Dismantling the law

A man who had been blind from birth would be most unfortunate if he suddenly gained sight while standing before distorting mirrors in a carnival funhouse. The version suddenly revealed to him—men and women with grotesquely bloated bodies, faces out of surrealist nightmares, people upside down—would make what he supposed to be reality appalling and terrifying. So it is with Martin Garbus’s new book, Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law.¹ Should the book fall into the hands of anyone ignorant of the Court’s constitutional jurisprudence, which is virtually all of the American public, he will be horrified to learn that extreme right-wing bigots, reactionaries, and toadies to malefactors of great wealth are increasing their control of the Supreme Court and most of the lower...