Since 2013, the University of Pennsylvania Press and supervising editor Garrett Epps have drawn on the expertise of Supreme Court watchers to provide a summary and analysis of the Court's preceding term. Todd Ruger, legal-affairs staff writer at CQ Roll Call, provides the most recent instalment in the series, considering the Court's 2017 term (Court terms are named after the year in which they began; by tradition on the first Monday in October) which ended on 27 June 2018 with what Ruger argues was “the most important moment in the U.S. Supreme Court's most recent term”: the announcement of the resignation and retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy (1). For well over a decade, the Californian Reagan appointee had been considered the Court's ideological centre: siding with both liberals and conservatives often enough to convince each side that they had a chance when bringing their case before the justices. Kennedy's announcement represented the second blow to liberals as regards the Court, coming barely a year after the culmination of the bitter partisan battles over the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch which divided politicians and ordinary Americans alike. The legacy of those fights, and the shadow of Justice Kennedy, loom large over the discussions in this book.

Depending on your personal political persuasion it might be possible to see American Justice 2018 as either an elegy for the now-ended era of the moderate conservative Kennedy or fair warning to conservatives to prepare to celebrate a future before the Court likely to be far more successful for them. Ruger is scrupulously fair to both sides, and in the book's neutrality lies its strength and value. In an era of the ever-increasing politicization of the Court by both political parties, by activist legal and political groups which target the Court to resolve controversial political decisions and thus encourage the perception (if not the reality) of the Court as making politically influenced decisions, by the massive expansion of legal and political blogs covering the Court and its actions from all political perspectives and none, and by an increasing tendency to discuss the Court in overtly political terms, it feels remarkably refreshing to have a book which shows the political and ideological divides without actively taking a position on them.

While Ruger, quite reasonably, shows that President Trump's election impacted the Court in a variety of ways (including position changes by the Justice Department and the consequences of Gorsuch's appointment), he stops mercifully short of suggesting that the more conservative 2017 Supreme Court term was a direct result of Republican Party politics. Instead, he argues, “When the nine justices of the Supreme Court vigorously disagree with one another, the country gets the best glimpse of their conflicting views on how to interpret laws and the Constitution, and of their various philosophies about the role of the court in American government” (8–9). Not a single mention of political decision making. His willingness to look beyond party politics allows for a far more nuanced analysis of other factors influencing Court decision making, including the role of precedent, personality, and understandings of the Court's relation to the other branches of government. Yet throughout the book, Ruger also makes clear how the outcome of the 2016 election and the occupant of the White House (whom he describes, fairly moderately, as “unpredictable” with “a far different course in decorum and statecraft than his predecessors” (4)) significantly impacted the course of the Court's term.

In eight lively and engaging chapters, Ruger provides a thoughtful overview of some of the key issues before the Court in its 2017 term, as well as the legal and political context out of which they arose: gerrymandering (chapter 1); denial of service and LGBT rights (chapter 2); online sales tax and modern economic regulation (chapter 3); cell phone data and privacy (chapter 4); the travel ban (chapter 5); the role played by Gorsuch in his first full term on the bench (chapter 6); the changing use of free-speech doctrine, drawing on questions of union fees and abortion (chapter 7); and the role of the Solicitor General (chapter 8). In each, Ruger's journalistic skill is on display as he takes often complex legal issues and makes them understandable for a nonspecialist audience. He also brings together comments from some of the leading journalists, legal scholars, and politicians to have studied and commented on each issue, providing an exceptionally useful overview of the major players and debates surrounding the Court. While he largely eschews prediction about what would follow Kennedy's retirement, Ruger nevertheless points out in particular those instances where Kennedy's absence would have made a significant difference to the outcome. Reading this a full Court term after the end of Ruger's discussion, with Justice Kavanaugh now on the bench, we can see how close Ruger's assessments came in reality, especially on the issues of partisan gerrymandering and the strengthening of the protections for free speech and religious freedom.

Garrett Epps described his first book in the American Justice series as a “traveler's diary” through the Supreme Court's 2013 term.Footnote ¹ This, the fifth in the series, can be considered in much the same way. There is little here that will surprise regular Court watchers, especially anyone who follows the excellent (and decidedly nonpartisan) coverage of the Court via SCOTUSBlog, but there is pleasure in reading its concise and useful overviews of key issues and reminders of the context in which the cases were decided and the surrounding debates that were current at the time. Equally, the clarity of Ruger's descriptions and the energy of his prose should make it an excellent book for inspiring and exciting undergraduates and anyone else with a vague interest in the Court, its work, and the cases discussed here. In American Justice 2018, Todd Ruger has laid down quite the challenge for American Justice 2019's author, Slate's Supreme Court analyst Mark Joseph Stern, to follow.