Even before opening Judge John T. Noonan, Jr.’s latest book, Narrowing the Nation’s Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States, one suspects that something is amiss. The cover photo is a picture of an American flag draped backwards, not the kind of mistake that the author of The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom, which meticulously traced the original understanding of the Constitution’s religion clauses, should have made. But then, at first blush, there is something backwards about a conservative judge such as John Noonan criticizing the conservative Rehnquist Court’s recent federalism decisions, the most successful effort to restore the Constitution’s original limits since the New Deal virtually annulled them.