The implicit reasoning of those who backed the decision seemed to be "It wasn't pretty, but it had to be done" -- not a position easy to defend publicly. (And since the outcome was both favorable to their side and irreversible, arguments were unnecessary anyway.) The critics, for their part, were convinced that the nation's highest judicial body, whose members are answerable to no one, had pulled off a judicial coup d'état, its conservative majority, on the thinnest of legal pretexts, arrogantly handing the election to the candidate it preferred -- in the process possibly nullifying the votes of 50 million Americans.

I was among those who harshly criticized the Supreme Court's decision. I have had no reason to reconsider that judgment. But, I suspect, like many people who followed the election carefully but are neither lawyers nor experts in the history of the court and constitutional law, I still harbored a small area of doubt as to whether the majority justices were really corrupt.

There were three reasons for this. First, there's decorum: our belief in the incorruptibility of the Supreme Court justices, or at least our hesitation to publicly question it, is deeply ingrained. Second, there is the intimidating universe of law, a kind of parallel reality made up of a confusing maze of principles and codes. Although I believe judicial decisions are ultimately transparent, susceptible to the same analysis as legislation or executive rulings (they must be, or democracy and citizenship are trumped by "expertise"), it's hard for even a reasonably well-informed citizen to feel absolutely confident when making judgments about legal matters. Without knowing the intricacies of the history of equal protection doctrine or how much weight to attach to precedent and consistency in evaluating the probity of a justice's decisions, could one be absolutely positive that the majority's decision was legally and morally bankrupt? Finally, there was the distorting element of partisan passion. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, with emotions running high, judgments could be unreliable.

More than half a year has now passed since Bush vs. Gore. Passions have cooled, and the first wave of expert commentary on the decision, represented by the two books discussed here, has appeared. And there is nothing in either of these volumes to dispel the thesis that the majority acted improperly, and probably corruptly, in Bush vs. Gore.

The two books offer a reasonably comprehensive spectrum of viewpoints. Alan Dershowitz's "Supreme Injustice" is a lucid, heavily researched, no-holds-barred assault, written for a general audience, on both the ruling itself and on the justices who made it. Dershowitz, an author, Harvard Law School professor and Gore partisan (he provided pro bono legal representation for Democratic voters in Palm Beach County), is out for blood: His purpose is to convince us that the majority not only made bad law in Bush vs. Gore, but did so for contaminated and self-serving reasons. He writes, "The decision may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants ... No honest person can any longer trust them to do justice, as distinguished from politics."

Dershowitz presses his case on three fronts. First, he attacks the legal reasoning of the decision as a matter of law. Second, he examines the various majority justices' previously expressed views, and demonstrates their utter inconsistency with the decision. This is "Supreme Injustice's" most important contribution. Finally, he adduces considerable evidence that supports (though of course it cannot prove) the argument that the justices acted out of blatant partisanship, with some of them also motivated by self-interest.

At the heart of Dershowitz's argument is his certainty that the majority justices would fail what he calls the "shoe-on-the-other-foot test" -- that is, if Gore was ahead and it was Bush who was seeking a hand recount, the majority would have ruled differently. This is an extremely serious accusation, because deciding a case on the basis of the identity of a litigant is a violation of the judicial oath of impartiality. If there were a process to oversee the Supreme Court (and Dershowitz argues that there should be), such a violation would presumably result in the offenders being removed from office. Dershowitz challenges anyone who believes the majority would pass the other-foot test to prove it, "by demonstrating how their opinions in this case can be reconciled with their opinions in prior cases as well as with their extrajudicial writings." Dershowitz concludes that the majority justices "shamed themselves and the Court on which they serve, and ... defiled their places in history."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"