Sarah Isgur and Nonfiction

October 19, 2026

Sarah Isgur is an attorney, political commentator, and former spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department. She appears regularly as a legal expert for ABC News. As editor of SCOTUS blog, she is considered one of the leading conservative legal voices in America.

But Isgur is not your normal nonfiction author. Her books are informative but more than that, they are fun to read. Take her recent work, Last Branch Standing. She takes what could be a flat and dull subject—the United States Supreme Court—and makes it interesting by showing the court’s justices as more than just nine faces in black robes. She humanizes them, capturing their backgrounds and personalities, while doing it all in a distinctive narrative voice.

Her works of nonfiction checks all the boxes of quality writing. She presents fresh information on important issues while advancing arguments that move readers to reconsider previously held beliefs. She uses her technical knowledge and her familiarity of institutions and traditions to move a story forward with authority. And she avoids highly formal language that is associated with legal presentations, often writing in a humorous, irreverent, conversational voice. Instead of discussing legal issues inside an abstract concept of judicial philosophy, Isgur demonstrates how legal officials approach the same constitutional questions through different mindsets.

And drawing from a strength of a novel, she presents conflicts in her stories to demonstrate that the legal industry is not monolithic in its viewpoints. Competing judicial philosophies—between SCOTUS and the other two political branches, between perceptions held by the public as opposed to realities of the legal institutions, and between the Court’s interpretation of the law versus the public’s desire for outcomes—gives juice to her nonfiction works.

In Last Branch Standing and her other accomplishments, Isgur proves herself to be one of America’s most accomplished authors in her field.