What do the following names have in common: Abella, Binnie, Charron, Cromwell, Deschamps, Fish, LeBel, McLachlin, Rothstein? These are the nine justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court of Canada. Despite their influence over life and public affairs in this country, they probably aren’t as recognizable to the average Canadian as their American counterparts, especially controversial figures such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

This lack of awareness about who Canada’s Supreme Court Justices are and how they acquire their power is the focus of Philip Slayton’s second book. His first, 2007’s Lawyers Gone Bad, attracted a great deal of media attention for its salacious accounts of amorality among high-priced, high-powered legal professionals. Mighty Judgment has been positioned similarly – large-print copy on the book’s back cover refers to “The judge and the dominatrix” – but with the exception of a few general details about judicial infighting and more specific accounts of former Chief Justice Antonio Lamer’s alleged affinity for alcohol, Slayton dishes little dirt.

Instead, he makes a strong argument that politicians, the news media, and Canadians in general don’t pay enough attention to the men and women who sit on the Supreme Court – judges who have played an increasingly central and activist role in Canadian governance since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was signed in 1982.

The first part of Mighty Judgment focuses on key decisions handed down by the Supreme Court in the Charter era, while the second part is composed of mini-profiles of the current roster of judges. Notwithstanding Slayton’s specialized knowledge – now retired, the Rhodes Scholar was once a clerk at the Supreme Court as well as a Bay Street lawyer and dean of the University of Western Ontario’s law school – he succeeds in making his book readable and relatable, which is especially impressive considering the volume of information he conveys.

To help explain the workings of the Canadian court, Slayton frequently refers to U.S. magazine articles, often by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick (herself a Canadian) and The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin. Of course, the fact that an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg is more resonant – and more readily available – to Canadian audiences than one with Beverley McLachlin only supports Slayton’s larger point about our inexplicable collective antipathy toward our own, increasingly influential, judicial branch of government.