With Trump's executive orders flying at us like the Eagles defense, the president's opponents are turning to the courts for legal recourse. One judge actually denied the secretary of the Treasury from accessing the payment system of... the Treasury. Some of these cases will wend their way to the High Court. So it's only fitting that we feature David J. Garrow, who reviews The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States by Stuart Banner.
"Prior to the late 1860s, all of 'the justices spent most of their time serving as circuit judges rather than as members of the Supreme Court,' for the young nation’s incipient lower federal courts depended upon the justices’ regular presence, a practice known as 'riding circuit' and which was 'a grueling job' when all interstate travel was via horse and carriage or if lucky a riverboat. Thus 'the justices were not in Washington very much,' and when they were they 'lived together in a boarding house, where they ate their meals, discussed their cases, and wrote their opinions.'
"Without a building of their own, oral arguments were heard in a small chamber deep in the Capitol. 'Living together seems to have encouraged the justices to downplay their differences and to speak with one voice most of the time,' Banner observes, for published dissents were surprisingly infrequent. What’s more, since the justices did not control their own docket, almost always 'the Supreme Court was an ordinary court that decided banal legal disputes with no political implications.' Thus 'the great cases are unrepresentative' of the justices’ pre-Civil War toils, and 'this was a Court that scarcely resembled the institution it would become.'"
"Giving the Court mastery over the docket 'transformed' the justices 'from passive recipients of cases to active participants in the making of the law,' Banner emphasizes. Additionally, 'once the Court gained the power to choose which cases it would hear, the norm against expressing dissent evaporated.' In 1925 only 6 percent of cases featured a published dissent, but 20 years later that figure had risen to 50 percent. Likewise, 'as the composition of the Court’s caseload shifted from mostly humdrum cases to mostly important ones, the Court’s physical surroundings changed to match,' Banner writes, as the huge, grand new building 'made the Court seem like a more august institution' than when it had been relegated to the innards of the Capitol. 'The Court of 1935,' Banner adds, not only "looked very different from the Court of 1920. It had become much more like the Court we know today.'
"Another consequential byproduct of the 1925 [Judiciary] Act was how the Court’s control of its caseload soon began to witness 'the biggest burst of new constitutional rights in the Court’s history' as the justices gradually restored the 14th Amendment to meaningful life. Prior to the late 1930s the Court was always 'a profoundly conservative institution,' but between 1937 and 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to appoint seven new justices, 'all political allies with no judicial experience.' Roosevelt’s appointees pushed the Court in decidedly more liberal directions even as several duos among them came to loathe each other, with William O. Douglas calling Felix Frankfurter 'utterly dishonest intellectually' and Frankfurter in turn labeling Douglas 'completely evil.'"
From the origins of the Court to a completely different origin story: Sean Durns reviews The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan.
"The elder Xi was persecuted and jailed, his family cast out. His son, Xi Jinping, was denounced by the Red Guards and ostracized. Once a privileged 'princeling,' Xi Jinping was forcibly detained. He escaped confinement only to be turned away by his own mother who feared that taking him in would lead to grave consequences for both her and her other children. Xi was only 15 at the time.
"Sent to the countryside, Xi became one of the 'sent-down youths,' those who fled the inner cities during the Cultural Revolution, making their way to rural China and, they hoped, redemption. Chinese people call the Xi Jinping generation 'those who were raised on wolf milk' to describe their toughness, suffering, survival skills, and sheer ruthlessness. Xi learned to mingle with peasants. And he learned discomfort, from flea bites and lice to a hard day’s toil. His response to these trials and tribulations was to become 'redder than red.'
"These years have become part of the Xi legend, burnished by state propaganda. But Xi also benefited from his revolutionary lineage, which eventually helped him obtain plum jobs and credentials. As Sheridan notes: 'Today’s cult of Xi Jinping leads people to believe that he and his family came back from disgrace when China entered its age of reform, conveniently associating them with a saner era. The truth is that they were rehabilitated by Mao Zedong himself and owed their survival to his say-so: the restoration of their fortunes began four years before Mao’s death.'
"Xi would lean on the connections of his rehabilitated father, serving as an aide to a former defense minister and then an official in several provinces. A defector who knew Xi at the time later told the CIA that Xi had one abiding and unmistakable characteristic: 'from day one he never showed his hand.'"
When it comes to mystery fiction, Weekend Beacon contributor John Wilson is turning Japanese (I really think so). He reviews Keigo Higashino's Invisible Helix: A Detective Galileo Novel.
"By the end of the 19th century, translations of mystery fiction (novels as well as short stories) from Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere had appeared in Japan, where they attracted considerable interest. In fact, during the period when 'mysteries' became a global phenomenon, Japan was one of the principal nodes of the genre, as it continues to be today, though you wouldn't have guessed that in the 1960s, when, in my mid-teens, I first began to read Japanese fiction. Novels by Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and other masters of 'literary fiction' were on the shelves of our public library in English translation, but, for instance, Seichō Matsumoto's brilliant 1961 mystery Suna no utsuwa ('Vessel of Sand') didn't appear in English until 1989, lamely titled Inspector Imanishi Investigates.
"Thankfully, that has changed: Translations of crime fiction from Japan appear routinely now—and I wouldn't mind seeing even more of them. A case in point is Keigo Higashino, who is described on the dust-jacket of one of his novels as 'the single best-selling, best-known novelist in Japan and around Asia.'
"Higashino, born in 1958, earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked in that field for several years after his graduation before he became a full-time writer. 'A good electrical engineer,' so an AI bot informs me, 'has a combination of technical skills, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills.' Who knew? Higashino's novels are intensely 'orderly,' not at all in a way that conflicts with his depiction of human beings (like us) at their best, at their worst, and in the midst of what we sometimes call 'everyday life.'
"Like many crime novelists, Higashino often works in a series, as he does with Invisible Helix, featuring one of his most popular characters, Manabu Yukawa, a professor of physics nicknamed 'Professor Galileo' by members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department after he assists them with a case. ... To some degree Yukawa resembles the gifted 'amateurs' who help the police solve cases in many so-called Golden Age mysteries. That's no surprise, since Higashino himself is deeply versed in the history of the genre."
From the archives: As Israel fights to bring the last of its hostages home, it's worth revisiting Dan Senor and Saul Singer's The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World. Meir Y. Soloveichik gave us a review in late October 2023, a mere three weeks after the October 7 attacks.
"The question with which Senor and Singer begin is pithily put: 'Why are Israelis so damn happy?' This query was first posed by the journalist Tiffanie Wen, when she noticed that Israel ranks consistently close to the top among countries when it comes to the happiness of its citizens, even as these very same citizens remember, every year, relatives who have fallen in the country’s many wars, and almost every Israeli knows someone murdered in a terror attack. While their previous book—the hugely influential Start-Up Nation—focused on how Israeli life cultivates creativity in the technological and financial sectors, Senor and Singer now eloquently outline the emotional aspects of Israeli life. They explain how a society marked by its constant confrontation with its enemies, and by the angry exchanges of its democratic debates, is actually one of the most contented countries on the face of the earth.
"Like most ingenious explanations, it is only obvious once it is given. Genuine joy in life comes not from hedonism or escapism but from a sense of being part of, and contributing to, something larger than one’s self. In contrast to the atomistic sense of identity cultivated in much of the Western world, and the epidemic of loneliness now impacting so much of America, Israel has succeeded in creating a culture in which individuality is celebrated but is always placed within the context of family, community, and country."
"In the past several weeks since the horror of Hamas descended on Israel, the familial unity described by Senor and Singer can be seen everywhere. In Tel Aviv, once riven by religious debates, several high-end restaurants became kosher in order to cater to religiously observant soldiers. Israelis continue to create families; weddings that had been meant to take place in halls and hotels have been moved to homes and even army bases, with at times both bride and groom wearing the IDF green under the wedding canopy. In one notable story, a soldier returned from the front for one evening to wed the love of his life, and his neighbor offered him a large backyard in which to hold the ceremony. As the groom’s mother prepared for the wedding, her hairdresser asserted that he would ensure Ishay Ribo, one of the most famous singers in Israel, would perform. Ribo did indeed come, singing the song of the Passover seder: 'In every generation they rise up to destroy us, and God saves us from their hands.'"