{"product_id":"the-oath-isbn-9780307390714","title":"The Oath","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Work of Nonfiction\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the moment Chief Justice Roberts botched Barack Obama's oath of office, the relationship between the Court and the White House has been a fraught one. Grappling with issues as diverse as campaign finance, abortion, and the right to bear arms, the Roberts court has put itself squarely at the center of American political life. Jeffrey Toobin brilliantly portrays key personalities and cases and shows how the President was fatally slow to realize the importance of the judicial branch to his agenda. Combining incisive legal analysis with riveting insider details, \u003ci\u003eThe Oath\u003c\/i\u003e is an essential guide to understanding the Supreme Court of our interesting times.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Toobin is one of the most talented reporters covering American law.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Deeply versed in Supreme Court lore and legal subtlety, [Toobin] draws upon first-hand interviews with the justices and their clerks in crafting an anxious tale of the Roberts court, casting its major rulings as looming symbols of judicial philosophy. . . . A polished and thoughtful dissection.” —\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A compelling narrative of the early years of the Roberts court. . . . The many pleasures of \u003ci\u003eThe Oath\u003c\/i\u003e come . . . from human details about the justices and their interactions with the White House.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Anyone fascinated by the inner workings of the highest court in the land will be delighted.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Huffington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not until scholars a generation hence gain access to the justices’ papers are we likely to have a more useful, or more readable, picture of this oddly assorted group of judges at this moment in history.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A worthy successor to \u003ci\u003eThe Nine\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Oath\u003c\/i\u003e is a work of probity, intelligence and exceptional reporting.” —\u003ci\u003eRichmond Times-Dispatch\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Might . . . be viewed eventually as the best book about the court during the opening half-decade of John Roberts’ reign as chief justice. . . . Toobin does his job well.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Court watchers, serious and occasional, will find Toobin’s explanation of the issues at stake . . . before the Roberts court well worth their time.” —\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Exceptionally readable. . . . Blends strong reporting with a sure historical grasp of the court.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Columbus Dispatch\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An artfully constructed chronicle. . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Oath\u003c\/i\u003e delivers a bracing survey of the court’s key decisions and divisions. . . . Toobin’s sketches of the justices are fabulous.” —\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lucid, lively and astute. . . . Toobin has the chops (and the contacts) to take readers inside the court.” —\u003ci\u003eMinneapolis Star Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“For political, and governmental, junkies. . . . Fall[s] into the Robert Caro–Lyndon Johnson category. . . . Reminds us that it is the interplay between different personalities and agendas that more than any scholarly argument or historical text is often at the heart of the laws we live with.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A reliable and astute guide through the thicket of legalese.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Miami Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Toobin [is] a rare authority who knows how to write. . . . This is, in short, a book suitable for reading in the study or while sprawled at the beach.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Sun-Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A revealing look at the ideological battle between the White House and the Supreme Court.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A skillful probing of the often-discordant relationship between the president and the Supreme Court. . . . Shrewd and elucidating.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eJeffrey Toobin is the bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Nine\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eToo Close to Call\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eA Vast Conspiracy\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Run of His Life\u003c\/i\u003e. He is a staff writer at \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e and the senior legal analyst at CNN. He lives with his family in New York.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover Edition\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eThe Politician’s Path\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn February 14, 2008, a man named  Steven Kazmierczak opened fire on the campus of Northern Illinois  University, in DeKalb, Illinois. He killed five people, and injured  twenty-one, before committing suicide. The following day, Barack Obama,  the junior senator from the state and a candidate for president, was  asked about the shooting at a news conference. In light of this tragedy,  what did Obama think about the need for gun control, especially as it  related to the Second Amendment?