I started reading this as a loaner from P-FLAG (Parents, Friends, and Families of Lesbians and Gays) - found myself totally caught up in it. The combination of Deb Price's columns, with her insights into the lives of gays and lesbians, and Joyce Murdoch's text about the effects of the column on their own lives, expanded my horizons and commitment dramatically. This book is really a must-read for anyone who is gay/lesbian or knows anyone who is.

I can't put this book down. Murdoch and Price have done an unebelievable amount of research into the inner workings of the Supreme Court. By interviewing former clerks for Court justices, scrutinizing transcripts of oral arguments, and dissecting the Court's notoriously difficult opinions, they have presented a refreshing picture of the people behind such (in)famous cases as Bowers v. Hardwick and less well-known cases which preceded and followed it. As a soon-to-be-second-year law student, the human face on the litigants and decision-makers is striking.

However, as someone whose main literary diet consists of academic literature and judicial opinions, I have noticed some flaws. First, there are more than a few typographical errors, which I assume will be corrected when the book comes out in paperback. More importantly, since the authors aren't lawyers, they miss the implications of the legal language the Court uses. The authors enclose terms of art like strict scrutiny and Court language like "dismissed as improvidently granted" in quotation marks as if to emphasize the peculiarity of the Court's language. Also, the authors' (understandable) bias is sometimes distracting, taking away from an otherwise even-handed assessment of the Court's motives.

All in all, this book is a worthwhile read (as my fellow reviewers have noticed).

"Courting Justice" is an authoritative account of gay men and lesbians who have petitioned the court for their civil rights.

Through interviews with clerks, excerpts from transcripts and audiotapes of oral arguments, justices' notes of meetings and rough drafts of decisions, and the journalist authors' clear explanations of legal jargon and procedure, we watch the court at work. The mysterious, incontrovertable third arm of our government is revealed to be simply nine men and women, as subject to prejudice as the rest of us. But we also see a few justices wrestle with their prejudices and write forceful dissents and eventually a majority opinion (Romer v. Evans) that wrapped queer Americans in the constitutional guarantee of Equal Protection.

Because Murdoch and Price's book covers such a broad timespan, they're able to dissect the court's (often achingly) slow evolution from viewing gays as perverted criminals to citizens.

If you want to understand the key legal questions facing gay, lesbian, transgender, and bi-affectional Americans, and their search for equal justice in a country that promises so much, I would highly recommend this book. But don't read it before bedtime; Scalia's a pretty scary boogyman.

Courting Justice immediately strikes one as a gay version of the Brethren, Bob Woodward's classic book probing the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court. In some respect it is. Murdoch and Price, who also have ties to the Washington Post, have gained access to private papers and interviewed a network of usually close-mouthed law clerks to attempt to piece together the Court's hidden deliberations in gay rights cases over the past three decades. Given the Court's staunch commitment to preserving a thick shroud of secrecy around those deliberations - for reasons not unlike those of the Wizard of Oz - this investigative journalism has always been extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, through obvious persevering determination, Murdock and Price have managed in Courting Justice to cast some fascinatingly revealing light on the Court's decisionmaking in each gay rights case it has considered (or refused to consider). The book is valuable for these insights alone.

But Murdock and Price and have done far more than Woodward, perhaps because their focus was more precise. They offer a compelling thesis about the Court's evolving disposition toward lesbians and gay men, one that, in some respects, mirrors the disposition of mainstream American society toward the same community. The book shows the Court as what it undoubtedly really is: a collection of individual men and women who come to work in the morning with predefined notions and biases about lesbians and gay men. The book credibly describes an evolving Court that, through persistent confrontation and education, has grown in its understanding of the gay community and objectivity toward gay people.

Beyond that, the book ends up simultaneously offering a grand historical narrative of the modern gay rights movement. Just about every gay rights controversy has ended up knocking on the doors of the Supreme Court at one time or another, and telling the stories of those cases and the people involved in them necessarily educates readers about the history of the gay rights movement - and in langauge that is always wonderfully written and at times deeply moving. This book demonstrates exactly why journalists are often so much better at writing accessible and fulfilling social-legal history than legal academics are.