The Company They Keep: How Partisan Divisions Came to the Supreme Court

Are Supreme Court justices swayed by the political environment that surrounds them? Most people think "yes," and they point to the influence of the general public and the other branches of government on the Court. It is not that simple, however.

As the eminent law and politics scholars Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum show in The Company They Keep, justices today are reacting far more to subtle social forces in their own elite legal world than to pressure from the other branches of government ...