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Second Amendment states: “A  well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,  the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  There was and remains unanimous agreement that the text of the  amendment is ungrammatical. For more than a century, there was also  agreement on what the Second Amendment meant. According to this  understanding, the Second Amendment related only to the rights of  citizen militias and imposed no barrier to gun control; in other words,  the amendment did not give private individuals a right to bear arms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObama had a different view.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I  believe that the Second Amendment means something. I do think it speaks  to an individual right,” Obama said at his news conference following  the massacre. “There’s been a long-standing argument among  constitutional scholars about whether the Second Amendment referred  simply to militias or whether it spoke to an individual right to possess  arms. I think the latter is the better argument,” he went on. “There is  an individual right to bear arms, but it is subject to common-sense  regulation just like most of our rights are subject to common-sense  regulation. And so I think there’s a lot of room before you start  bumping up against a constitutional barrier.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven a few years  earlier, Obama’s comments would have seemed bizarre. Since a Supreme  Court case called United States v. Miller, in 1939, hundreds of courts  had rejected the individual rights view of the Second Amendment. But  then the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party, and their  allies invested their time, money, and energy in creating a new  understanding of the Second Amendment. Indeed, at the time of Obama’s  news conference about the massacre, the Supreme Court was preparing to  decide District of Columbia v. Heller, a product of this long effort to  create a new interpretation of the Second Amendment. The work of  conservatives to change the accepted meaning of the framers’ words was  so successful that the recruits to the cause came to include the Chicago  liberal who was a leading contender to be the Democratic nominee for  president.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis, it turns out, was no surprise. Obama was an  unusually well-credentialed lawyer. His life as a public figure began in  1990, when he was twenty-eight and won election as president of the  Harvard Law Review, the first African American to hold that position.  Obama practiced law for a dozen years and taught at the University of  Chicago Law School for nearly as long. But by the time he ran for  president, Obama was above all a politician, and a cautious one. Obama  admired the heroes of the civil rights movement, including the lawyers,  but he did not model his career on theirs. Obama did not believe the  courts were the principal vehicle for social and political change.  Elections, rather than lawsuits, were his battlefield of choice, and by  2008 he knew that the way to win the presidency was, in part, to embrace  the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNear the  end of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, which he published when he was  thirty-three, Obama reflected on his education at Harvard Law School.  His tone was ambivalent. “The study of law can be disappointing at  times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an  uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to  regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often  seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness  of their condition.” Then, in a gesture that was common in the book, and  in Obama’s character, he gave the other side of the story: “But that is  not all the law is,” he continued. “The law is also memory; the law  also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its  conscience.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObama’s conversation with himself continued: “How  far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into  justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t  always satisfy me—for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score  of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” As  before, though, Obama followed that despairing remark with a hopeful  one: “And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I  find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions  are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow,  ultimately, prevail.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObama arrived at Harvard after spending  three years as a community organizer in Chicago. There he had led a  small group in a series of fights, usually with the city government, for  better housing, for asbestos abatement, and for jobs on the South Side.  Like many such endeavors to organize the poor, Obama’s work was  difficult and not especially successful; friends and colleagues found  Obama more analytical than confrontational. In time, as his frustrations  mounted, Obama began thinking about going to law school. Partly, Obama  simply wanted to find a way to make a decent living, but the profession  also seemed well suited to his particular kind of intelligence and  ambitions. He was admitted to Harvard and began his studies in the fall  of 1988.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObama had just turned twenty-seven, which turned out to  be a fact of some significance. Most of his fellow students were  considerably younger, and Obama’s maturity, both chronological and  temperamental, set him apart. He approached law school, as he did much  else, with a certain detachment, as both participant and observer. Law  school, and Harvard in particular, would leave its mark on Obama, but  his core remained unchanged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was much truth in the  conventional view of a Harvard Law School degree as a passport to Wall  Street law firms, but the school also produced eminent role models for  an aspiring reformer like Obama. Louis Brandeis, class of 1877,  practically invented Supreme Court litigation as a vehicle for social  change and, in an article in the Harvard Law Review, first identified a  “right to privacy.” Felix Frankfurter, class of 1906, provided much of  the intellectual energy behind the New Deal, as well as many protégés to  Franklin Roosevelt, before following Brandeis on to the Supreme Court.  Archibald Cox, class of 1937, joined the faculty and went on to serve as  President Kennedy’s solicitor general and then Watergate special  prosecutor. In subsequent decades, untold numbers of Harvard Law  graduates moved to Washington, and around the country, to make their  marks on the policies of the day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd there was a time, too, when  ideas, as well as people, also made the trip from the Ivy League to  Washington. In the Warren Court years—the years of Brown—leading law  schools provided much of the intellectual firepower behind the Court’s  most liberal decisions. In Goldberg v. Kelly, in 1970, the Court held  for the first time that the government must give an individual a hearing  before cutting off his welfare benefits. To do otherwise, Justice  William J. Brennan Jr. said, would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, by  depriving the individual of “property” without due process of law. But  were welfare benefits “property”? In the key passage in the opinion,  Brennan wrote, “It may be realistic today to regard welfare entitlements  as more like ‘property’ than a ‘gratuity.’ Much of the existing wealth  in this country takes the form of rights that do not fall within  traditional common-law concepts of property.” In support of this novel  notion, Brennan cited the work of Charles A. Reich, a professor at Yale  Law School, and his articles in the Yale Law Journal. At around the same  time, Frank I. Michelman, a professor at Harvard (who was still  teaching when Obama was a student), suggested that the Fourteenth  Amendment might require a right to economic equality, not just freedom  from discrimination. The Supreme Court never went that far, but the idea  was, at least for a while, plausible. To write for a law review in  those days could be seen as an act of genuine political importance.  Harvard’s influence, though, went in cycles, and there was a down period  as the country and the Supreme Court began to turn to the right in the  1970s—a period that coincided with the tenure of John G. Roberts ’79 on  campus. Richard Nixon famously referred to Harvard as the “Kremlin on  the Charles,” so faculty members were generally less welcomed in his  administration. Conservative Supreme Court justices needed no direction  from liberal academics. On the whole, in these days, the Harvard law  faculty still tilted left, but the school returned its focus to its  mission as a professional school. As managing editor of the Harvard Law  Review, Roberts was known by his colleagues as a political  conservative—a modest novelty among his fellow editors—but mostly as a  skilled and demanding taskmaster.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLiberals may still have held  sway in Cambridge, but conservatives were gaining in the rest of the  world, and following his graduation, magna cum laude, Roberts began his  Republican ascent. He clerked first in New York for Henry J. Friendly, a  legendary judge of moderate Republican views on the Second Circuit, and  then in 1980 for William Rehnquist, who was still an associate justice.  From there, Roberts went to the Justice Department and Reagan White  House. Clearly, then, the Kremlin in Cambridge could launch a brilliant  conservative career as well as a liberal one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBack at the law  school, in the eighties, the politics took a peculiar turn. The faculty,  and to a lesser extent the student body, became bitterly divided over a  movement known as Critical Legal Studies. CLS was a hybrid of  traditional Marxism and contemporary literary theory; its adherents  purported to expose the contradictions and class biases inherent in all  aspects of law. As far back as the 1920s, “legal realism”—which provided  the intellectual basis for much of the New Deal—exposed the political  nature of most legal rules. But the Crits, as they were known, practiced  a kind of legal realism on steroids, taking an almost nihilistic  pleasure in showing the meaninglessness of law. They portrayed law as  first and foremost an instrument of oppression of the disenfranchised,  and they did so in a manner that was both passionate and obscure, with  articles full of citations to the work of “poststructuralists” like  Jacques Derrida. Crits and conservatives on the faculty battled over  tenure appointments, and the fights sometimes spilled into the  classrooms, and even into courtrooms. The Kremlin on the Charles became  known as Beirut on the Charles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRoberts experienced a pre-CLS  Harvard. Obama arrived just after its heyday. So it was notable that,  while still in his first year, Obama sought out Laurence Tribe and went  to work for him as a research assistant. The choice was a revealing one  on the young student’s part. Tribe was a liberal but no Crit—a  description that also fit his prize student. Tribe had managed to avoid  the Crits-versus-conservatives warfare on the faculty, largely because  he was a leading modern exemplar of the Cambridge-to-Washington axis.  