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Congress and the Media: Beyond Institutional Power. By C. Danielle Vinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 256p. $105.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

relationship between the federal courts and the president. But the thrust of the book sounds more in the key of a specific statement of ideals than of a careful account of how public views, professional norms, and elite strategies affect federal courts. It is instead in the ideal of unusually broad-minded judicial polymaths working diligently— without distraction or constraint—that one might find justification for the author’s interest in enhancing judges’ administrative abilities, their willingness to discuss with candor the costs and consequences of their rulings, along with the ambiguities that force them to engage in acts of judgment (as in his discussion of statutory interpretation circa p. 243). It is faith in that ambitious ideal that presumably best explains Posner’s (not obviously necessary or justified) acerbic disappointment at the perceived limitations of judicial colleagues (e.g., p. 401, n. 6), disdain for congressional interference in statutory interpretation (p. 243), and frustration at the lack of willingness of federal courts to experiment with live-streamed hearings. Similarly, the extensive discussion of limitations in the work of immigration judges includes relatively meager coverage of the incentives that may create and sustain dysfunctional adjudication arrangements, and the not-soeasy second-order questions facing a principled judge trying to address such dysfunction. And critically, from Posner’s romantic sense of a (nerdy yet) heroic federal judge, protected from outside pressure but not from external ideas, one can derive an understanding of why the book is far less concerned in any intellectually sustained way with all the institutional norms, hard-fought compromises, and delicate balances that sustain the judicial enterprise writ large: the balance between institutional interest and individual quirkiness that defines an insulated judiciary, and the delicate interplay of potentially countermajoritarian principle and public confidence that lies at the heart of much prudent judging. If commitment to that ideal is not entirely surprising in someone like the author—who mostly lives up to it—it yields a less than complete practical guide to the complexities of the federal courts and the values they are generally understood to serve. Although Posner’s contributions to our understanding of the federal courts has likely come more from his remarkable body of opinions and statements over the years than from anything in this tome, it makes an intriguing, opinionated guide to many dilemmas associated with the federal judiciary. Denizens of Silicon Valley with little knowledge of the federal courts or their procedures often extol the virtues of “design thinking,” a practice made possible by eschewing the nit-picky concerns about which reforms are feasible, who might be for or against them, or (more generally) why seemingly inefficient outcomes might arise not just because of a lack of ideas or creativity but also because such outcomes are sometimes deeply rooted in social behavior and difficult to change. The book is engaging in part because its ethos is consistent with such design thinking, as reflected in (for example) his exaltation of judicial hearings as a corrective for administrative error. Such intellectual moves are not without costs, however, and one is sometimes left wondering where the resulting insights sit relative to a coherent theory of how institutions behave or change, and how that theory applies to the federal judiciary. This alternative approach would tend to foreground such questions as how to take sufficient account of heterogeneous goals and constraints affecting judges and how those goals affect both their strategic choices and their habits of mind; the benefits and costs of having judges with the specific blend of “genuine cultural breadth” that Judge Posner seems to admire (p. 225) and how their presence might affect (for example) the length of their questions at oral argument; and the inevitable friction arising from interactions between federal courts, other institutions, and the public. That such questions are given only limited if any exploration in The Federal Judiciary leaves similar questions unresolved, making the book—at its best—more of an exercise in a kind of “design thinking” about a vital institution than an account of why that institution is given power and influence in the first place.