Blog #264 The Justice Who Is Reshaping the Supreme Court
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Weekend Beacon: The Supremely Qualified Samuel Alito
May 3, 2026
With oral arguments wrapped up at the Supreme Court, the justices have begun to render some landmark decisions. So it’s fitting that we begin with legal scholar Ilya Shapiro who reviewsAlito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution by Mollie Hemingway.
“Many of the best lines come from the people Hemingway quotes: friends, former clerks, insiders. She notes that her work is based on interviews with nearly 100 people. The result is both thoroughly researched and deeply reported. Hemingway is not just retelling public episodes; she’s adding to the public record.
“And the biggest addition to that record is unquestionably her account of what transpired after the leak of the draft of Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“The leak itself was unprecedented and corrosive enough. But Hemingway goes further, and what she reports about the internal conduct of the liberal bloc is extraordinary. After the draft leaked, the majority justices faced a genuine security crisis. The Alitos were moved to a secure location, Justice Amy Coney Barrett had to put on a bulletproof vest in front of her children, and an armed would-be killer appeared outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home. Elsewhere Hemingway notes the justices and even family members were given increased protection because the leak made the conservative justices ‘targets for assassination.’
“Under those circumstances, one might think the dissenters would have hastened to finish their work so the Court could issue the opinion and end the period in which murder might change the outcome. But Hemingway reports that after Alito urged the dissenters to hurry because delay itself was a security threat, they refused to give a completion date, and that Justice Kagan went to Justice Stephen Breyer’s office and pressured him not to accommodate the majority, ‘screaming so loudly … that the wall was shaking.’ This is the book’s real scoop, and it’s appalling.”
From the High Court to high finance, NYU Stern's Paul Ticereviews Lloyd Blankfein's Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs.
“Blankfein traces his life from the mean streets of Brooklyn to the meanest street of all, Wall Street, where he spent the entirety of his 36-year career in finance at Goldman. Growing up during the 1960s in a traditional Jewish family of little means, he was driven from a young age to escape ‘the projects’ of East New York and ‘see the world,’ the latter code for improving his economic lot in life. Realizing early on that a good education was his ticket to ride, Blankfein redoubled his efforts in school, doing so well that he was able to skip the eighth grade. In high school, he scored near-perfect on his math SAT and graduated as the class valedictorian at the age of 16. He was accepted to Harvard (among other Ivy League schools), majoring in history, and then stayed on at Cambridge to get his Juris Doctor degree.
“Four years of working on dry legal contracts, however, were enough to convince Blankfein that the law was something he would prefer not to do for a living. In 1982, he abruptly switched careers and made the jump to the rough-and-tumble world of Wall Street, landing a job at the commodities trading firm, J. Aron & Company, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. Despite having no educational background or direct work experience in business or finance, Blankfein was able to quickly excel in the esoteric financial markets of physical commodity sales, interest rate swaps, and foreign exchange hedging. Within six years, he was made a Goldman partner at the age of 34.”
“Nearly a decade after retiring, the author Blankfein remains a steadfast steward and tireless defender of the firm’s culture and reputation by rejecting pretty much any criticism of Goldman—whether before, during, or after the crisis—as the product of competitive envy, political posturing, or media hype. He gives short shrift to the business scandals (e.g., Goldman’s financing of the massive 1MDB government embezzlement scheme in Malaysia in the early 2010s) and strategic missteps (such as the firm’s ill-fated 2016 push into consumer lending) that occurred on his watch. Most of the diversity, climate, and sustainability initiatives started during the Blankfein years have not aged well, while Goldman’s longstanding financial ties to Communist China have come under greater scrutiny of late. Other than a speed round of anodyne comments to wrap up the book, there is no serious self-reflection or second-guessing of his leadership calls and certainly no mea culpas issued.”