Justice Kennedy comes in for high praise because, as an inveterate tourist, he begins basing his decisions on what European Socialists believed, pretty much ignoring our own Constitutional guidelines. In similar fashion, Stephen Breyer, who like Toobin, opposes capital punishment, gets high marks for quoting legal opinions from Jamaica, India and even Zimbabwe. But you know that if Scalia, Thomas, Alito or Roberts, based their own decisions on what Polish or Australian conservatives believed, Toobin would rake them over the coals.

When Thomas opposed colleges and universities using race as a basis for admission, Toobin dismisses him as representing “only a fringe view -- on the court and in the nation at large.” Not only is that a questionable conclusion regarding the nation, but one that is of no concern to Toobin when it comes to, say, capital punishment, which public opinion very much supports, or same-sex marriage, which is opposed by the overwhelming majority of Americans.

He writes: “One reason the U.S. military refused to treat the Guantanamo detainees as POWs was because under the Geneva Conventions, such prisoners may not be interrogated.” No mention of the fact that they were in fact enemy combatants, not soldiers. They didn’t wear uniforms or carry a flag, and were therefore not covered by the Geneva Conventions.

When Toobin mentions the Washington Times, he refers to it as “a sort of house organ of the conservative movement,” but he doesn’t dismiss the Washington Post, the New York Times or, God forbid, his own magazine as house organs of the liberal movement.

After spending the better part of 300 pages fawning over Justice O’Connor for the sublime role she played in bringing about 5-4 Court rulings with which he agreed, Toobin bemoans the fact that Roberts and Alito are responsible for a number of 5-4 votes that don’t really create precedents, that serve only to point out how divided on important issues the Court seems to be.

Now I hope you have a better idea of why I prefer reading fiction. When I read that someone is an arch villain who deserves to be pilloried, I prefer knowing it’s because he’s committed a violent crime, betrayed a friend or loved one, or at least evicted an old lady from her home on Christmas Eve, and not simply because some left-wing schnook on the New Yorker didn’t agree with his vote on racial quotas or eminent domain.