Comparing law to the American practice of common courtesy, this book explains how our courts not only survive under conditions of suspected hypocrisy, but actually depend on these conditions to function. "Between costly partisan judicial elections and a Supreme Court that appears frozen in an ideological 5-4 split, there has never been a more apt time to answer conclusively the question of whether judges are apolitical oracles or ideological politicians. Bybee's answer-they are both-sounds at first like a discomfiting one. But in this fascinating book he shows that the courts' very survival in fact rests on the white lie of this fundamental tension."