Quick Take
- Narration: Don Leslie is a steady, intelligent narrator whose clear delivery suits Toobin’s dense legal-political prose, the 15-hour runtime is managed with consistent competence.
- Themes: the Supreme Court as political institution, judicial personality and philosophy, the Bush v. Gore legacy
- Mood: Analytical and surprisingly personal, with flashes of genuine drama in the behind-the-scenes passages
- Verdict: Toobin humanizes the justices with the same skill he applies to trial coverage, a book that feels more urgent now than when it was written.
I keep returning to books about the Supreme Court the way some people return to certain neighborhoods, there is always something I missed the first time, and the landscape keeps changing without the architecture obviously shifting. Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine came out in 2007, written in the anxious period just ahead of the 2008 election, and re-encountering it in audio now is a strange experience. The book describes a Court at a moment of conservative majority consolidation, with changes promised on abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations. The years since publication have provided an answer to those promises that Toobin could only anticipate.
That historical position gives the book an unintended additional layer. Reading it now, you have the eerie experience of watching the setup for developments that would take another decade-plus to fully arrive. The institutional dynamics Toobin describes, the ideological sorting of the bench, the retirement decisions made with electoral consequences in mind, the slow erosion of the O’Connor center, are the same dynamics that produced the Court composition that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The book is better understood as diagnostic history than as current events, but the diagnosis turns out to have been accurate.
Portraits of Nine People Who Decide the Law
Toobin’s method is biographical and psychological before it is doctrinal. He is not primarily interested in explaining the legal logic of landmark decisions, he is interested in the people who make those decisions, their temperaments, their resentments, their ambitions, and the complex social chemistry of nine highly intelligent people forced into permanent professional proximity. The portraits he draws are specific enough to be genuinely interesting: Anthony Kennedy’s sense of self-importance (Toobin’s phrase), Clarence Thomas’s carefully tended grievances, David Souter’s odd nineteenth-century lifestyle, which is not a figure of speech but a literal description of how Souter lived.
One reviewer described the book as reading like a movie, and credited Toobin with making the justices seem human, quirks and follies included. This is accurate and also the book’s central achievement. The Court is presented in popular understanding as an institution populated by figures whose authority derives partly from their apparent transcendence of ordinary human motivation. Toobin argues implicitly that this image is false and consequential: if you want to understand why the Court decides what it decides, you have to understand the people deciding it, including the parts of their personalities that never appear in official opinions.
Bush v. Gore, Finally in Full
The synopsis flags the behind-the-scenes account of Bush v. Gore as a major feature, and it is. Toobin conducted exclusive interviews with the justices themselves, and his reconstruction of the internal deliberations during those weeks in late 2000 is the most complete account available in accessible form. The decision is described as including Sandra Day O’Connor’s fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office, a detail that carries considerable weight given her public reputation for institutional loyalty.
One reviewer cautioned that the book should be read with a grain of skepticism, noting that Toobin has a liberal perspective that shapes his framing. This is fair and worth noting. Toobin is a CNN analyst and New Yorker staff writer, his sympathies are legible in the text, and the book’s treatment of the conservative justices, particularly Thomas, reflects those sympathies in ways that not all readers will find fully balanced. The book is compelling political narrative, but it is narrative with a point of view, and engaged readers will want to locate that point of view and weigh accordingly.
Don Leslie Across Fifteen Hours of Legal Analysis
Don Leslie’s narration is consistent and clear, the kind of narration that does not call attention to itself, which is exactly what this material requires. Toobin’s prose is journalistic: direct, not particularly lyrical, built for information delivery rather than literary effect. Leslie matches that register. His pacing is appropriate for a text that combines historical narration, biographical sketch, and legal analysis, moving through each mode without jarring shifts.
At 15 hours, the book is substantial but not overwhelming for listeners comfortable with extended nonfiction. The structure is organized around the three conservative Courts, Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts, which provides a clear chronological spine even as the biographical portraits create simultaneous time frames. Leslie keeps the listener oriented through these structural transitions without needing to over-signal them.
Reading This Now Versus Reading It in 2007
For listeners approaching this book as current events, adjustment of expectations is warranted, the Court has changed significantly since publication, with three justices having been replaced by Trump appointees alone. For listeners interested in institutional history and the longer patterns by which the Court’s ideological composition shifts, the book remains a valuable lens. It is one of the best accessible accounts of how the modern conservative legal movement worked to reshape the Court, and that account reads more clearly in retrospect than it could have at the time of writing.
Frequently Asked Questions
The book was published in 2007, how much has the Supreme Court changed since then, and does that make the book outdated?
Significantly changed. The composition Toobin describes has been transformed by multiple retirements and deaths, including those of Ginsburg, Scalia, and Kennedy, and their replacements. The conservative majority he described as newly consolidating is now substantially more dominant. The book is best read as recent institutional history rather than a guide to the current Court’s dynamics.
How does Toobin handle the legal substance of major decisions alongside the biographical portraits?
Toobin consistently prioritizes personality and process over doctrinal analysis. He explains the legal significance of major decisions accessibly but does not dwell in the legal reasoning the way an academic text would. This makes the book highly readable for non-lawyers but means that readers wanting deep engagement with the constitutional law itself should supplement with more specialized sources.
The reviewer Pete flagged Toobin’s liberal perspective, how noticeable is it in the text?
It is noticeable to attentive readers, particularly in the framing of conservative justices and in the emotional register around decisions like Bush v. Gore. Toobin does not pretend to neutral omniscience. His sympathies are those of a mainstream center-left legal journalist, and the portraits of justices he finds sympathetic are warmer than those he finds troubling. The book is honest about being a perspective rather than a survey.
Does the audiobook include the full behind-the-scenes account of Bush v. Gore, or is that section abbreviated?
The 15-hour runtime of the unabridged recording includes the full Bush v. Gore account as published. This section is one of the book’s most detailed and is unlikely to have been trimmed. The Sandra Day O’Connor material in particular is central to Toobin’s larger argument about the Court’s political character and would not have been cut.
