarus focuses on abortion, discrimination, and death penalty 'snapshots' from a legal historical perspective then turns to the inner workings of the court.

Shallower readers more interested in Grisham or other fiction might object to Lazarus' description of the Scottsboro case: a legal reader wouldn't begin trying to understand death penalty litigation without that critical starting point. Lazarus describes death penalty obstructionists as dueling with death penalty hawks - such as law clerks who threw parties when executions were carried out, while Marshall/Brennan clerks conducted vigils.

After Woodward/Armstrong's scathing reviews of Blackmun in 'The Brethren,' one cannot fault Lazarus for striving to resuscitate Blackmun's career. After all, the man read deeply, thought profoundly, and cared tremendously about his legacy (which comes down, for better or worse, to Roe v. Wade).

And this drives the large number of deprecatory reviews: people who hate Roe v. Wade will hate anything written about Blackmun with the slightest degree of fairness, deriding the author unfairly and underscoring his claims that closed, prejudiced (or at least, pre-judged) minds dominate, and only a few are willing to stand up to them.

Particularly telling is the origin of the 'centrist' coalition - O'Connor, Kennedy, and temporarily, Souter - which stood against Marshall/Brennan/Stephens (the liberal wing) and Rehnquist/Scalia (the conservative wing).

All of which is dull, tiresome reading for those looking for journalistic treatments of wheeling and dealing. Those looking for such writing should turn to Woodward/Armstrong's 'The Brethren.' Those looking for more informed history should turn to Morton Horwitz's treatises.

But for understanding the role of a clerk - the power and limits - as well as precious insights into Blackmun, an enigmatic jurist unloved by liberals or conservatives, and to read these treatments along with concise, and quite balanced legal history - this is a fine book.