Continuing with this little series, the next president is going to need a fairly full understanding of what Bush has done to our judicial system and our freedoms. So I asked Slate's court reporter, Dahlia Lithwick, to recommend a couple books that would give the lay of the land:
I’d start with Charlie Savage's Takeoverand Marjorie Cohn’s Cowboy Republic
for primers on executive branch abuses since 9/11.Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency
is one of the most important books about how the Bush Administration crafted its terror policies in the aftermath of 9/11. It’s told from the vantage of a quite-sympathetic insider, with a level of understatement that may have you tearing your hair out, but it’s all the more compelling for that reason.Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy
is the Encyclopedia Britannica of torture. Clive Stafford Smith’s The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side
is a bone-chilling account of the legal proceedings at Guantanamo.Finally, in case you live in a crevasse in the earth, Jan Crawford Greenburg’s Supreme Conflict
and Jeff Toobin's The Nine
offer two insider versions of the Roberts Court.
