Bøker av Steven Glazer

The United States Constitution takes great pains to explain how we are supposed to choose a President. It lays out a rather complex system in which each state designs its own voting protocol for electors who, in turn, are tasked with choosing among the candidates for President and Vice-President. When it works, it is a model of democracy in action. When it doesn't, it is a horror show. We have suffered the horror show twice in recent memory -- in 2000 and 2016. The mother of all horror shows, however, came long before those, during the Presidential Election of 1876. The Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote nationwide but came in one electoral vote short of winning the Presidency. The Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, lost the popular vote and was 20 electoral votes short of the goal. Twenty contested votes from four states hung in the balance. Congress, tasked with the constitutional responsibility of counting the electoral votes, was at a loss for what to do. At last, it hit upon the solution that it often uses when it is in a jam -- it formed a commission. Fifteen prominent politicians and jurists, five each from the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court, were chosen to sit on it. Eight were Republicans and seven were Democrats. How the Electoral Commission of 1877 managed to make Rutherford B. Hayes President, even though he had lost the election, in a 27-day marathon of hotly-contested hearings, attended by an army of lawyers for each side, is a tale of political wrangling that presaged the fights of the Presidential elections of the twenty-first century. The reader will learn how the American method of choosing its Head of State is fraught with trips and traps for unwary voters but nevertheless stands as the best that the world has yet managed to create.

Much has been said in political news lately about "packing" the U.S. Supreme Court with additional Justices besides the present nine. This is nothing new in the history of the Court. Congress has changed the number to as few as six and as many as ten. This novel is based on the life story of Stephen Johnson Field, the only tenth Justice to have ever served on the Supreme Court, who served from his 1863 appointment by President Abraham Lincoln until 1897.Field is the second longest-serving Justice on the Court (William O. Douglas served the longest). He left his legal practice in New York City for the California Gold Rush of 1849 and practiced law in California during the wild early days of the Golden State. He became its Chief Justice only ten years after starting his law practice there, and was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Abraham Lincoln only eight years later. =================================================================== Winner of Honorable Mention for Fiction at the Hollywood Book Festival, 2023 "Having been a judge himself, Glazer, in his first novel, explores the life of Field, his judicial mindset, and how some of the decisions in which he took part shaped the course of American history." -- Hon. John Dring, senior counsel in energy regulation at Vinson & Elkins LLP and former Administrative Law Judge, writing in Washington Lawyer Magazine "Fist-fights, brandished pistols, and a fatal second duel all enliven the Field saga. In a nice counterpoint to the novel, those events are completely factual. Glazer, obviously a lawyer and almost as obviously a judge, unearths historical facts and animates them through fictitious dialogue that draws the reader in." --Robert M. Snider, administrative hearing officer in Southern California and retired California Deputy Attorney General, writing in Los Angeles Lawyer Magazine

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