Released today, Levin's new book, "Men in Black," is nothing short of an indictment of the high court, detailing judicial abuses from its founding in 1801 right through modern-day decisions on abortion and homosexual rights cases.

Though the Supreme Court is generally the most revered branch of government, supposedly populated by the finest legal minds in the nation, Levin lays bare the institution as one plagued by the human frailties of its members - who regularly base their decisions on their own political prejudices, often with little or no regard for Constitution.

"The biggest myth about judges is that they're somehow imbued with greater insight, wisdom, and vision than the rest of us, that for some reason God Almighty has endowed them with superior judgment about justice and fairness," he begins.

But over its more-than-two-century history, the high court has welcomed into its club an ex-Ku Klux Klansman (Hugo Black), a virulent anti-Semite (James McReynolds) and a sexual predator (William O. Douglas) - along with no small number of increasingly infirm and senile members who soldiered on while their colleagues worked around them.

"Men in Black's" central complaint, however, is the abuse of a branch of government that was created to interpret the Constitution - and more often than not, ends up rewriting it.

Or as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, explaining his judicial philosophy: "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up."

Over the years, that approach has led to a series of judicial disasters, each covered by Levin in great detail.

The Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, for instance, which ratified the Jim Crow "separate but equal" code of segregation, could be reached only by ignoring already well-established law.

Levin notes that the Court simply ignored "the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment" and "inserted its own segregationist version of what was just."

Korematsu vs. United States, the high court decision that justified FDR's internment of the Japanese during World War II, "was devoid of any legitimate constitutional basis for upholding Roosevelt's orders," he explains.

One of the book's most insightful chapters dissects Justice Harry Blackmun's motives in writing the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision.

His wife, Dorothy, for instance, once told one of his pro-abortion clerks that she was coaxing him at home to legalize abortion, explaining, "You and I are working on the same thing; me at home and you at work."

In the wake of Blackmun's abortion ruling, reaction was sharp. Letters poured into the Court, both pro and con. Blackmun took the supportive letters to heart. "Over time, he came to think he had done a great thing for women," a Court historian noted, and it radicalized his judgment in future privacy rights cases.

Notes Levin, "There is something truly absurd and, frankly, repugnant about a judge being swayed by fan mail."

Through vignettes like that, "Men in Black" offers an up close and personal perspective on a high court that all too often resembles the legal version a runaway train - careening off the course clearly outlined in the Constitution.

Editor's note: