opposing argument crossword

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• Opposing argument

Opposing argument (Crossword clue)

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OPPOSING ARGUMENT Crossword Clue

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OPPOSING ARGUMENT Crossword Clue & Answer

All solutions for opposing argument, top answers for: opposing argument, top answer for opposing argument crossword clue from newspapers, opposing argument crossword puzzle solutions.

We have 1 solution for the frequently searched for crossword lexicon term OPPOSING ARGUMENT. Our best crossword lexicon answer is: CON.

For the puzzel question OPPOSING ARGUMENT we have solutions for the following word lenghts 3.

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What is the best solution to the riddle opposing argument.

Solution CON is 3 letters long. So far we haven´t got a solution of the same word length.

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We have 1 solutions to the crossword puzzle OPPOSING ARGUMENT. The longest solution is CON with 3 letters and the shortest solution is CON with 3 letters.

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The length of the solution word is 3 letters. Most of the solutions have 3 letters. In total we have solutions for 1 word lengths.

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OPPOSING Crossword Clue & Answer

All solutions for opposing, top answers for: opposing, top answers for opposing crossword clue from newspapers, definition of opposing.

• characterized by active hostility

Anagrams of opposing

Opposing crossword puzzle solutions.

344 Solutions - 2 Top suggestions & 342 further suggestions. We have 344 solutions for the frequently searched for crossword lexicon term OPPOSING. Furthermore and additionally we have 342 Further solutions for this paraphrase.

For the puzzel question OPPOSING we have solutions for the following word lenghts 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15.

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Find for us the 345nth solution for OPPOSING and send it to our e-mail (crossword-at-the-crossword-solver com) with the subject "New solution suggestion for OPPOSING". Do you have an improvement for our crossword puzzle solutions for OPPOSING, please send us an e-mail with the subject: "Suggestion for improvement on solution to OPPOSING".

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Solution AGAINST is our most searched for solution by our visitors. Solution AGAINST is 7 letters long. We have 50 further solutions of the same word length.

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We have 344 solutions to the crossword puzzle OPPOSING. The longest solution is INSURRECTIONARY with 15 letters and the shortest solution is CON with 3 letters.

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With help from our search you can look for words of a certain length. Our intelligent search sorts between the most frequent solutions and the most searched for questions. You can completely free of charge search through several million solutions to hundreds of thousands of crossword puzzle questions.

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The lenght of the solutions is between 3 and 15 letters. In total we have solutions for 13 word lengths.

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• Newsday Crossword
• December 17 2023

Arguments against

While searching our database we found 1 possible solution for the: Arguments against crossword clue.  This crossword clue was last seen on December 17 2023 Newsday Crossword puzzle . The solution we have for Arguments against has a total of 4 letters.

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• LA Times Crossword
• February 10 2024

__ argument

While searching our database we found 1 possible solution for the: __ argument crossword clue.  This crossword clue was last seen on February 10 2024 LA Times Crossword puzzle . The solution we have for __ argument has a total of 4 letters.

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Opposing element in camp, trendy about nothing in argument (10)

I believe the answer is:

' argument ' is the definition. (I know that argument can be written as contention) ' opposing element in camp trendy about nothing ' is the wordplay. ' opposing ' becomes ' con ' (I've seen this in another clue) . ' element in camp ' becomes ' tent ' (a camp includes tents) . ' trendy ' becomes ' in ' ('in' can mean fashionable) . ' about ' is an insertion indicator. ' nothing ' becomes ' o ' (looks like zero - 0) . ' in ' enclosing ' o ' is ' ion '. ' con '+' tent '+' ion '=' CONTENTION ' ' in ' is the link.

(Other definitions for contention that I've seen before include "heated argument" , "Judgment" .)

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Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court Majority: You’re Doing It Wrong

By Louis Menand

One day in 1993, Stephen Breyer , then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which sits in Boston, was riding his bicycle in Harvard Square when he was hit by a car. He was taken to Mount Auburn Hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. While he was recovering, he was visited by three White House officials. They had flown up to interview him for a possible nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

The vetting went well enough, and Breyer was invited to Washington to meet the President, Bill Clinton . Breyer’s doctors advised against flying, so he took the train, in some discomfort. The meeting with Clinton did not go well. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s “ The Nine ,” a book about the Supreme Court, Clinton found Breyer “heartless.” “I don’t see enough humanity,” he complained. “I want a judge with soul.” Breyer was told to go home. They would call.

He knew that things had gone poorly. “There’s only two people who aren’t convinced I’m going to be on the Supreme Court,” he told a fellow-judge. “One is me and the other is Clinton.” He was right. The phone never rang. The seat went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg .

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Ginsburg was a cool customer, too, but she knew which buttons to push. In her interview with Clinton, she talked about the death of her mother and about helping her husband get through law school after he was stricken with testicular cancer. Clinton loved catch-in-the-throat stories like that. Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate 96–3.

A year went by, there was another Supreme Court vacancy, and Breyer was again in the mix. His candidacy was pushed by Ted Kennedy, with whom he had worked as the chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Kennedy was its chair. Clinton really wanted to nominate his Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, but Babbitt faced opposition from senators in Western states, and Breyer seemed politically hypoallergenic.

So Breyer was chosen. Still, the White House did not do him any favors. Clinton’s indecisiveness was an ongoing story in the press—it had taken him eighty-six days to pick Ginsburg—and the news coverage made it plain that Breyer was not his first or even his second choice. The White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, told reporters that, of the candidates being considered, Breyer was “the one with the fewest problems.”

