Recommended: The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution

Marcia Coyle has been covering the Supreme Court for several decades now as the chief Washington correspondent for the National Law Journal. She often appears on PBS’s The News Hour to explain Supreme Court rulings, and makes the most complex decisions easy to understand.

In her new book The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution she weaves a fascinating tale of personalities, legal precedents, and Supreme Court protocol to give a wonderful flavor of what goes on in legal cases going before the Supreme Court. The book is organized around four landmark decisions the Roberts Court has produced since John Roberts became Chief Justice, the 2007 challenge to race-based public school assignments in Louisville and Seattle, the Washington DC handgun ban in District of Columbia vs Heller, the Citizens United campaign finance case, and the 2012 challenge to the Affordable Health Care act (Obamacare).

This is a wonderful book, not only because it is free from the usual partisan bias discussions about such issues usually engender, but also because she makes it clear how difficult such decisions are where there are rights in conflict. She also is at pains to help us understand the judicial outlook of each of the justices, the "world view" which shapes the way each looks at the Constitution and the law. Many people feel the Supreme Court is partisan in the small sense (adhering to one current political party or another).  Coyle shows that they are not partisan in that sense, but do differ in fundamental ways in their views of how to properly interpret the Constitution.