The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court

Overview
The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, is an investigative narrative of the United States Supreme Court during the early 1970s, published in 1979. The book takes readers behind the Court's closed doors to portray how landmark decisions were shaped by personalities, strategic bargaining and institutional pressures rather than by abstract legal doctrine alone. Its account centers on the Burger Court era and the tense, consequential years that included decisions such as Roe v. Wade and the Court's role amid Watergate.
Written in a journalistic, scene-driven style, the narrative treats the justices as complex actors, careful, quarrelsome, ambitious and sometimes contradictory. The Brethren presents the Court as an institution that balances collegiality, ideological commitments and the practical need to keep the Court viable in the political system, revealing how those forces intersect in opinion writing, conference bargaining and the exercise of power by the Chief Justice and senior members.

Structure and Sources
The book combines chronological reporting with focused portraits of individual justices and key cases, reconstructing conference debates, draft opinions and private conversations. Much of its material derives from interviews with former law clerks, court staff and others close to the institution, along with memos and contemporaneous notes. The authors interweave these sources to create detailed vignettes that aim to show how particular rulings were negotiated and how strategy often mattered as much as legal reasoning.
The investigative approach yields vivid scenes and quotable moments, but also led to controversy because many sources remained unnamed and some former clerks criticized the book's reliance on confidential disclosures. Still, the combination of reporting and narrative reconstruction marked a new kind of inside look at an institution long shrouded in secrecy.

Key Episodes and Personalities
Central figures include Chief Justice Warren Burger, whose managerial style and concern for the Court's institutional standing recur throughout, and Justice Harry Blackmun, whose role in the Roe opinion is a focal point for the book's exploration of drafting and ideological calculation. Justices such as William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist also appear prominently, often depicted in terms of the alliances and swing votes that determined outcomes.
The book traces how crucial votes were courted, how opinion assignments were used to shape alignments, and how clerks sometimes played decisive roles behind the scenes. It presents memorable scenes of bargaining over language and strategy, of justices weighing public reaction and political fallout, and of the sometimes-personal tensions that affected judicial collaboration.

Themes and Interpretation
A central theme is the tension between law as principled reasoning and law as collective, strategic enterprise. The Brethren emphasizes that decisions are products of institutional dynamics: compromise to secure a majority, concern for legitimacy, and occasional tactical retreat. The narrative challenges the image of the Supreme Court as a purely legalistic body and instead shows it as a political institution operating within broader social and governmental forces.
Another theme concerns transparency and secrecy. By exposing the private mechanics of decision-making, the book interrogates norms of confidentiality and raises questions about public accountability and the ethics of disclosure, both for the reporters who rely on confidential sources and for the clerks and aides who provide them.

Impact and Reception
The book reached a wide audience and influenced how journalists, historians and the public view the Court, helping to popularize a behavioral and institutional approach to judicial analysis. It was praised for vivid storytelling and for making the Court's work accessible, while drawing criticism from some legal scholars and former clerks for possible breaches of confidentiality and for the limitations of anonymous sourcing. Regardless of debates over method, The Brethren helped change expectations about media access to the judiciary and remains an influential, if contested, portrait of the Supreme Court's inner life during a pivotal era.