Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- There are the grandstander, the pouter, the brainiac and the prissy queen. From time to time, as Jeffrey Toobin reports in ``The Nine,'' things get so heated that Dad has to intervene. ``Nino, you're p---ing Sandra off again. Stop it!'' he orders.

Dad is, or was, William H. Rehnquist, chief justice of the United States from 1986 until his death on September 3, 2005. Rehnquist was scolding Justice Antonin ``Nino'' Scalia (the grandstander), an unrelenting critic of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (the prissy queen.)

Much as in your family and mine, the Supreme Court has days when the kids just can't get along. ``The Nine'' provides an authoritative yet readable view of the court's players and the extreme new course (try not to fall over as we all lean to the right) they've set out upon.

Toobin, a CNN legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, tells the story of the Court since the Reagan administration, tying its legal opinions and its personalities together against the backdrop of national politics and history.

The justices and ``more than 75'' of their law clerks granted Toobin the interviews on which the book is based, with the proviso that they not be directly quoted or tied to specific details.

Cuomo's Ambivalence

There are wonderful yarns. When Bill Clinton offered a seat to Mario Cuomo, the New York governor changed his mind more often than a stressed-out contestant on ``Let's Make a Deal.''

``If you want me to, I'll call Clinton and take it,'' he reportedly told his son Andrew, as though he were RSVPing for some inconvenient cocktail party. Couldn't someone tell the governor we were talking about the Supreme Court here? Cuomo ultimately declined, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg got the job.

Toobin tells us that Rehnquist ran office betting pools for ballgames and the Kentucky Derby and that he was a regular at monthly poker games, where his fellow players, including Scalia, called him Chief.

He says Clarence Thomas (the pouter -- and, boy, is he) shows his playful side when he and Stephen Breyer pass notes back and forth on the bench, giggling like schoolboys.

And that David Souter (the brainiac), a bachelor who eats an apple (core and all) and one cup of yogurt for lunch every day, has been set up on blind dates by everyone from O'Connor to Barbara Bush but sometimes bungles them. One date thought things had gone well until at her door the justice suggested, ``Let's do this again next year.''

Vital Issues

That's the fun stuff, but Toobin also gets into the vital issues. He details numerous examples of the powerful role that evangelical Christians have played in transforming the court -- a key premise of ``The Nine.''

Although it would be tempting in this story of politics, passion and ideas to paint the zealots as over-the-top, Toobin doesn't do that. Instead he tells us about people and decisions that are often extreme by means of restrained fact-telling and reportorial depth.

Which is for the best: This is a period of judicial history that demands a careful account. The court underwent a dramatic shift in ideology in recent years, culminating in the appointments of John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The issues on the table were, and are, considerable. Toobin lists the top priorities of the backers of the two newest judges: ``Expand executive power. End racial preferences intended to assist African Americans. Speed executions. Welcome religion into the public sphere. And, above all, reverse Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban abortion.''

These conservatives have already begun to attain their goals -- often, Toobin argues, via a judicial fiat by which right-wing justices simply come to the conclusions they desire while ignoring legal precedent.

At least one judge wanted to get it on record that something was rotten in the changing state of the court. In a protest from the bench on June 28, 2007, Breyer put it best: ``It is not often in law that so few have quickly undone so much.''

``The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court'' is published by Doubleday (369 pages, $27.95).

(Susan Antilla is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Susan Antilla in New York santilla@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 20, 2007 00:09 EDT