lightreads

The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans: Birth, Sex, Marriage, Childrearing, and Death by Howard Ball

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
A review of SCOTUS privacy cases, heavy on the interpersonal back-and-forth between the Justices in closed conference, and light on legal analysis beyond the merely descriptive. Which might make this a good book for the lay reader, but I have my doubts – there's an awful lot of procedural knowledge assumed, and the quick two-step through first principles (substantive due process, the transition from Lochner to West Coast Hotel, etc.) might actually be more confusing than anything. Then again, one thing law school has done to me is make it very difficult to remember how nonlawyers think, so I could be completely wrong on that.

Anyway, nice enough presentation of highly topical issues, with a very simple argument about the personal nature of decision-making in privacy cases. Most interesting for those eras where judicial papers have been unsealed, and less so for the more recent cases.

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