War Clouds -- Pearl Harbor -- War -- Taking A Stand -- Summer Session -- A Mortification Of The Flesh -- A Barefoot Lawyer -- "The Whole Situation Looks Mighty Bad" -- "A Fixed Star In Our Constitutional Constellation" -- "Just A Scrap Of Paper" -- An Odious Classification -- "I Am Unable To Believe You" -- The War At Home -- The Double -- A National Ticket -- Korematsu -- "The Ugly Abyss" -- The End Of The Roosevelt Court

"The inside story of how one president forever altered the Supreme Court, with consequences that endure today. By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices (the most by any president except George Washington) and handpicked the chief justice. But war time the Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president. This book examines these justices--from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson. 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. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy"--Adapted from the publisher's description