Out of Order: Arrogance, Corruption and Incompetence on the Bench.

• Author: Williams, Stephen F.

by Max Boot, New York: Basic Books, 252 pages, $25.00

Most analysis of the judicial function proceeds on a rather highfalutin level, with subtle and imponderable contentions about comparative institutional capacities floating back and forth. The contestants act in the belief that if we manage to understand these capacities, we'll be able to define a role for the courts, especially in their potentially dangerous task of reviewing legislation for constitutionality.

Max Boot's Out of Order does not engage much in this interminable debate. Instead Boot, editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, gets down and dirty, asking what real live judges actually do. The answer is grim: There are lots of fools and knaves out there, wielding the power of the state in stupid, destructive, abusive, and malicious ways. Boot tracks these jurisprudential monsters through virtually every branch of the law.

In doing so, he helps right the balance between lawyers and judges in the court of public opinion. Public esteem for lawyers is dismally low, apparently reflecting a judgment that all the plagues of the court system should be laid at their door. But it is the judges who make the rules and run the system, and Boot rightly argues that much of the responsibility is theirs.

The anecdotes of incompetence and villainy in Out of Order go on and on; indeed, that is the fun of the book. We have the judge who refuses to remove a vehemently prejudiced juror; the one who forces a prison system to provide inmates with "hot pots" in their cells; the one who, supposedly to remedy racial discrimination, orders a state to invest millions in a magnet school that must include a 2,000-square-foot planetarium; the one who gives probation to a juvenile who participated in a bloody murder by supplying the gun and helping dispose of the body. This is quite a rogues' gallery.

But the reader is bound to ask, What's new? Is there any reason to think that judicial competence has declined in recent years? Surely there have been fools and knaves on the bench for a long time. There is the very old story, presumably apocryphal but nonetheless suggestive, of the English trial judge so prone to error that an appellate opinion reversing him began, "The decision below is by Judge X, but there are additional grounds for reversal." Boot himself quotes the familiar riddle, "What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 80?" The answer: "Your honor."

Although judicial folly and knavery are not...