Weaving legal, political, and social history, Cohen creates a richly detailed, but accessible, account for all interested in the personalities and politics that have shaped and are continuing to shape not only the U.S. criminal justice system but also the fabric of American life. A must-read..

The book is a liberal cri de coeur, a lamentation of the many distinct and specific ways American society might be fairer, more equal and more humane if that one consequential change, the court’s decisive shift to the right under Nixon, had not occurred.

Given individual justices who can sometimes seem too big for their robes, Cohen’s wonky emphasis on cases rather than characters offers a steady perspective.

Cohen is uniquely qualified to write this book.

Readers not already familiar with the relevant cases and constitutional text will receive little help from Supreme Inequality, which reduces nuanced arguments to brief descriptions of winners and losers. Meanwhile, Mr. Cohen offers biographical descriptions to explain why judges have voted for the poor or against them.

Cohen, in his new book, explores the court's opinions over the past five decades and comes to a rueful conclusion: These decisions have greatly exacerbated America's gap between rich and poor.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Supreme Inequality is a howl of progressive rage against the past half-century of American jurisprudence. Cohen, a former New York Times and Time magazine writer, builds a comprehensive indictment of the court’s rulings.

There’s no shortage of important cases he has to cover from the past half-century. There’s no shortage of justices, either, a majority of whom are introduced in Supreme Inequality via crucial backstories, which are both necessary to the book’s arguments and detrimental to its pace.

Cohen makes a passionately partisan and powerfully persuasive case.

Cohen’s ambitious, well-written book makes a convincing case that the court has contributed to growing inequality through its rulings on everything from election law and education to corporate law and crime.

In Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen argues that for half a century, America’s highest court has waged 'an unrelenting war' on the poor while championing the rich.

Cohen persuasively argues that the court’s five-decade pattern of 'siding with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak' bears at least some of the blame for our historic levels of socioeconomic inequality.

Throughout, Cohen examines roads not taken, ones that might have 'built a different society,' while noting that the court is likely to take an even more rightward tack in coming years.

... impassioned but one-sided.