FREE: Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court

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The Supreme Court of the United States is the most powerful court in the world. It is also the branch of our government most shrouded in mystery, misunderstanding, and myth.. Isolated in a marble temple, supposedly insulated from the pressures of politics, nine unelected Justices are charged with protecting our most cherished rights and shaping our fundamental laws. They are assisted by roughly thirty-six law clerks each year, the best and brightest of the nation's young lawyers, who routinely go on to fill the highest ranks of our government, courts, law schools, and law firms.

Never before has one of these clerks stepped forward to reveal how the Court really works--and why it often fails the country and the cause of justice. In this groundbreaking book, award-winning historian Edward Lazarus, a former clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, guides the reader through the Court's inner sanctum, explaining as only an eyewitness can the collisions of law, politics, and personality as the Justices wrestle with the most fiercely disputed issues of our time. Part memoir, past history, and all spellbinding narrative, Closed Chambers provides an intimate portrait and devastating critique--Justice by Justice--of a court at war with itself and in neglect of its constitutional duties.

From the conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist's apparent attempt to influence the 1992 election by delaying a crucial abortion case to liberal champion Justice William Brennan's ill-conceived and ultimately self-defeating campaign to sabotage the death penalty, Lazarus's riveting account shows us a Court broken into scheming factions whose members resort to crass political calculations and transparently hypocritical arguments as they discard legal principles for bottomline results.