Heard from the pulpit of All Saints Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas, this past Sunday, and cited to her "German grandmother" by Rev. Genevieve Razim, preaching:
"Remember that when you point your finger, there are three more fingers pointing back at you."
"[L]inguists, philosophers, and literary theorists who have investigated processes of textualization in scholarly discourse have all reached the same conclusion: writing an academic study without at some point resorting to figurative language is extremely difficult, even impossible."
Philippe Carrard, History As a Kind of Writing : Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography, University of Chicago Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=4785185.
Here is a book I discovered in history grad school. Published in 1954, it is relevant today: Reinhard H. Luthin, *American Demagogues--Twentieth Century* (1954 & 1959), with an introduction by the great historian Allan Nevins.
The author presents a very functional definition of "American demagogue":
"masters of the masses who, in their aspirations for political place and power pandered to the passions and prejudices, rather than the reason of the populace, and performed all manner of crowd-captivating tricks. . . . He is a politician skilled in oratory, flattery, and invective; evasive in discussing vital issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices--a man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to seek to become a master of the masses."
He added, perspicaciously:
"In a future fraught with complex social, economic, and diplomatic dilemmas, future demagogues will probably find more untapped areas of ignorance, prejudice, bigotry, and emotionalism to exploit. With television and other means means of mass communication, their voices and their faces may invade any home in the United States--and many abroad. Such professional 'men of the people' accordingly present a persistent problem which this and future generations of Americans and peoples of other lands will be forced to face."
In the Intro, Professor Nevins notes: "We have had plenty of demagogues in state and city affairs. . . . But we have never had a President who by the wildest stretch of the English language could be justly called a demagogue."
That was in 1954 . . . . . . .
I attach the title page and the TOC.
From the intro to a new law article (footnotes omitted):
In its 2024 decision overruling the decades-old Chevron doctrine directing judges to accept an
agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory language, the Supreme Court declares:
“agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” This Article
makes clear how profoundly blinkered an assertion of judicial hubris this statement is. We present
findings from a qualitative empirical study of how agencies work with the statutes that give them
authority to act, showing that interpreting statutes to ensure that they have effect in the world is at
the heart of agency competence. Loper-Bright, much like the Court’s recent supercharging of the
“major questions doctrine,” rests on two flawed assumptions . . . .
Anya Bernstein & Cristina RodrÃguez, Working with Statutes, forthcoming Tex. L. Rev. 2025)(emphasis added).
I agree, and I recommend this article to all who have serious interest in the Court and are concerned about it trajectory.
"Instead of dissecting impersonal forces … the historian should narrate the past in terms of living men and women seen as individuals, groups, or communities; and he should give due emphasis to personal motivation and initiative."
Allan Nevins (1890-1971)
Historian, Columbia University Faculty, 1928-58
From my new post on SSRN titled "Early Ruminations on the Supreme Court's Purdue Pharma Decision," available free at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4915343, on pages 11-12 is my insight that I believe represents a unique contribution to the national discussion about this case (footnotes omitted):
3. The Court’s attempt to characterize the nature of the bankruptcy discharge by assertions of legal history fails.
The attempt of the majority to provide the legal history of the discharge in bankruptcy cases stumbles badly. The current Court considers itself expert in legal history, as its decision-making has made a purported “turn to history” in many subject matter areas in recent years. The Purdue majority purports to furnish relevant history to buttress its conclusion about the nature of the discharge in bankruptcy, but its contention here is insupportable.
Specifically Justice Gorsuch’s opinion avows:
history offers a third [strike against the dissent’s construction of §1123(b)(6)]. When Congress enacted the present bankruptcy code in 1978, it did “not write ‘on a clean slate.’” . . . Recognizing as much, this Court has said that pre-code practice may sometimes inform our interpretation of the code’s more “ambiguous” provisions. . . . While we discern no ambiguity in §1123(b)(6) for the reasons explored above, historical practice confirms the lesson we take from it. Every bankruptcy law the parties and their amici have pointed us to, from 1800 until 1978, generally reserved the benefits of discharge to the debtor who offered a “fair and full surrender of [its] property.”
From the context, it is clear that the Court is speaking of the statutory law of bankruptcy, not its case law or common law. While the parties and the amici curiae may well have failed to point it out, the majority’s proclamation about “[e]very bankruptcy law” is incorrect because one entire chapter of the bankruptcy law that was adopted and was effective for the half century before 1978—a restructuring chapter, no less—unequivocally provided for a debtor to receive a bankruptcy discharge of claims without surrendering its assets. And that chapter remains in effect today.
Chapter IX of the Code’s predecessor, the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, known as municipal bankruptcy, afforded the judicial relief of adjustment of debts for municipal debtors, and this bankruptcy law provided explicitly for a discharge of debts with no surrender of properties into a bankruptcy estate or otherwise into the custody of the bankruptcy court. In municipal bankruptcy, there is no estate, and the debtor not only continues in possession of its assets but also is free to manage and dispose—even sell—those assets without bankruptcy court approval.
The deep legislative history of bankruptcy discloses that one of the innovations of the robust elaboration, development, and reformulation of bankruptcy and reorganization law that occurred during the New Deal was that Congress came to understand that a prior concept of a “fair and full surrender of [its] property” was not a sine qua non of all forms of bankruptcy relief. In a nutshell, here is the interesting story of the evolution of bankruptcy’s constitutional and legal theory that accompanied the formulation and enactment of Chapter IX municipal bankruptcy.
In the flurry of legislative activities during the lame duck phase of Herbert Hoover’s presidency and then the first year and a half of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, members of Congress offered bills to innovate municipal bankruptcy for the relief of many thousands of cities, towns, and other political subdivisions of states that had become insolvent—unable to pay their outstanding bonds. Opponents of the adoption of Chapter IX argued vehemently that surrender of assets for administration by and under the bankruptcy court was the absolutely essential element of bankruptcy, and because a Chapter IX debtor would retain its properties, municipal bankruptcy would be unconstitutional under precedents such as Sturges v. Crowninshield and Hanover Nat. Bank v. Moyses.
But an important legal thinker, the Chair of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, Congressman Hatton W. Sumners of Dallas, analyzed the Constitution’s article I, § 8, clause 4 (the “Bankruptcy Clause”) and that article’s § 10 (the Contracts Clause) and determined that Congress’s power to legislate statutory bankruptcy law is not so limited. It was Sumners who on January 21, 1933, filed the first bill to afford bankruptcy relief for insolvent political subdivisions of states, and he soon crafted the specific legislation that was enacted as the First Municipal Bankruptcy Act in 1934 and, after the Supreme Court invalidated it in Ashton v. Cameron County Water Improvement District No. 1, re-enacted the law as the Second Municipal Bankruptcy Act in 1937.
Sumners’s rationale survives and continues justify municipal bankruptcy today. Then and still, municipal bankruptcy contains no concept of property of the estate and requires no turnover of assets to the bankruptcy court. A municipal debtor receives the same reorganizational relief that a Chapter 11 debtor does and that includes a discharge of debts upon confirmation of a plan—but with no surrender of assets. So the majority is incorrect in its historical allegation about surrender of property.
I like this sentence from a recent review of two biographies of Franz Fanon:
"[The author's] portrait of Fanon does what superb biographies always do: send the reader back to the original text."
Susan Neiman, Fanon the Universalist, 71 New York Review of Books, No. 10, at 21 (June 6, 2024).