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A Pawn in Their Game
publish date:
2026-04-06 20:11:34
Latest chapter
Mistaken Alliances The Shape of Time Remaining
November arrived with a conversation I had been approaching from different angles for two years.Kade and I were at the Georgetown apartment on a Saturday, a rare day when nothing was scheduled and the city was gray and quiet outside and the kitchen was warm.He was reading. I was at the table with case notes that I had brought home and was ostensibly working through but was mostly thinking around.He looked up."You are not working," he said."I am thinking," I said."What are you thinking about?" he said.I put down the notes."Retirement," I said.He set down his book.He said nothing."I have been on the court for six years," I said. "The access framework is established. The enforcement is protected. The international dimension is developing. The next generation has the tools.""You are sixty-one," he said."Yes," I said."Justices serve into their eighties," he said."Some do," I said. "The question is whether they should.""Are you thinking about whether you should?" he said."I
Mistaken Alliances The Law Beyond The Court
Summer recess and I did something deliberate with it.I went to Louisiana.Not officially. Not as a Supreme Court justice. I called the advocacy organization that had worked with Gerald and explained that I wanted to visit their office and speak with the people in their reentry program and I did not want it announced or covered.They arranged it.I went on a Tuesday in July.The office was in Baton Rouge. A storefront with modest furniture and good lighting and the specific organized energy of a place that was doing serious work with limited resources.Gerald was there.He was thirty-eight years old. He had been out for four years. He was a paralegal now, formally certified, working at the advocacy organization three days a week and at a public defender's office two days a week.He showed me around the office.He showed me the cases they were working on. The reentry reviews. The housing applications. The licensing processes. The specific stack of files that represented the Beaumont st
Mistaken Alliances The Bridges We Build
The housing discrimination petition that Gerald had helped build came to the court in February.The Eleventh Circuit ruling was the one that had held that using criminal history as the sole basis for housing denial was permissible. The petitioners were the group of formerly incarcerated people.The court took it.Six to three to grant.The Equal Protection argument was different from the access argument but the underlying logic was the same. The state had acted. The conviction was the product of state action. The housing denial was the product of the conviction. The perpetuation of state-created harm through private commercial discrimination was an equal protection problem when the criminal justice system produced racially disparate outcomes.The brief made the racial disparity argument with precision. The criminal justice system convicted Black defendants at rates that did not reflect underlying rates of criminal conduct, which the social science literature documented extensively. Us
Mistaken Alliances The Work That Learned To Walk
December arrived and with it the end of the fifth term.Sixteen cases decided. Twelve majority opinions. Two concurrences. Two dissents.The dissents were the ones I thought about most.The first was in an immigration case where the majority had drawn a line in the adequacy argument that I thought was too narrow. The line excluded certain administrative immigration proceedings from the Mensah extension on grounds of jurisdictional complexity.I wrote twelve pages about why the jurisdictional complexity was not constitutionally relevant.The second was in a voting rights case where the majority had deferred to a state legislature's determination of its own remedial process in a way I believed undermined the constitutional protection.I wrote fifteen pages about why legislative self-determination had limits when constitutional rights were at stake.Both dissents were careful and precise and well-grounded.Both dissents were, I believed, correct.Both dissents would be used by lawyers an
Mistaken Alliances Building For Tomorrow
The summer arrived and Rosa came to Washington.She was fourteen now and she had been in correspondence with Destiny in Atlanta for eight months and the family court argument had grown from a notebook idea into something with shape and structure.She came to my chambers on a Tuesday afternoon in July.She sat across from me with the notebook and three additional documents she had printed."Tell me where you are," I said.She told me.The constitutional foundation: the due process clause applied to family court proceedings under the Supreme Court's established precedents. Children in those proceedings were parties. They had interests that were legally distinct from their parents' interests and from the state's interests.The specific gap: no jurisdiction had established a constitutional right to counsel that specifically represented the child's independent interests as distinguished from the child's parents' interests or the state's protective interests.The empirical evidence: Destiny
Mistaken Alliances The Gap They Found
Winter arrived and the court moved into the part of the term where the cases that had been argued began producing decisions.Three decisions in January that were significant. A Fourth Amendment case in which I was in the majority and in which the majority opinion I wrote was, the legal scholars said, the clearest statement of the exclusionary rule's constitutional purpose since Mapp v Ohio.An employment discrimination case in which I wrote a dissent from the majority that the Chief Justice told me privately was the most persuasive dissent he had read in his tenure on the court and that he expected would become the majority position within ten years."Within five," I said.He looked at me."The composition of the court," I said. "It will change.""You are speculating about future nominations," he said."I am noting a constitutional reality," I said."Five years," he said."We will see," I said.And a case that arrived from the Eleventh Circuit that I had not expected.A housing discri
Mistaken Alliances We Deal With It Together
It was Kade's mother who figured it out first. We were having lunch at the townhouse, just Eloise and me, a habit that had developed quietly over the past weeks. She fed me and I told her things I didn't tell the twins, not always about them, sometimes just about work or the city or things I wa
Mistaken Alliances Which Brother
By the following Tuesday, the entire office knew. I wasn't sure how it started. Maybe it was the way Killian had greeted me in the hallway that morning, loud and warm in front of everyone, like we were old friends. Maybe it was the way Kade had held the elevator door open for me with a look that
Mistaken Alliances Behind Closed Doors
I did not shake their hands for long. The second I let go, I stepped back and put a smile on my face that I hoped looked more natural than it felt, because on the inside I was absolutely losing it. "What a surprise," I said, and I meant it in the worst possible way. Bendel was beaming betwe
Mistaken Alliances Trapped by the Carters
I woke up the next morning to my head splitting in two from a migraine. I groaned and pushed myself off the bed, dreading the work day ahead of me already. After that dinner with Killian and Kade, well, the train wreck I barely survived, I had headed home and forced myself to go to bed. Unfortunate
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