The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made

Sloan (The Great Decision), a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, offers an astute look at the Supreme Court during WWII, an era that tested the Court’s ability to balance the Constitution’s protections of individual rights against the extraordinary measures the government thought necessary to win the war. Sloan views the Court’s protection of individual rights in a positive light, pointing to the 1942 opinion in Skinner v. Oklahoma denying a state’s ability to forcibly sterilize a criminal defendant, a decision that has become a precedent underlying the right to same-sex marriage; and West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, a 1943 decision that protected the rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the U.S. flag on religious grounds. On the other hand, Sloan argues the 1944 opinion in United States v. Korematsu that found government had authority to move hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the name of national security stands as one of the worst opinions in the Court’s history. Alongside astute case analyses, Sloan vividly explores the fractious relationships between justices whose judicial philosophies, personalities, and backgrounds radically differed. The result is an accessible narrative that highlights how the forces of history, politics, and personality influenced one of America’s most important institutions at a critical time in history. It’s an entertaining and worthwhile account. (Sept.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the Supreme Court decision the protected the right to refuse to salute the flag on religious grounds.