The technical jargon and the dry rot of legal learning tend to disappear; and, instead, there stand revealed before the reader human beings—usually very interesting human beings—with their hopes, aspirations, desires, and foibles.

OVERLAPPING A PARAGRAPH from where I left off with Government by Judiciary, Louis Boudin tells us his method of trying to break through the intentionally and habitually opaque and, so, deceptive judicial and legal verbiage that most people get distorted and lied about in entertainment media and so have a dangerously wrong view of what the Supreme Court and other courts regularly get up to in order to thwart egalitarian democracy and, so, the common good.

How get behind the published opinions? Or, rather, behind their verbiage, to their real meaning? My solution of the problem was the application of the comparative-historical method. While a judge may, consciously or unconsciously, hide his real meaning as well as his motives behind a barrage of words, both his meaning and his motives become perfectly plain when looked at in the light of similar words uttered by other judges at other times in the course of our judicial history. My task was, therefore, nothing less than that of writing a constitutional history of this country—at least in outline—and of writing it, as far as possible, in the language
of the actors who made it, the judges themselves.

As a preliminary, it was necessary to clear the ground of some mythical and legendary history—by writing some chapters on what might be called the pre-natal history of the Constitution. In doing this part of the work some special studies had to be undertaken into fields into which I could not expect the general reader to follow
me. The result of these studies were taken for granted in the main text, while the proof of these assumptions was relegated into appendices, where the special student may find them, while those willing to take my conclusions on trust may skip them. The principal portion of Appendix A was published as an article in the Law Review for March, 1929, under the title Lord Coke and the American Doctrine of Judicial Power, Appendix B—with some modifications—was published as an article in St. John’s Law Review for May, 1929, under the title Precedents for the Judicial Power.

[As luck would have it, the text of that article is available online without a pay-wall, for once.]

But while I was willing to be taken on trust by some of my readers as to some of my assertions with regard to the pre-natal history of our Constitution, I -was unwilling to do so with regard to any part of our history under the Constitution. I have, therefore, not followed the usual method of putting the proof into footnotes. To me “the proof is the thing” so I stuck the long quotations from judicial decisions right into the text, where the reader will have to read them, if he is to read the book at all. This may deter some readers from continuing their reading, but those who read to the end will have to take nothing on trust. Incidentally, I believe that these quotations are worth reading on their own account—for much of the tragedy and comedy of our history lies hidden in them. And as one goes along the reading becomes of absorbing interest. The technical jargon and the dry rot of legal learning tend to disappear; and, instead, there stand revealed before the reader human beings—usually very interesting human beings—with their hopes, aspirations, desires, and foibles. Behind the impassive judicial masks we see impassioned actors making history, and history in the making.

New York, August 1931

Not only the technical jargon and dry rot but also the deception of those, the very stuff of how the Supreme Court has regularly thwarted the "hopes, aspirations, desires" and so unequally and so outrageously punished and, or corrected the "foibles" of human beings.  As I pointed out the other day, the system which we were all lied into believing is as it absolutely is not exists as it really does BECAUSE OF WHO BENEFITS FROM IT AND THEIR "HOPES ASPIRATIONS AND DESIRES" ARE AGAINST AND NOT FOR THE COMMON GOOD.  

It is largely due to the Supreme Court and the tragically vague, inspecific language of even the least bad parts of the Constitution that we, in 2022 are seriously in danger of recapitulating all of the worst in our history having learned nothing from it and, as can be seen in the Republican-fascist attempt to lie us into a white supremacist national mythology on the basis of "freedom" to repeat it in a concentrated form, the posterity of the abolitionists, the Women's suffrage, workers rights, etc. now experiencing the same oppression that was reserved for Black People, Native People and other People of Color for the entire period under a combination of  Supreme Court and the Senate [even more so than the House] establishment and maintenance of white supremacist-oligarchic rule. 

As I noted I have found little actual biographical information about Louis Boudin, one of the things I did find out is that he came here with his family from Russia when he was 17, I doubt knowing a lot of English at that age but who quickly gained not only sufficient language skills to get a university education but to go through law school and to think so well in a second language as to write what he did.  Considering he was Jewish, a minority discriminated against but never so much as those who were not white, especially discriminated against in the professions, his achievements are impressive.  Most impressive for me is how his reason and fundamental dedication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence kept him from some of the worst of the left he was a part of - he apparently saw through the tragedy of the Russian Revolution very fast - and of the legal establishment he was a member of, as well.   I think there isn't nearly enough said about how some of the greatest proponents of the principles of American democracy in the Declaration of Independence were immigrants or the children of immigrants even as the established older families and populations either despised democracy or took it dangerously for granted and got sold cheap, knock-off substitutes and symbols divorced from any reality behind them.  Not a little of that delivered in popular entertainment, much of it under the direct influence of those who favored racist inequality, often on a regional basis, later expanded on the basis of shared white supremacy even in those states which maintained the Union side in the Civil War. 

A lot of that on no more of a basis than that those in Hollywood and on Broadway wanted to be able to sell their crap to audiences of racists, especially in the former Confederate states.   Hollywood is especially guilty in that regard, though these days "Hollywood" isn't merely a city in California.  You don't have to be very old to remember PBS children's programming being altered for or under pressure from their affiliates in formerly Confederate States even as the public schools are from Republican fascists.    We are seeing what I was calling "fascist chic"  in the late 1970s and 1980s, movies and TV and "anti-political correctness" racism as edgy humor bearing the fruit that anyone less stupid than a Supreme Court member should have seen coming.  I doubt that if even earlier the Confederate flag hadn't been used in movies so regularly, such things as Iron Crosses, those would show up so regularly in today's mainstream politics.  I heard that the truckers' anti-vaxx astro-turf in Canada such symbols were used there.  They certainly didn't get it from their own history, it's due to American movies.