Battles on the Bench

For students and court-watchers eager for more depth, Cooper (The Supreme Court Inside Out) offers a readable exploration of court conflicts, with anecdotes mined from numerous judicial biographies. After traversing reasons for conflict (personal, ideological, procedural), Cooper intriguingly traces how justices have moved from traditional dissents to write opinions that attack colleagues by name. Although the author considers disputes among justices as ``dynamics to be expected,'' he thinks they actually do not clash as much as they could. Given the development of institutional norms and other checks on behavior like the growth of empathy over time, the court, the author concludes, is not the ``nine scorpions in a bottle'' of lore but the most collegial of Washington's governmental bodies. (Dec.)