Scorpions is by Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman (one of the constitutional experts called to testify at the House Impeachment Inquiry). Feldman starts with a discussion of FDR’s attempt to pack the court in order to enable passage of his New Deal legislation. The title refers to the fact that the justices often disagreed and fought like” Scorpions in a bottle”.

 This book is a fascinating look into the workings of the Supreme Court of the United States by examining the lives of four of FDR’s appointments: Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Feldman describes these judges (considered to be among the greatest) through several different lenses: their backgrounds, personalities, families, decisions, triumphs, failures, decisions and jurisprudence. The justices are considered great, not because they worked together on great decisions, but because they each individually practiced and advocated different legal perspectives. Frankfurter represented Judicial Restraint, Black Originalism, Jackson Legal Pragmatism, and Douglas Privacy and Individualism. The Constitution can be interpreted through each of these perspectives.

 Felix Frankfurter was a Jewish immigrant from Austria who arrived in the US at 13 speaking no English. He grew up in NYC. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he became a full professor who populated the Federal courts and universities with his clerks. Hugo Black grew up in rural Alabama, joined the KKK, and became a US Senator. Robert Jackson was a rural upstate NY Lawyer who never graduated from law school. He was arguably the best writer and litigator of them all. In between terms, he took a break from the court to become the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg . William O. Douglas grew up dirt poor in the state of Washington. He became a full professor of Law at Yale. He was the first Chairman of the Federal Exchange Commission and turned down the opportunity to be nominated as Truman’s Vice President.

 They participated in arguably the Court’s worst decision (Korematsu) which allowed the Japanese-American concentration camps to stand. They all came together in Brown v. Board of Education to unanimously overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and to outlaw the “separate but equal” law of the land. Then, in the course of the next several years, they had multiple major disagreements.

 Jackson invented the crime of ‘aggressive war’ that enabled the Nazi leaders to be tried at the end of WW II. Douglas established and used the idea of a ‘Penumbra’ (i.e. implied meaning) since  ‘privacy’ does not exist in the constitution. This concept was used to justify the decisions in Griswold (contraception), Roe v Wade (abortion), Obergefell (same sex marriage) and the liberal interventionists Warren Court.

 Most of our book club members thought it was well written, informative, and entertaining, but some thought it had too much material and required too much work. I thought it was a great read, very informative, and changed the way I understand the court. —-Fred G. Davis