United States. -- Supreme Court--History. -- Constitutional law--United States. -- Law--Political aspects

From the debates over judicial power in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to controversial rulings on slavery, racial segregation, free speech, and abortion, Peter Irons offers a penetrating look at both the people who bring cases before the Supreme Court and the justices who decide what the Constitution means in each dispute.

Here are revealing sketches of every justice from John Jay to Stephen Breyer, as well as portraits of such legal giants as John Marshall, Roger Taney, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Earl Warren, and Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps most fascinating of all are the accounts of ordinary Americans-such as Dred Scott, Homer Plessy, Lillian Gobitas, and Michael Hardwick-whose cases forced the justices to confront the Constitution's promise that every American deserves "the blessings of liberty." Irons also recounts the landmark decisions in which the Court both honored and broke that promise. In the tradition of Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States, this astute work explains and pays tribute to a system of justice that both reflects and parallels our country's remarkable legal history.