The Ashwander Rules

About The Ashwander Rules

This project began over a decade ago as a napkin rumination: what would Louis Brandeis think of today's US Supreme Court?

If he was alive, Brandeis' sense of propriety would constrain him from any direct comment, so I imagined how me might address the question as a novelist (in a private letter he once expressed an interest in trying his hand at fiction).

The result is The Ashwander Rules, a parable of the modern Supreme Court, in which a secret Israeli Mossad operation in Washington D.C. works to save a fictional chief justice from assassination at the hands of domestic terrorists.

In the spirit of Brandeis' Supreme Court opinion writing, The Ashwander Rules is an effort to educate the public -- and remind the Court -- about the importance of judicial restraint, especially as it relates to questions of constitutional law.

The narrative also introduces a non-fiction alternative to two-party politics called the American Majority Party, www.american-majority.org, which is an internet adaptation of a good government initiative organized by Brandeis in 1903.