An off-season double dip into the wonderful world of reading clearouts...
The Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions by Tony Mauro (January 2022)
Tony Mauro, who has covered the Supreme Court for over forty years, pulls together his list of twenty landmark cases for this short, straightforward volume. Each chapter has the same structure - Mauro quickly summarizes the case, then includes a few snippets from the various written opinions that accompany each verdict. I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book, but I think it would have been helpful back in my various US history classes to have this perspective on American history. I must admit that since reading it a few weeks ago I have thought more about the roles of various groups and individuals, particularly in the context of my job, in terms of who is responsible for the essential functions of creating, executing, and reviewing policy, so it's clear that this book has at least had some effect on my recent thinking.
Some of the details that stood out to me included the way the Supreme Court rarely makes the initial decision, appearing instead at the end stages to clarify a lower court's ruling or break some kind of tie that emerged along the way, as well as the way certain opinions cited the importance of courts stepping aside to let the people determine their own laws within the various jurisdictions of city, country, or state levels. The idea that split decisions undermine public confidence felt like a bit of outdated nonsense for me, given that these days the perception seems to be that the justices will always vote along ideological lines. I also didn't think much of the observation that originalism has appeared on both sides of the same case, which seems to be more of a problem than the author cared to emphasize about the process. I think the idea I'll take with me from this book is the danger that principles will always expand to the limits of their own logic.
Pandemic by Connie Goldsmith (January 2022)
I wonder why I chose this? This book wasn't exactly what I was expecting - turns out that being shy of 150 pages was a function of the target audience being somewhere between middle and high school, though I didn't mind some of the charts or photos. In fact, I didn't mind the overall reading experience at all, but I assume the TOA audience would prefer to read something else. I picked up a few interesting nuggets from this work, such as the observation that advances in air travel mean we can reach just about anywhere on the globe within the incubation period for most pathogens, or how SARS was containable partly because symptoms appeared before the sick person became infectious. For those frustrated by a particular way some have dismissed the threat of COVID, it may be helpful to know that Goldsmith suggests flu caused around twelve thousand deaths in the 2015-16 season.
