Books, Arts & Manners: Liberalism’s Guilty Conscience

Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles inside the Supreme Court, by Edward Lazarus (Times, 528 pp., $27.50)

EDWARD Lazarus is a liberal, pro-choice lawyer who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the opinion in Roe v. Wade. Yet not only is his book a generally fair and well-written explanation of how the Court came to be riven by partisan politics; it also confirms, often despite itself, conservatives’ charge that the Warren and Burger Courts politicized the legal process by seeking “social justice” at the expense of the rule of law.

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Daniel E. Troy

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Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles inside the Supreme Court, by Edward Lazarus (Times, 528 pp., $27.50)

EDWARD Lazarus is a liberal, pro-choice lawyer who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the opinion in Roe v. Wade. Yet not only is his book a generally fair and well-written explanation of how the Court came to be riven by partisan politics; it also confirms, often despite itself, conservatives’ charge that the Warren and Burger Courts politicized the legal process by seeking “social justice” at the expense of the rule of law.