As an attorney, the US Supreme Court's decision in Bush vs. Gore has rankled me since it was handed down in 2000. I learned a lot of "inside baseball" by reading this well written book.

The book confirms that this was essentially the Republican justices outvoting their Democratic counterparts on a question of interpreting Florida law, which should never have gotten beyond the Florida Supreme Court. Jeffrey Toobin reports that former clerks for conservative Justices encouraged friends in the Bush campaign to take the state law case all the way to the US Supreme Court. Then the conservative Justices acted with unseemly haste by jumping into this dispute before it was anywhere near ripe for consideration at the US Supreme Court's level.

Toobin's book is based mostly on information about the Gore legal team's strategy and approach, with much less about the Bush side. Toobin's bias seeps out in his consistent criticism of the poor fight that Gore himself put up. Despite receiving more ballots in his favor, based on the fairly obvious intent of the disputed votes, Gore was finally declared the loser of an election that he probably won. It's as if Gore let down Toobin as well as that narrow majority of voters who voted for Gore.

The perspective of the intervening 13 years until now shows that our country is even more polarized than the Justices who decided this crucial election based mainly on politics. As a lawyer, I had hoped that Justices at the US Supreme Court level would rule based on the facts and law presented to them, regardless of the political affiliation of the parties making the arguments. To render a 5-4 decision based on convoluted reasoning still makes this election difficult to stomach years later.