In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The Conservative Court
• Aryeh Neier (bio)

Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America
by Adam Cohen
Penguin Press, 2020, 448 pp.

In 1963, I started work at the American Civil Liberties Union. My assignment was to establish new affiliates of the organization in states such as Texas and Oklahoma and to upgrade the capacity of long-standing state affiliates, such as those in Michigan and Pennsylvania. It was a thrilling time [End Page 147] to be engaged in those tasks. ACLU activities were regularly punctuated by victories for civil liberties at the U.S. Supreme Court, many of them in cases argued by the lawyers I was working with. Those wins included cases substantially expanding the rights of criminal defendants to be treated fairly by the police and the courts, striking down loyalty oaths required of public employees, ending the censorship of movies, overturning the prohibition on interracial marriage, barring state-enforced religious practices, expanding the right to protest, upholding freedom of speech, equalizing the right to vote in state elections, requiring that welfare recipients should be treated fairly, and many more.

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Chief Justice John Roberts in 2006 (Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)

In 1970, fifty years after it was founded, I became the ACLU’s fourth national executive director, a post I held for the next eight years. It was a very different period on the court. Richard Nixon became president in 1969 and soon had the opportunity to designate Warren Burger as chief justice of the Supreme Court, replacing Earl Warren. He appointed three other justices during his first three years in office. The Nixon Court succeeded the Warren Court.

The ACLU continued to prevail in some important cases. We supported the New York Times and the Washington Post in publishing the Pentagon Papers, helping to achieve a major victory for freedom of the press. We also established the pioneering Women’s Rights Project, directed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which won a series of victories before the Supreme Court that largely, though not completely, made overt discrimination against women as legally untenable as overt discrimination against racial minorities.

Though we took pride in the quality of the legal work of Ginsburg and her colleagues in those cases, we recognized that more was involved than litigation strategy and skill. A crucial factor in our success was the transformative impact of the women’s rights movement on American society in the 1970s. Women were securing jobs and workplace responsibilities previously denied to them; they [End Page 148] were entering educational programs and professional specialties in which their presence had been scarce; they were enlisting men to share in domestic duties that most had previously disdained. Changes in the law required by our Supreme Court victories accompanied and facilitated these developments, but they did not take place in isolation. A similar process took place decades later when the Supreme Court struck down limits on gay rights, including the prohibition on same-sex marriage. Those decisions came down after the emergence of a substantial gay rights movement, which had already transformed American society by the early years of the twenty-first century. The Supreme Court’s decisions did not lead the way.

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The legal victories for women’s rights and gay rights in the past half century have partially obscured the picture Adam Cohen paints in his important book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, makes a compelling argument that since the advent of the Nixon Court, the highest court in the land has been a consistent ally of corporate interests and the wealthy and the enemy of Americans who are less economically fortunate, especially those who are racial minorities. He achieves this by systematically analyzing the Court’s decisions on welfare, education, voting rights, campaign finance, labor, corporate responsibility, and criminal justice over the past five decades.

Cohen is particularly concerned with the Supreme Court’s treatment of poverty through its decisions dealing with welfare recipients. He writes that the Warren Court “appeared to be...

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保守法院

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 保守法院
• Aryeh Neier（生物）

最高不平等：最高法院为争取更加公正的美国
而进行的五十年之战，作者亚当·科恩·
企鹅出版社（Adam Cohen Penguin Press），2020年，第448页。

1963年，我开始在美国公民自由联盟工作。我的任务是在德克萨斯州和俄克拉荷马州建立该组织的新分支机构，并提高密歇根州和宾夕法尼亚州等长期存在的州分支机构的能力。那真是激动人心的时刻[End Page 147]从事这些任务。ACLU的活动经常在美国最高法院获得关于公民自由的胜利的信号，其中很多是在我所与之打交道的律师辩护的情况下进行的。这些胜利包括：案件大大扩展了刑事被告的权利，以得到警察和法院的公平对待；降低了对公职人员的忠诚宣誓；结束了电影审查制度；推翻了禁止异族通婚的规定；禁止了国家强制的宗教习俗，扩大抗议权，维护言论自由，使州选举中的投票权平等，要求福利接受者应得到公平对待等。

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首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨（John Roberts），2006年（布鲁克斯卡夫有限责任公司/科比斯，盖蒂图片社）

1970年（成立50周年），我成为了美国公民自由协会（ACLU）的第四位国家执行董事，这是我在接下来的八年担任的职位。在球场上，这是一个截然不同的时期。理查德·尼克松（Richard Nixon）于1969年出任总统，并很快有机会任命沃伦·伯格（Warren Burger）为最高法院首席大法官，以取代伯爵·沃伦（Earl Warren）。在他任职的头三年中，他任命了另外三名法官。尼克松法院接替了沃伦法院。

在某些重要情况下，美国公民自由协会继续占上风。我们支持《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》发表《五角大楼文件》，帮助实现新闻自由的重大胜利。我们还建立了由露丝·巴德·金斯堡（Ruth Bader Ginsburg）领导的具有开创性的妇女权利项目，该项目在最高法院赢得了一系列胜利，尽管这并不完全，但很大程度上使对妇女的公开歧视与对少数民族的公开歧视在法律上站不住脚。

尽管我们为金斯伯格和她的同事在这些案件中的法律工作质量感到自豪，但我们认识到涉及的不仅仅是诉讼策略和技巧。我们成功的关键因素是1970年代妇女权利运动对美国社会的变革性影响。妇女正在获得以前被剥夺的工作和工作场所责任；他们[结束第148页]正在进入缺乏教育的计划和专业领域；他们要男人分担大多数以前不屑一顾的家务。这些最高动态要求我们对最高法院的胜利进行法律修改，并为这些发展提供了便利，但这些变化并不是孤立发生的。数十年后，最高法院撤销了对同性恋权利的限制，包括禁止同性婚姻的诉讼，也发生了类似的过程。这些决定是在大规模的同性恋权利运动出现之后做出的，该运动在二十一世纪初已经改变了美国社会。最高法院的裁决没有带路。

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在过去的半个世纪中，妇女权利和同性恋权利的法律胜利部分掩盖了亚当·科恩（Adam Cohen）在他的重要著作《至高不平等：最高法院为争取更公正的美国而进行的五十年之战》中所描绘的图画。纽约时报》编辑委员会前成员科恩（Cohen）提出了令人信服的论点，即自尼克松法院（Nixon Court）问世以来，该国最高法院一直是公司利益的一贯盟友，也是美国人的财富和敌人经济上不那么幸运，尤其是那些少数民族。他通过系统分析法院在过去五十年中有关福利，教育，投票权，竞选资金，劳工，公司责任和刑事司法的裁决来实现这一目标。

科恩特别关注最高法院通过与福利受助人有关的裁决来处理贫困问题。他写道，沃伦法院“似乎是……