A review by librator
A People's History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution by Peter Irons

3.0

Not bad. Irons is interesting, and provides a lot of great vignettes of the cases, and particularly the people, that make up our Constitutional law. His legal knowledge and qualifications can't be denied. He is, however, not a historian, and his bias, like that of his mentor Howard Zinn, is open and overt. His heroes (particularly Earl Warren) loom large and change the country for the better, dying mourned and beloved, while his villains are usually consigned to mediocrity or dismissed with a phrase such as "He was rated a 'failure' by modern scholars." While my own views may correspond with his more often than not, he approaches history as a tool for his own use, and a way to prove the virtue of his teleological perspective. History should deal with the past on its own terms - reading our own values back to color the choices its participants made is something we all do, certainly, but that historians try to minimize as anachronistic. Kudos to Irons for taking on the task, for being a good read, and for providing one of the very few comprehensive histories out there, but I really wish he had worked harder to leave himself out of it.