Better Judgment, by Reynolds Holding, is a fascinating and detailed look at three distinguished federal district judges: Carlton Reeves (S.D.Miss.), Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.), and Martha Vazquez (D.N.M.).  As reflected in the book’s subtitle, “How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts,” the author believes that Judges Reeves, Rakoff, and Vazquez have strengthened our democracy by “resist[ing] growing and harmful constraints on a judge’s power to discover the truth and right wrongs.” To make his case, the author gets up close to each of his subjects, and tells us about their early lives, the events that led them to become lawyers and later judges, and their approach to their judicial work. But these are not sterile biographical sketches. Holding is an excellent and engaging writer, who has picked some events for each of his subjects that bring their background and work to life.

The narrative begins with Judge Reeves, and a description of a photograph of a first-grade class in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1971. The picture includes 6-year-old Carlton Reeves, smiling like his classmates, in an integrated classroom where the students play together and have not yet learned to view each other through the distorting lens of racial identity.  Reeves, we learn, was a happy and outgoing child, but he did not escape the tribulations of growing up as a Black man in Yazoo. For instance, the book describes a field trip to Jackson, Mississippi, where the bus driver hugged the statue of an infamous race-baiting former governor, telling the students that, “Y’all should be very proud of this man.”  It then recounts how Reeves was falsely accused of making an obscene gesture and walloped with a wooden paddle by the white principal. And, even after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, Reeves and his friends had to go up three flights of stairs to the balcony of the local movie theater, because the owner charged a fee to sit in the orchestra on padded seats with the white boys and girls.  Eventually, Reeves’ natural ebullience and intelligence took him to Jackson State for college and law school at the University of Virginia. The account of his early years is interspersed with discussion of events taking place in American government, law, and society, including the birth of “qualified immunity” as a means of protecting law enforcement personnel from being held accountable for civil rights violations. Reeves graduated law school and became a law clerk for Reuben Anderson, a justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. His work as a law clerk often kept him in chambers until 2 or 3 in the morning, even though his girlfriend (later, his wife) had been diagnosed with cancer. As Holding describes, Reeves had begun to develop a sense of purpose—to bring his experience, including optimism and opportunity, along with the “scars of discrimination” to the legal system.

After introducing us to Judge Reeves, the book shifts its focus to Jed Rakoff. But again, the portrait of Judge Rakoff is not laid out in a plain vanilla timeline of his childhood, his legal education and early career, and then his ascension to the bench. Holding wants to keep his book lively and engaging, avoiding the “this happened, then that happened, and then the next thing happened” form of narrative. So the discussion of Judge Rakoff begins with a graphic account of the suicide of Eli Black, who committed suicide in February 1975 by throwing his briefcase through the plate glass window of his office on the 44th floor of a Park Avenue skyscraper, after which he jumped through the open window to his death. What does this have to do with Jed Rakoff? We learn that Black had been the CEO of United Brands, and he had authorized the company to pay a bribe to a Honduran economic minister in order to get a cut in the rate of the country’s “banana tax.” Rakoff, then a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, decided with his colleague, Rusty Wing, to prosecute United Brands and the Honduran minister under the federal mail fraud statute. The decision, according to Holding, was a display of the “creativity and audacity and delight at challenging corporate power” that Judge Rakoff would later display on the bench. The book then goes on to describe Rakoff’s early life. The details are entertaining, including a reference to Rakoff’s uncle, described as “a raucously funny ladies’ man,” having sex on the living room couch as the future judge and his brother secretly looked on from the staircase.

The third judge who has a leading role in the book is Martha Vazquez, and Holding begins his treatment with a description of her early years growing up in California (and Mexico) with her older brother, Ricardo. Judge Vazquez spoke no English as a young girl. After school she would join her parents to work in rich people’s gardens, and Holding writes that the people in her Mexican community, and particularly her father, “had an almost irrational faith in the United States and its capacity to treat them fairly.” But Vazquez’ faith was tested by the arrest and federal drug prosecution of her brother Ricardo for violating the federal narcotics laws. Judge Vazquez, who had become a lawyer by the time of her brother’s arrest, well understood that the criminal justice system could be “terrifying,” and she brought that understanding with her when she later became a federal judge.