After writing the best single-volume treatise on the Constitution, Tribe  became an accomplished Supreme Court advocate and adviser to Democratic  politicians. In 1987, Tribe gave damning testimony before the Senate  Judiciary Committee against Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the  Supreme Court. The stand made Tribe a Republican target and doomed his  own chance of winning a nomination to the Court. Still, Tribe was more  than an academic; he was a player on the larger stage, the real world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObama  excelled in the classroom—he too would graduate magna cum laude—and he  succeeded in the writing competition to join the staff of the Harvard  Law Review. Students on law reviews edit articles that are submitted by  law professors around the country; about forty out of five hundred  students in a class make law review at Harvard. Every February, the  staff of the law review holds an election to select the president, or  editor in chief, of the magazine for the following year. Obama won with  broad support. Conservative students, who were a growing presence at  Harvard, turned out to be the key to Obama’s victory. The Federalist  Society—the national conservative legal organization—had been founded at  Yale in 1982, but Harvard soon opened a chapter, and its members  asserted themselves as a vocal minority on the staff of the Review. The  conservatives recognized that Obama was not one of their own, but they  felt he would give them a fair shake, especially about which articles to  publish. In winning the confidence of conservatives, Obama’s maturity  proved a tremendous asset. In that tumultuous time on campus, Obama  always seems slightly removed from the battle lines, in his customary  posture of both observer and participant. He had an innate grasp of the  politician’s gift for persuading others that you agree with them without  ever making an explicit commitment. Obama’s earnest style earned him  some mockery from his friends. One of them told David Remnick that a  group would go to the movies and tease Obama by imitating his  solicitude: “Do you want salt on your popcorn? Do you even want  popcorn?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuddenly, then, with his election as president of the  Review, Barack Obama was a celebrity of sorts. The New York Times did a  story about him. Turner Broadcasting asked Obama to record a “Black  History Minute,” and the young man, struggling with the teleprompter,  gave a brief tribute to Charles Hamilton Houston, one of Thurgood  Marshall’s legal mentors. Vanity Fair, which does not generally track  the leadership of scholarly publications, devoted a full page to Obama’s  election. “The New York Times ran a ‘First Black’ headline, which  probably won’t be the last time that label is affixed to Barack Obama,”  Elise O’Shaughnessy wrote, before concluding that Obama “responds warily  to the assumption that he himself will run for office. ‘If I go into  politics it should grow out of work I’ve done on the local level, not  because I’m some media creation.’ Though, as media creations go, he’d be  a pretty good one.” In addition, around this time, Jane Dystel, a  literary agent in New York, approached Obama with the idea of his  writing a book. Obama agreed, and signed a contract with a division of  Simon \u0026amp; Schuster. (At that point, people embraced Obama without  knowing much about him. One publisher thought he was raised in the  Chicago ghetto; Vanity Fair said he grew up in Singapore, not Indonesia.  No one seemed to know that his real home was Honolulu.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was  all a rather extraordinary amount of attention to a mere law student,  but during his debut as a public figure, Obama demonstrated precocious  political skills. “The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of  progress,” he told Fox Butterfield, of the Times. “But it’s important  that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for  blacks.” Likewise, Obama was always careful to show respect for his  forebearers in the civil rights movement, whose sacrifices, he said,  made his own success possible. He told the Boston Globe, “To some  extent, I’m a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been  made.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut for all that Obama showed respect for Marshall,  Houston, and their peers, he also made clear in his own way what he  expected of the contemporary legal system: not much. Those pioneers had  used the courts to break down the legal barriers that oppressed African  Americans. But by the time Obama was at Harvard, that work was mostly  done. The task of legal progressives of Obama’s vintage was to try to  hang on to the gains that had been made in the courts—and that wasn’t  easy, or of particular interest to him. In 1991, Obama graduated from  Harvard Law School into the world of the Rehnquist Court, where the  social change on the agenda was (almost always) in the conservative  direction. If the right was ascendant, the left was distracted—with the  baroque inventions of Critical Legal Studies. For someone like Obama,  who had spent years working on the real-world problems of poor people in  Chicago, theories untethered to reality had no appeal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater,  when Obama was a senator, he explained the nature of his disillusionment  with the use of the courts for social change. It wasn’t just that  things looked bleak at the Rehnquist Court. “I wondered if, in our  reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our  values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy,” he wrote in  The Audacity of Hope. Yes, he pointed out that he believed in the right  to privacy and celebrated the legacy of Brown in civil rights, but it  wasn’t up to lawyers to preserve those rights. “There was one way to  ensure that judges on the bench reflected our values, and that was to  win at the polls.” Unlike his honored forebearers, Obama would devote  his life to elections, not lawsuits.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303728599269,"sku":"NP9780307390714","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307390714.jpg?v=1767740759","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-oath-isbn-9780307390714","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}