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For reasons that Lewis meticulously explains, the court rarely agrees to review a case simply to correct an injustice. The lightning struck Gideon because the court was ready to confront the knotty question of the state courts' obligations, under the Bill of Rights and the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, to provide lawyers for indigent defendants in criminal cases. And as Lewis shows, the decision in Gideon's case is significant not simply because it overturns a 20-year-old Supreme Court precedent that had seriously disturbed many justices and legal scholars, but also because in so doing, the court moved with a swelling wave of legal opinion that has fundamentally expanded and shored up the protections of individual liberty in the past 30 years.
In casting his knowledgeable eye along the Supreme Court bench that sat on Gideon's case, and the long roll call of illustrious men who preceded them on the court and influenced their thinking, Lewis similarly relishes the inescapably human drama and conflict that the law provides. Lewis is himself clearly sympathetic for the most part to those "activists" who, like Justice Black, are usually urging the court to define its powers broadly. Yet he dispenses justice to the Justices with a perceptive and even hand.