Book reviews: ‘Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution’ and ‘Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival’

‘Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution’ by Amy Coney Barrett

Maybe the America we know still has a chance, said Noah Feldman in The Washington Post. As Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. constitutional system mount, “Amy Coney Barrett is the most important justice on the Supreme Court,” and in her first book, she lays out her judicial philosophy in a way that makes clear both why she occupies the very middle of the nine-member court’s current ideological spread and why the rule of law may withstand Trump’s assault. Liberal constitutional scholars like me reject one of the major pillars of her philosophy: originalism. But “unlike some of her conservative colleagues,” including those who see the late Antonin Scalia as a model, Barrett “takes seriously Scalia’s personal aspiration to decide cases purely on the basis of what the law says, not what she thinks it should be.” That helps explain why she has broken from her conservative colleagues and the president’s lawyers even on some major cases.

At a moment when the justices often spar sharply in the court’s written opinions, Barrett’s book is “a model of collegiality,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “My own conclusions from it are, first, that she has a sharp and well-organized mind, and, second, that she is a very nice person.” She “seems genuinely burdened by the reality that most Americans know little about the Supreme Court” and devotes many pages to explaining how the court operates. When explaining her approach, she “writes superbly on originalism,” the idea that the Constitution must be interpreted according to its text as the framers understood that text. But she’s a bit less persuasive in explaining how the “due process” clauses of the Fifth and 14th Amendments protect certain unnamed individual rights but not others.

If you hoped the book would help you get to know Barrett herself, you’re out of luck, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. The former Notre Dame law professor and mother of seven “clearly knows that readers crave relatability, especially from women, so she offers a few breadcrumbs.” Still, “she’s not about to let her guard down, even for a reported $2 million advance.” Her book’s “studied blandness” becomes more irksome, though, when she’s claiming that justices are merely referees deciding who has played by the rules as the rules are written. For almost 50 years before she joined the court, the law of the land was that women have a right to abortion. For almost 250 years, the president had no right to act like a king. She voted to change those rules.

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‘Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival’ by Stephen Greenblatt

“Christopher Marlowe was, is, and will doubtless remain a troublemaker,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. In Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, the 16th-century poet and playwright best known as a contemporary rival of William Shakespeare’s is presented as the wild-child catalyst of the English Renaissance, and Greenblatt is “right to sound the trumpet.” Marlowe lit the fuse in at least one sense: Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth all owe him a debt for freeing English verse by pioneering the use of unrhymed iambic pentameter. Beyond that, Marlowe today seems “frighteningly” modern in his relish for shocking audiences in his portrayals of violence, vice, and religious bigotry. Though many mysteries surround Marlowe’s life and violent death at 29, Greenblatt isn’t fazed. Indeed, “speculative riffs are not a weakness but a mainspring of his biographical approach.”

Clearly, Marlowe was a prodigy, said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe. Born, like Shakespeare, in 1564, during Queen Elizabeth’s stormy regime, Marlowe was a cobbler’s son who won scholarships that enabled him to earn two Cambridge degrees, and the queen’s advisers took such an interest in him that evidence suggests he may have been a spy for the crown. “Greenblatt argues, at best, a circumstantial case for the playwright’s espionage role, yet these speculations season his narrative, lending crucial context.” Protestants and Catholics were at war, and Marlowe took a pot stirrer’s interest in the contest of ideas and the violence it provoked.

“Oh, to be a student in one of Greenblatt’s Harvard classes!” said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. The Pulitzer–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World backs up his praise for Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great with “astute textual analysis,” and he earns our trust as a biographer by admitting where the facts of Marlowe’s life can’t be nailed down. Was he a spy or crook? Was he targeted for murder or killed in a boozy brawl? “With its mix of fastidious scholarship, storytelling chops, and educated guesswork,” Dark Renaissance gives readers reason to celebrate Marlowe’s daring response to his own troubled era.