Todos los capítulos de Mistaken Alliances : Capítulo 151 - Capítulo 160

Three days after the retirement announcement, a letter arrived at my chambers that I read four times before I called anyone.It was from a man named Professor Eli Mensah at the University of Ghana Law School. He was not related to Amara Mensah, the petitioner in the immigration case. The shared surname was coincidence. He was sixty-three years old. He had been teaching constitutional law in Accra for thirty years.He wrote to say that he had been following the access framework since the first paper published in the Harvard Law Review. He had been assigning the papers to his third-year students for eleven years. He had been following the Supreme Court decisions in the American cases through the court's published opinions and through Amara Osei's work on the international dimension.He wrote to say he was building something.Ghana had ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. The Charter's Article 7 guaranteed fair hearing rights. His argument, which he had been develop

September arrived and with it the return to Columbia.My office was on the fourth floor, the same floor it had always been. The west-facing window. The afternoon light. The smell of old libraries.The research team had been building all summer.Clara, now on the Seventh Circuit, checked in by phone twice a week.Josephine was running the international program, the sixth paper published, Professor Mensah in Accra now formally connected to the Columbia research infrastructure.Priya was leading the seventh paper's final push toward publication.Amara had returned to the team as a visiting researcher with the specific mandate of connecting the African Charter work to the existing framework.Rafael, who was clerking for a justice on the Supreme Court pending his own possible nomination to the bench, stayed in regular contact through channels that were appropriate for a potential future justice.And Nora was on the third floor.Different floor. Same building.On the first Thursday we had l

February brought something from Eloise that I had not expected.She called on a Sunday morning from Provence, where she was spending the winter with Catherine. Her voice was different in a way I recognized from the long practice of knowing her."Are you all right?" I said."I want to tell you something," she said."Tell me," I said."I have been reading the Reed decision," she said. "The integrated proceeding standard. I have been reading it for three weeks.""Yes?" I said."The language in the final paragraph," she said. "Constitutional rights do not stop and restart at administrative boundaries. The lives of the people whose rights are at stake do not stop and restart.""Yes," I said."You wrote that," she said."Yes," I said."I have been thinking about it since I read it," she said."What have you been thinking?" I said.A pause."I kept my secrets at administrative boundaries," she said."Eloise," I said."No," she said. "Let me say this. When I found you through the investigator

Summer arrived and I did something I had been planning since January.I went to Ghana.Not alone. With Amara. With Josephine. And with Nora, who had been corresponding with Professor Mensah for six months and who cleared her schedule without being asked when I mentioned the trip.We flew to Accra on a Thursday in July.Professor Mensah met us at his university. He was a tall man with the specific bearing of someone who had been in front of students for thirty years and had never stopped finding it interesting. He shook my hand and said, "The papers reached me before you did.""The papers usually do," I said.He showed us his work.The African Charter argument was further developed than I had expected. The Article 7 analysis was precise. The adequacy standard built on the Kovács precedent and applied it to the Charter's specific language with a care that showed deep knowledge of both the international human rights system and the domestic constitutional law.He had three cases in the pi

The imaging three months later showed no change.The neurosurgeon was precise about this. No growth. No new symptoms. The watchful waiting approach was appropriate. The next imaging would be in six months.Kade received this the way he received clear factual information. With complete attention and then the movement forward that was his way."Six months," he said in the car leaving the clinic."Yes," I said."What happens in six months?" he said."More imaging," I said."And between now and six months?" he said."Everything we were doing before," I said.He was quiet."The Maine project," he said."What Maine project?" I said."James has a commission in Maine," he said. "A coastal trail. I told him I wanted to come to the site.""When?" I said."Spring," he said. "The ground thaws in April. He starts the survey work in April.""You want to go to Maine in April," I said."I want to stand at the site of James's Maine commission in April," he said."Then we go to Maine in April," I said.