Reynolds Holding opens Better Judgment on a Mississippi roadside. In 2013, a Black motorist, Clarence Jamison, was stopped and searched for nearly two hours. Seven years later, Judge Carlton Reeves, compelled by the doctrine of qualified immunity, dismissed Jamison’s civil rights lawsuit. Despite this, he urged the Supreme Court to eliminate the doctrine (6). For Holding, a long-time legal journalist, the episode distills a larger argument. Over roughly six decades, he contends, Congress, the executive, and above all the Supreme Court have narrowed the federal courts and ordinary people’s access to justice through qualified immunity, mandatory arbitration, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, sentencing guidelines, and civil forfeiture, among other instruments. Against calls on the left and right to sideline the judiciary, Holding convincingly maintains that engaged trial judges remain indispensable to democracy. He frames that claim through Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s account of a “democracy of opportunity,”Footnote ¹ the proposition that constitutional democracy depends on constraining oligarchy, broadening the middle class, and including more people across race and gender lines.

The book makes its case through the intertwined biographies of three federal district judges, with its structure rotating among them. There is Reeves, a Black American raised in Yazoo City, Mississippi, who came to regard federal judges as “heroes” through a college history course (27); Jed Rakoff, a white former Manhattan prosecutor-turned-judge in the Southern District of New York; and Martha Vázquez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants and a federal judge in New Mexico. Each chapter follows a similar arc: a formative biography, a signature case of resistance to legal constraints, and an appellate reversal or, occasionally, an eventual vindication. Interleaved is a brisk history of the modern campaign against the courts, from the 1956 Southern Manifesto and the “switch in time” of 1937 (26) to the Nixon–Burger turn (33) and the rise of mandatory sentencing (218–9).

The cases are well chosen to show what attentive trial judging can and cannot do. Reeves uses his opinions to teach. The lessons are about suppressing evidence from a pretextual highway stop, sentencing the perpetrators in the racist murder of James Craig Anderson, and enjoining a Mississippi abortion ban whose professed concern for women’s health he called “pure gaslighting” (227), shortly before the Supreme Court relied on that same statute in Dobbs to overrule Roe. Rakoff stretches the wire-fraud statute as a young prosecutor in the United Brands bribery scandal that gives chapter two its title (39–40), questions the constitutionality of the federal death penalty, and rejects a Securities and Exchange Commission settlement with Bank of America as a “façade of enforcement” (183) before approving a revised version as “half-baked justice” (188). Sitting by designation, he also helps correct the Second Circuit’s insider-trading doctrine. Vázquez is shaped by her brother’s incarceration under a mandatory minimum sentence for a drug crime (82). She resists the sentencing guidelines, works to seat more Native American jurors, and factors a defendant’s race into the voluntariness of consent to a search, knowing that her decision “would be reversed” (215). She was right. Holding’s method is narrative journalism built on interviews and reconstructed dialogue, and the results are consistently readable.

The book’s central reminder is one that sociolegal readers will welcome: nearly all consequential adjudication occurs in trial courts rather than in the Supreme Court, and district judges exercise discretion that shapes lives directly. By emphasizing the trial bench, Holding provides a valuable adjustment to the focus of both the public and scholars, which is often centered on the Supreme Court justices. His account of the long constriction of access to justice complements existing literature.Footnote ² The judges are drawn with care. Holding’s narrative makes a technical subject accessible without trivializing or oversimplifying it.

The book is most interesting when it is least resolved. Holding’s diagnosis is structural; he argues that the foreclosure of access to the courts is a matter of institutional design. However, his proposed remedy is largely individual, residing in the character and courage of particular judges. The two do not entirely meet, though. The framework he adopts compounds the question because the “democracy of opportunity” tradition is itself wary of judicial supremacy and inclined to locate reform in legislatures and social movements. Enlisting it to celebrate heroic judging, therefore, leaves open a problem that Holding may well take up in future work: when is bold judging a vindication of democracy, and when is it the counter-majoritarian difficulty that examined?Footnote ³ The tension is heightened by Holding’s own narrative in this book. His judges are reversed more often than not, so that the reader is left uncertain whether the lesson is the promise of engaged judging or its limits.

A reader attentive to gender and race will notice an asymmetry in how these three are portrayed. Rakoff is characterized by intellect and public authority, and Reeves by eloquence. In contrast, Vázquez is characterized by empathy, her discipline of “read everything” (214), and physical strain. The empathic orientation is genuinely her own perspective. She grounds her judging in vicarious knowledge, observations of her brother’s imprisonment and death, and that she “saw what parents go through” (224). What belongs more often to the narrator than to the judge is the register of depletion and sacrifice itself. While Holding describes her migraines and exhaustion, her own words in the same passage name professional isolation rather than the body (131) as the cause of her stress. When Senator Dianne Feinstein framed judging as “one of the most difficult tasks for a woman” (130), Vázquez answered that her husband shared child-rearing equally, a response the text then qualifies. The portrait is admiring rather than unkind, but it tends to render a woman’s self-understood pursuit of justice as care and self-sacrifice, at points against her own framing. The book does not pause to ask why the characterizations might be read as racialized or gendered, which would be worthy lines of inquiry.

A related opportunity remains available on the fiscal dimension of the cases. Several of the book’s most affecting episodes are, beneath the surface, accounts of extraction: an immigrant car dealer stripped of more than half a million dollars through forfeiture until Vázquez deems the amount an excessive fine; the structuring laws that criminalize the cash practices of people outside the banking system; the tax avoidance and sovereign manipulation at the center of the United Brands chapter. Holding renders these as drama with judicial empathy. Read for political economy, though, they raise distributional questions about who is taxed through the penal system and who is not, which the book registers but does not pursue. This choice is understandable, given Holding’s focus on the judge as a central figure.

These are, however, observations about the book’s ambitions rather than its execution. Better Judgment accomplishes what it sets out to do. It tells the stories of three absorbing judicial lives, returns the trial court to view, and offers an earnest and accessible defense of the courts at a time of widespread disaffection. Sociolegal scholars concerned with access to justice, judicial behavior, and the politics of the federal bench will find it a vivid entry point and a useful teaching text. By marking unanswered questions about the relationship between individual judging and structural reform, and the gendered and fiscal dimensions of the cases it narrates, the book sets an agenda that empirical and theoretical scholarship is well placed to undertake.