The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the country, with consequences that endure today By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court.
Sloan\'s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times..
But the FDR Court\'s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy.
The justices\' shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court Justices and their political patrons.
Douglas, FDR\'s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt\'s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.
It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices--from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O.
The Court at War explores this pivotal period.
One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.
But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces.
He had appointed seven of the nine justices--the most by any president except George Washington--and handpicked the chief justice.
The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the country, with consequences that endure today By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court
