The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
by Jeffrey Toobin
View on GoodreadsJeffrey Toobin's group portrait of the Rehnquist-to-early-Roberts Supreme Court (covering roughly 1990–2007), built on interviews with justices and clerks — arguing the era was defined less by ideology than by Sandra Day O'Connor's centrist swing votes, and ending as the Federalist Society project finally secures a conservative majority.
Core ideas
- Toobin's counterintuitive thesis is that the Rehnquist era was not a conservative revolution but a period of "intractable moderation" — real power belonged to swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, whose attunement to middle-of-the-road public consensus, not doctrine, decided the era's biggest cases.
- The book treats the Court as driven by personality and personal alliance rather than pure legal philosophy — Kennedy's self-importance, Scalia's combativeness, Souter's eccentricity, Thomas's grievances — arguing that who the justices are shapes the law as much as what they believe.
- Its forward-looking warning is the operative one in hindsight: with O'Connor replaced by Alito, Toobin argues the Federalist Society's decades-long project to capture the Court had finally produced a durable conservative majority — "we get the Court we deserve," and elections determine it.
Published2007
Pages384
ISBN9780385516402
ReadJun 2026
