Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts

The weakening of the federal courts⎯and how they can restore their power and Americans’ access to justice⎯told through the lives of three remarkable judges.

Despite the outsize public attention paid to the Supreme Court, federal trial courts are at the heart of US democracy. Through the stories of Jed Rakoff, Martha Vázquez, and Carlton Reeves, lawyer and acclaimed journalist Reynolds Holding recounts how the erosion of federal court power and people’s ability to seek justice has undermined our constitutional system and charts a way to repair the damage done. Combining archival and legal records with hours of intimate interviews with the principal characters and their clerks, colleagues, friends, and families, he animates the lives and work of the judges who are the first, and usually only, stop for ordinary people seeking justice.

Over the past six decades, the federal courts have been constrained⎯by Congress, by the executive, and especially by the Supreme Court⎯to the point where they can no longer do what we count on them to do. Holding makes the bold case that judges are good for democracy and should have more power, not less. In Better Judgment, he offers a lively, up-close judicial biography of resistance.

Reynolds Holding is a journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist, lawyer, and research scholar at Columbia Law School.