Better Judgment

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The weakening of the federal courts⎯and how they can restore their power and Americans' access to justice⎯told through the lives of three remarkable judges. Despite the outsize public attention paid to the Supreme Court, federal trial courts are at the heart of US democracy. Through the stories of Jed Rakoff, Martha Vázquez, and Carlton Reeves, lawyer and acclaimed journalist Reynolds Holding recounts how the erosion of federal court power and people's ability to seek justice has undermined our constitutional system and charts a way to repair the damage done. Combining archival and legal records with hours of intimate interviews with the principal characters and their clerks, colleagues, friends, and families, he animates the lives and work of the judges who are the first, and usually only, stop for ordinary people seeking justice. Over the past six decades, the federal courts have been constrained⎯by Congress, by the executive