The Roberts Court
The Struggle for the Constitution

Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nations highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the US Constitution. The battleground is the Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action. The Roberts court, seven years old, is at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Four landmark decisionsconcerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schoolsreveal the fault lines in a conservative-dominated court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. Marcia Coyles brilliant inside account of the high court captures how those cases beganthe personalities and conflicts that catapulted them onto the national sceneand how they ultimately exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United campaign case. Most dramatically, her analysis shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups are strategizing to find cases and crafting them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority.The Roberts Courtoffers a ringside seat at the struggle to lay down the law of the land.