In his introductory chapter, Yalof lays out the variables that shape who is nominated. Among them are the timing of a vacancy, the political and ideological composition of the Senate, the popularity of the President, the attributes of the justice responsible for the vacancy, the realistic pool of available candidates, and the decisional and bureaucratic framework used by the President to reach the selection decision. Yalof suggests three decisional frameworks: an open recruitment process whereby recruitment begins after the vacancy occurs; a single-candidate process in which the nominee has been, for most intents and purposes, chosen in advance of an actual vacancy; and a criteria-driven process whereby, in advance of a vacancy, the president specifies criteria to guide selection.

In addition, Yalof discusses 10 factors that help explain how the recruitment process has evolved. Perhaps the most important of them are the growth and bureaucratization of the Justice Department; the growth and bureaucratization of the White House, particularly the White House Counsel's office; the divided government; an increasingly public confirmation process; increased participation by interest groups; and increased media attention. The variables including the decisional frameworks as well as the factors are considered more or less systematically in the subsequent five chapters and then in a more focused fashion in the last major chapter.

In his chapter on Harry Truman, Yalof traces Truman's personal process of picking Supreme Court justices, offering new light on the twists and turns that culminated in Truman's appointments of Burton, Vinson, Minton, and Clark. In contrast, Dwight Eisenhower's selection of Supreme Court nominees after Earl Warren was dependent upon the top officials of the Justice Department, who worked from the constraining criteria that Eisenhower imposed including judicial experience, age (no one older than 62), and, as Yalof documents, religion in terms of finding a Catholic to appoint before the 1956 presidential election. The chapter on Kennedy and Johnson points up the differences between Kennedy/Johnson and Eisenhower and also between Kennedy and Johnson in the selection of Supreme Court justices. The path to the selection of Byron White was more circuitous than that for Goldberg. Most remarkable in the history of Supreme Court selection was Lyndon Johnson's, in effect, creating vacancies that he could fill with Abe Fortas and Thurgood Marshall, stories told before but well recounted and documented here by Yalof.

Yalof offers some fascinating revelations in the Nixon and Ford chapter including Warren Burger's behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get appointed to the Court as well as events leading up to the nominations of Haynsworth, Carswell, and then Blackmun to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Abe Fortas. The story of finding replacements for the Black and Harlan seats is discussed and the documentary evidence suggests that Richard Nixon was indeed serious about wanting to place a woman on the Supreme Court.

Events leading to Ronald Reagan's appointments to the Court including the ill-fated nomination of Robert Bork and the aborted one of Douglas Ginsburg have been told before, but not until this book have they been grounded in the Reagan presidential papers, which gives Yalof's account greater authenticity. Concluding the main body of the study, Yalof notes several trends in the evolution of the selection process including the near-lock that federal appeals court judges have had on nominations since 1968 (Yalof points out that 16 of the 19 nominees have been appeals court judges) and the shifting of selection from the back pocket of the president to the back rooms of the White House Counsel's Office and Justice Department. Yalof notes that there has been a shift to the criteria-driven decisional framework. The open decisional framework accounts for only five nominations since 1945, the last one being that of Stevens in 1975. The single-candidate framework accounted for 9 nominations but the criteria-driven framework can be seen with 14. Yalof provides an epilogue in which he provides what he calls a tentative analysis of the Bush and Clinton appointments to the Supreme Court relying on newspaper and secondary sources.

As thorough a study as Yalof's book is, there is an important omission. In only two footnotes do we find mention of President Jimmy Carter. Of course Carter did not have an opportunity to name a justice to the Supreme Court but he had ample opportunity to name lower court judges and the Carter administration selection process had an important influence on administrations to come. In particular, during Carter's administration key White House Counsel and Justice Department personnel began regular meetings to decide on recommendations to be made to the president. This was the beginning of the joint White House–Justice Department Judicial Selection Committee that has been a part of the process since. And most importantly, Carter and his administration pushed affirmative action in judicial appointments. Had Carter not been so insistent on finding qualified women for the bench and had he not been widely expected to name a woman to the first vacancy on the Supreme Court (he was seen as grooming Ninth Circuit judge Shirley Hufstedler, who resigned her lifetime position to join Carter's cabinet), it is questionable whether Ronald Reagan would have made his pledge to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court during the fall 1980 presidential campaign.

There are a few typographical or other errors. As for the latter, for example, the discussion of the growth and bureaucratization of the Justice Department fails to mention the Reagan Administration's creation of the Office of Legal Policy, which undertook the responsibility of screening, vetting, and processing all judicial nominations (p. 13). Edward H. Levi is described as “only marginally active in Republican politics” when in fact he was a former Democrat turned political independent (p. 126). Senator Hruska is described as being from Alaska when in fact he was from Nebraska (p. 247). Miller v. California is footnoted as the case that “included some pornography within the First Amendment's protections” (p. 133), instead of Stanley v. Georgia.

It should be evident that the errors are minor and that this book is a major contribution to our understanding of the nominating of Supreme Court justices. David Yalof is to be congratulated for his outstanding work.