THE PARTISAN IS the first full biography of William Rehnquist, who was an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1972 to 1986, and chief justice from 1986 to his death in 2005. Rehnquist was one of the more conservative members of the Court, and had many detractors. Jenkins too does not like Rehnquist’s performance on the Court, but his objection amounts to little more than the complaint that Rehnquist decided cases differently from the way Jenkins would have decided them, which leads to the forensic task of sifting through Rehnquist’s life for an explanation as to how he could have gone so far astray. This lack of generosity toward his subject undermines a biography that could have addressed some interesting questions, such as how someone who tended toward the extreme and frequently dissented managed to lead the institution so effectively.

The thesis of the book is summed up in the title. “If you were a homosexual, a racial or religious minority, a woman, an alien, an accused criminal, or someone facing the death penalty, you were not going to get Rehnquist’s vote,” writes Jenkins. Rehnquist was not just a conservative, but a “rigid conservative,” one who subscribed to a “judicial philosophy [that] was nihilistic at its core.” For Rehnquist, “ideology and results were what counted.” He had a “perverse commitment to principle.” He saw “cases in black and white” and his vote could always be “predicted based on who the parties were.” His judicial philosophy reflected “the majoritarian homogeneity of Shorewood [Rehnquist’s home town] and the simplicity of an earlier time when white men ruled.”

This view of Rehnquist is common on the left; Jenkins supplies additional invective but no original analysis of Rehnquist’s opinions. He damages his credibility by overstating his thesis, and then acknowledging—as he must—that Rehnquist did not always rule against criminal defendants, for example, or against women. In one notable case, Rehnquist wrote an opinion that favored a criminal defendant and refused to overrule the Miranda warnings, much to the dismay of Justices Scalia and Thomas, who dissented. In another case, Rehnquist upheld a statute that ensured that family and medical leave benefits would be enjoyed by state employees. Jenkins admits that this “wasn’t the only time that Rehnquist confounded the conservative pundits.” In yet another example, Rehnquist concurred in a holding that the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admission policy violated the Constitution. These and similar cases established that Rehnquist was not the most conservative justice on the Court, and was not always predictable.

Yet the basic point—that Rehnquist was a conservative who tended to vote against parties whom liberals favor—is correct. The question is what to make of this observation. Do we criticize Rehnquist for disagreeing with liberal justices or liberal justices for disagreeing with Rehnquist? No one really knows how to answer this question, because no one can agree on what Supreme Court justices are supposed to do. Most law professors believe that a Supreme Court justice ought to advance a “jurisprudence” or “judicial philosophy,” and not simply vote his or her ideological preferences, but there is intense disagreement about what a legitimate jurisprudence is, with conservatives arguing that justices should enforce the “original understanding” of the Constitution and liberals arguing that justices should take account of evolving (usually liberal) norms. Some scholars have described Rehnquist’s jurisprudence as one favoring majoritarian rule, federalism, and law and order, but it is hard to evaluate such a jurisprudence without relying on ideological priors, and we are back where we started. Jenkins faults Rehnquist for disregarding stare decisis—the principle that older cases should control later decisions—but the liberal justices that Jenkins champions did not respect stare decisis either, so why should Rehnquist?

So the failing of the book is that Jenkins does not try to explain how we should evaluate a justice, and gives little context as to the capabilities and limits of the Supreme Court. His argument is essentially that Rehnquist was a bad justice because he did not write liberal opinions. The contribution of Jenkins’s book lies elsewhere—not in its analysis of Rehnquist’s opinions, which is superficial, or in its assessment of the appropriate role for a Justice, which goes essentially unexamined, but its presentation of Rehnquist’s biographical details in one place.