The Antagonists by James F. Simon is about the complex friend and enemy relationship between two Supreme Court justices in the 1940s and 1950s: Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. Both were FDR appointees. Both had pro-New Deal and liberal to libertarian backgrounds. Frankfurter helped found the ACLU and was a Harvard Law professor before joining the Court. Black was a personal injury lawyer and then Alabama Senator who fought for the underdog against big money interests. (He also was a member of the KKK briefly but renounced its views.) So you would think they would be kindred legal minds on the Court, but they were fierce rivals in the 1940s, and then slowly became colleagues before a friendship developed in the late 1950s. Like Toobin’s The Nine, this book artfully weaves biography, law, and politics. I highly recommend it, although the writing is somewhat stilted and Simon skips over some landmark cases during this time, e.g., Youngstown v. Sawyer. The best chapters were the two biographical chapters (Chps. I and II) and the chapter on Brown v. Board of Education (Chp. VII). Simon convincingly shows how the Court’s decisions are very much the product of interpersonal conflict and cooperation among the justices. He also demonstrates how their antagonism was healthy in the long-run as each spoke for a different view: Frankfurter was the voice of judicial restraint and Black a staunch defender of civil liberties, the First Amendment above all. In the end, Black won the intellectual legacy and his views still shape the Court today.