Because the book shuttles back and forth between the lives and work of its three “heroes,” and does not follow a single and sustained temporal arc, the transitions from one chapter to the next can be jarring. We go from Carlton Reeves to Jed Rakoff to Martha Vazquez and then back to Reeves, again to Rakoff, again to Reeves, and so forth. As the book progresses, it takes us through many important moments in each judge’s career and judicial life. For example, the book highlights Judge Reeves’ handing of a case involving Mississippi’s ban on gay marriage. Judge Reeves condemned the ban and wrote that a judge’s role is not to step aside and let the legislative process resolve the dispute, because in the meantime the litigants’ “legal rights and those of their children will continue to be denied.” For Judge Rakoff, the author takes us through the judge’s unsuccessful attempt to have the death penalty ruled unconstitutional, his objections to the SEC’s practice of resolving cases of alleged corporate wrongdoing without requiring the defendant to “admit or deny” guilt, and the judge’s successful attempt to change the law of insider trading by writing an opinion as a visiting judge of the Ninth Circuit that expressly disagreed with the views of the Second Circuit, in which Judge Rakoff sat. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld Judge Rakoff’s view of the law, as the book describes in a chapter titled “The Troublemaker Prevails.” Finally, for Judge Vazquez, the book describes (among other things) her efforts to bring her court to a sitting on Navajo land, so that its work could be seen by those who could not appear in her courtroom, and her decision to suppress evidence seized by a DEA agent who made dozens of cases by going to the local bus station, greeting a bus passing through Albuquerque, and supposedly getting “consent” to look through the bags of Black and Latino passengers. In her opinion, Judge Vazquez focused on the likelihood that the defendant, like other people of color, had been conditioned to believe that refusing to consent would increase her odds of being harmed or arrested by the agent. As the book relates, the judge knew her decision would be reversed on appeal, and it was. But Judge Vazquez issued her ruling anyway, believing she had an obligation to bring injustice to the attention of higher courts.

Holding describes the work of his three judicial subjects in readable, entertaining, and sometimes dramatic prose. This is not a stuffy book aimed at scholars of legal doctrine and jurisprudence. It can and should be read by lawyers and nonlawyers, or anyone interested in how people become federal judges and how they go about their work. There is considerable discussion of developments in the law to give context to the work of the judges. That discussion is less entertaining than the more personal description of the three judges and their labors, and the reader sometimes will be tempted, for instance, to gloss over the narrative of efforts to curtail tort recoveries and to limit the award of punitive damages in order to get back to what the judges were doing in their courtrooms. But Holding manages to present even the pertinent legal trends in a well-written and lively way, as when he tells us the facts in the case involving the spilling of a boiling hot cup of McDonald’s coffee, a case that prompted efforts to limit tort recoveries.

The main thesis of the book is that judges, like the three who star in Holding’s book, should be activists. Holding believes that judges must fight back to resist efforts to limit access to the federal courts and must not simply defer to lawmakers and others who impede judges’ efforts to right wrongs and do justice. I take his point, but for me his description of the three judges had a deeper meaning. Whether or not one agrees with their rulings, these judges devoted their lives and their time on the bench to defending and fortifying the rule of law, including seeking change through the legal system where they believed that was necessary. Unfortunately, we live in an era where the rule of law is disrespected by many of those who presently pull the levers of government in the United States. The current President attacks justices who rule against him as unpatriotic and disloyal or worse, and the leadership of the Department of Justice routinely ignores court orders. For me, the enduring message of the book is to remind us that the rule of law, and legal institutions, are only as strong as the men and women who maintain them.  The three judges described in the book should be regarded as heroes not because they are activists, but because they faithfully devoted their lives and their careers to upholding the rule of law that protects all of us.

Mark F. Pomerantz is a founder of the Free + Fair Litigation Group, a former federal and state prosecutor, and a former partner at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison.