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The Ashwander Rules

This project began a decade ago as a napkin rumination: what would Louis Brandeis think of today’s U.S. Supreme Court?

If he were alive, Brandeis’ sense of propriety would constrain him from any direct comment, so Rechtman imagined how Brandeis might the question in parable form.

The result is The Ashwander Rules, a modern novel of the 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. At the same time the chief justice’s friend and confidant, an appointed senator from West Virginia, works to save his relationship with the nation’s leading feminist, the host of a television show called Women In Charge.

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.

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 in questions of constitutional law.

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NEAL RECHTMAN is an American writer and amateur scholar of Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court Justice of the last century. His published works include the political novel, The 28th Amendment (Bascom Hill, 2008) and the current (2018) Fear of Dying, which chronicles his wife's stress-free acceptance of her terminal cancer diagnosis and guides the reader along a path to the same fearless perspective. Rechtman lives and works in Christ Church, Barbados.