I have recently finished reading an extraordinary book by Jonathan Sumption: Trials of The State and the Decline of Politics. It is one of those rare books that is as trenchant as it is short (it is about 125 pages). The book, published late last year in Great Britain, is essentially a publication of five separate lectures broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the Summer of 2019. Sumption is a British judge and historian who served as a Justice on the UK Supreme Court from 2012 the 2018 and is only one of five people to be promoted directly from the bar to the highest court. According to one of the blurbs on the dust jacket of the paperback copy, his shaggy white hair covers “the biggest brain in Britain.” But there is nothing intimidating about the book, which is written with unusual simplicity and clarity. And while much of the focus of the book is on law and politics as they evolved in the United Kingdom, the book has considerable explicit and implicit relevance to law and politics today in the United States. The book presents in five chapters: (1) Law’s Expanding Empire; (2) In Praise of Politics; (3) Human Rights and Wrongs; (4) Lessons from America; and (5) Constitutions, New and Old. The very first sentence is attention-grabbing: “In the beginning, there was chaos and brute force, a world without law.” He goes on to point out that in the mythology of ancient Athens, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter so that the gods would allow his fleet to sail against Troy. His wife murdered him to avenge the deed, and she in turn was murdered by her son. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, put an end to the cycle of violence by creating a court to impose a solution in what today we would call the public interest: a solution based on reason, on the experience of human frailty and on fear of the alternative. Aeschylus in the Orestieia trilogy had Athena justify her intervention in the world of mortals as follows: “let no man live uncurbed by law, nor curbed by tyranny.” ... Read More