Fear of Dying, 2018
Using Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous treatise On Death and Dying as a framework, this short, humorous narrative describes Jane’s calm navigation of the ”five stages of grief” and details for the reader the reasoning she used to maintain her fearless perspective.
Barbados as Plan “B”
Sydenham Life, UK – March 2020
If you’ve recently encountered even a fleeting notion that modern civilization, as we know it, could be coming to an end inFIC the next generation or two, you might want to consider a back-up plan for your family.
Open Source Democracy 2.0
This essay (3,500 words) describes, and demonstrates at a beta website, an open source voting application that offers a practical solution to the problem of partisan politics in democratic governance.
FICTION COMES TO LIFE – JANUARY 2024
In my 2019 novel The Ashwander Rules, one of the protagonists suggests that an index should be maintained to record each and every time a justice of the Supreme Court violates one of Louis Brandeis’s seven rules of judicial restraint, as enumerated in his 1936 concurrence in Ashwander v. TVA (297 US 288, 345).
In a coffee shop conversation with Dr. Adam Feldman, an oft-cited observer of the Supreme Court and author of the blog www.empiricalscotus.com, the question arose: would it be practical to bring fiction to life? Was it possible to develop a quantitative index of individual justices’ violations of the Ashwander Rules?
Dr. Feldman, in addition to being a lawyer and political scientist, is also an accomplished statistician who has spent years constructing various quantitative assessments of SCOTUS jurisprudence. Eminently qualified, he decided to take up the question posed by my novel and has evaluated 22 years of Supreme Court opinions for violations of the Ashwander Rules (in practice Feldman expanded the original Ashwander rule set to include more modern criteria for justiciability that have emerged in SCOTUS doctrine since Brandeis’s footnote guidance of 1936).
The Supreme Court terms chosen by Feldman for this research were ten years of the Rehnquist Court (1985-2006) and twelve of the Roberts Court (2005-2018). The dataset selected from these terms includes all majority opinions and dissents in which justiciability issues were raised by the justices. This massive coding effort, undertaken over a three year period, has now come to fruition in the form of a law review article. Adam has joined with Prof. Taylor Dalton of UC Santa Clara in publishing an initial analysis in the current edition of the Loyola Univ.- Chicago Law Journal December 10, 2023; Vol. 55):
https://loyola-chicago-law-journal.scholasticahq.com/article/91048-on-second-thought-an-empirical-analysis-of-when-the-supreme-court-decides-not-to-decide
I was not involved to any degree in the authoring of this paper, and am the first to admit I don’t really follow the statistical methods they use to draw their conclusions. I was never a quant. But I am proud to have my novel credited on page one as the wellspring of the whole effort.
More importantly, this is a new original dataset that many SCOTUS scholars may find valuable for their own research. Adam has made a searchable version of the database available to the general academic community on his blog/website.