The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the country—with consequences that endure today  By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice.   But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.   The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.   The justices’ shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan’s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times. “[A] probing chronicle…Blending legal analysis of cases such as Korematsu and a handful of others with short profiles of the members of the court, Sloan probes the justices’ motivations and shortcomings as he examines the institution’s inner workings…In a world beset by rising domestic and global threats, it’s fair to ask whether today’s court would falter as it did in Korematsu if asked to safeguard civil liberties during times of peril. In casting a bright light on this issue, Sloan’s thoughtful book will better prepare the nation for that moment.”― Michael Bobelian , Washington Post “At a time when the constitutional order feels archaic, and the Supreme Court is once again firmly in the hands of appointees from a single party, many observers are mining past periods of consensus and progress for understanding—and perhaps inspiration. A new book, The Court at War , is a highly readable contribution to this trend… The historical figures in  The Court at War  are colorfully rendered; the action moves briskly… Above all, one comes away from this insider account with a stunning sense of the porousness of the Supreme Court to other elite actors within the Beltway… Sloan has written an eminently readable book.”  ― Robert L. Tsai , Washington Monthly "What makes the book a valuable contribution to Supreme Court history is the deft way he marshals long-available evidence to stitch together a portrait of a Court that in important respects lost its bearings under the sway of the powerful man to whom its members owed their jobs."― Linda Greenhouse , Lawfare "The author . . . delivers an account of a Supreme Court shaped by one president (he had appointed seven of the justices) during the fraught intersection of civil liberties with the exigencies of World War II and extraordinary executive power. Sloan’s brisk narrative is pertinent to today, when presidential candidates jockey for support promising to further transform, and politicize, the Court."― Harvard Magazine  “Mr. Sloan, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, offers a balanced assessment of the wartime court… Mr. Sloan’s historical scholarship is impressive.”― Barton Swaim , Wall Street Journal “A remarkable account of the comings and goings of Supreme Court justices during World War II. Page after page, Sloan describes in rich detail interactions between members of the Supreme Court and Roosevelt or his top advisors, almost any one of which would probably cause a serious flap today about judicial ethics and impropriety.  These details are by no means idle gossip, and in the deft storytelling hands of Sloan, they are a fascinating read…. Sloan has amassed a voluminous quantity of information that he shares in a highly readable narrative.”― Washington Lawyer  “Alongside astute case analyses, Sloan vividly explores the fractious relationships between justices whose judicial philosophies, personalities, and backgrounds radically differed. The result is an accessible narrative that highlights how the forces of history, politics, and personality influenced one of America’s most important institutions at a critical time in history. It’s an entertaining and worthwhile account.” ― Publishers Weekly “A wide-ranging legal history that shows that the Supreme Court is never truly divorced from the politics of the day.” ― Kirkus "Thoroughly researched, eminently readable, and sharply insightful."― Hon M. Margaret McKeown, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals , Western Legal History “The story of FDR’s unsuccessful effort in the late 1930s to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court is well known.  The Court at War tells the fascinating story of what happe