Like any other major federal nomination, Barack Obama's recommending Sonia Sotomayer for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court has sent ordinary citizens, bloggers and (sometimes painfully transparently) mainstream media personalities into last-minute study sessions to figure out what all this means. Even such an august body as the Supreme Court can still be a muddle for a lot of people. That's because it's by far the most secretive federal body, not counting whomever it is who administrates Area 51 and that wolfman body they keep frozen 500 feet under the national archives.

The justices serve for life and never have to worry about running for re-election. Perhaps because they can get away with it, or perhaps because of the scrutiny of their confirmation process, they tend to shun the spotlight, even for decades. For a few weeks of their lives, every politically-minded person in America examines them, then sends them off to adjudicate on the long march toward death. The whole process is like never going to the doctor until age 50, having the doc in question try to diagnose God knows how many problems, then sending you a checkup announcement with ???? written in the DATE field.

Aside from individual justices' biographies and historical studies of specific courts during specific periods, there aren't exactly tons of books a reader can just snatch off the shelf at a local store. But, in a pinch, four books should probably be available anywhere.

The first, and oldest, is Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's The Brethren (1979), which looks back on the tumultuous previous decade's court rulings. The dated nature of the material might initially hamper the enjoyment of a reader looking for insights into the current court, but the publication date probably shouldn't be cause for discouragement. Many of the issues before the court then are before it again today: abortion, mandated racial integration and the limits of executive power.

Probably the only cause for disenchantment sight-unseen is that, like most Woodward books, it relies heavily on off-the-record material. Although Woodward now admits that his key source was Associate Justice Potter Stewart, that revelation doesn't necessarily blunt one of the frequent criticisms of Woodward's books: that his patent need for deep-background sources tends to result in those sources leading him around by the nose, pushing their own agendas and controlling the story. Critics delighted in his trilogy of books on Bush because they seemed to exemplify that process: the first, Bush at War, with Bush ascendant and Woodward most in need of entrée is virtually hagiographical. Plan of Attack, written while his access was assured, was still blasted for being too uncritical of what he was told by sources but was more even-handed overall. State of Denial, the third, written as Bush was in decline and critical sources abundant, at times reads like Woodward pushing Bush off the shore in some funerary raft after setting it ablaze. Yet even then it relies on several key deep-background sources, this time Bush-bashers, all with the same conspicuously flawless memories for reams of dialogue.

Similar problems may attend Jan Crawford Greenberg's Supreme Conflict, which relies on a Woodwardian level of off-the-record Washington chatter. It's too bad — or maybe it's simply inevitable — because her book has a great air of political intrigue and excitement to it, due largely to being researched, investigated and written during the amazing upheavals that saw Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement, William Rehnquist's death, the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito and the disastrous nomination of Harriet Miers. Unfortunately, while the background comments often make that content more fun than we might expect it to be, zipping the story along and revealing behind-the-scenes portraits we can't be certain of, the fact is that we still just can't be certain of them. Who's grinding what axe in telling this story? Why?

The one book likeliest to provide a satisfying read while balancing revelation and policy is Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine. Reader's of the New Yorker will already be familiar with his Annals of Law articles, the most recent profiling Chief Justice Roberts. Toobin doesn't match Greenberg's sense of excitement, but his pacing, while more deliberative, is still superb. It matches the book's aim to profile the nine sitting justices and how they work within the court, while addressing each of them in relation to the most important matters facing the court today. In this last respect, it succeeds handily, presenting lucid summaries of legally complex issues while humanizing the people who will weigh them, even while offering criticism of their jurisprudence.

Of course, all this can be heady stuff, so perhaps the best solution is to give these stuffy current-affairs books a miss and try to absorb facts from fiction. To this day, I know that the atomic weight of cobalt is 58.9 because of Ghostbusters II, so there's always a good chance that Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship can fill in some key juridical gaps.

The book should be fun for anyone. Buckley's satire has moved further to the middle over the years (as the GOP has moved further right and abandoned many of the tenets his father, William F. Buckley, so sonorously advocated), leaving him something of an equal-opportunity offender. In the book, a president known for constantly vetoing bills sees his supreme court nominee shot down by congress as an act of revenge. Thus snubbed, he decides to embarrass them and the suave, logorrheic chairman of the judiciary committee by nominating a wildly popular, unsophisticated gun-toting woman TV judge. Deliberately, the foot-in-mouth chairman sounds exactly like Joe Biden. But, surprisingly and completely serendipitously for Buckley, what he'd intended to sound like a more attractive Judge Judy parody wound up sounding almost exactly like Sarah Palin. Although unplanned, the pair's confrontation in the book seemed oddly prescient by the time of the Vice-Presidential Debate during the election.

All these books should be a pleasure to read (especially the last two), but personally, I may take a cynical view. I've noticed that these justices get nominated and confirmed and then stick around for ages, leaving me years in which to catch up on my reading. If you can just fake it for two weeks or so, pretty soon the danger will have passed, and no one will expect you to know anything about this stuff anymore. Just remember to get a book between now and the next justice's retirement and read it. Don't put it off until the last minute! Remember what happened this time?