Clinton announced the selection without even waiting for Breyer to come down from Boston. When Breyer did show up, a few days later, he said, “I’m glad I didn’t bring my bicycle down.” Famous last words. In 2011, he broke his collarbone in another biking accident near his home in Cambridge, and in 2013 he fractured his right shoulder and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery after crashing his bicycle near the Korean War Veterans Memorial, on the National Mall. He was seventy-four. You have to give him credit. He gets right back on the horse.

Since his appointment to the Court, Breyer has published several books on his jurisprudential views. His latest is “ Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism ” (Simon & Schuster). It sums up his frustration with the court that he just stepped down from.

Clinton was not the only person who read Breyer as a technocrat. People felt he lacked a quality that Clinton could apparently summon at will—empathy. “He’s always been smarter than most of those around him,” the Yale constitutional-law professor Akhil Amar explained to a reporter, “so he’s had to learn how to get along with other people.”

That was his reputation at Harvard Law School, too, where he taught administrative law for many years before becoming a judge. “Breyer’s basic social instincts are conservative,” a Harvard colleague, Morton Horwitz, told the Times . “His legal culture is more liberal, and his very flexible pragmatism will enable him to give things a gentle spin in a liberal direction. But he’s a person without deep roots of any kind. He won’t develop a vision. . . . The words ‘social justice’ would somewhat embarrass him.”

It’s true that Breyer has a professorial presentation. He is cosmopolitan and erudite. He travels to other countries and is interested in their legal systems; reporters like to drop the fact that he has read “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” in French, twice. He is also, for a judge, relatively wealthy. His wife, Joanna Hare, a clinical psychologist at Dana-Farber, is the daughter of an English viscount.

Before joining the Court, Breyer showed few signs of being a social-justice warrior. He has, like the President who appointed him, neoliberal inclinations. He was instrumental in creating sentencing guidelines for federal judges that he later conceded were too rigid. He wrote a book on regulatory reform. And one of his proudest legislative achievements was working with Kennedy to deregulate the airline industry.

But he has an admirable temperament. Toobin called him “the sunniest individual to serve on the Supreme Court in a great many years.” Seated on a bench next to a lot of intellectual loners— Antonin Scalia , Clarence Thomas , David Souter , Ginsburg herself—Breyer became a consensus seeker, if not always a consensus builder. He believed in reasoned discourse.

He had also learned, from watching Kennedy do business in the Senate, that compromise is how you get things done in government, and he understood that on an ideologically divided court the power is in the middle. Being a split-the-difference centrist, like his predecessor Lewis Powell, and like the Justice he was closest to, Sandra Day O’Connor , suited his personality, too.

Breyer loved the job and was reluctant to announce his retirement, throwing liberals who feared another R.B.G. fiasco into a panic. He stepped down at the end of the 2021-22 term, in time for President Joe Biden to put one of Breyer’s former clerks, Ketanji Brown Jackson , on the Court. Breyer is now back where he started, as a professor of administrative law at Harvard. Happily for the law school, there are now many dedicated bike lanes in Cambridge.

Horwitz was not entirely right about what George H. W. Bush called “the vision thing.” Beneath Breyer’s pragmatic, let-us-reason-together persona is the soul of a Warren Court liberal. The Warren Court is where Breyer’s judicial career began. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1964, he clerked for Justice Arthur Goldberg. It was, he said, “a court with a mission.” The mission was to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown is Breyer’s touchstone. He calls the decision “an affirmation of justice itself.” Brown was decided in 1954, and it governs only segregation in public schools. This is because the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws,” the right under which Brown was decided, is a right that can be exercised only against states and their agencies. But Breyer understands Brown in a broader sense. He believes that the reasoning in Brown leads to the condemnation of any and all discrimination that is within the reach of government to eliminate.

Extending the spirit of Brown is what the 1964 Civil Rights Act was designed to do. The act was signed into law in July, just as Breyer was beginning his clerkship, and it did something that Congress had tried once before, in 1875: make it unlawful for public accommodations like hotels, theatres, and restaurants to discriminate on the basis of race. In 1883, in a blockbuster decision, the Supreme Court had thrown out that earlier act as unconstitutional. It ruled that the government cannot tell private parties whom they must serve.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act once again prohibited discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. But how are privately owned businesses like restaurants within the reach of the state? In October, 1964, three months after the act was signed into law, that question came before the Court in two challenges to the constitutionality of Title II: Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., concerning a motel in Georgia that refused to serve Black travellers, and Katzenbach v. McClung, concerning a restaurant in Birmingham, Ollie’s Barbecue, that refused to seat Black customers. (They could use a takeout window.)

The Court ruled that Congress gets its power to ban discrimination in public accommodations from the commerce clause in Article I of the Constitution. (“Congress shall have power . . . to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”) This holding required the Court to find that the Heart of Atlanta Motel and Ollie’s Barbecue were, in fact, part of interstate commerce. And the Court so found.

Since the motel was patronized by people travelling from one state to another, and since the ingredients for some of the food served at Ollie’s came from outside Alabama, the Court held that the motel and the restaurant were part of commerce “among the several states” and therefore within the power of Congress to regulate. The Court declared the 1883 ruling “inapposite and without precedential value,” and the decision in both cases was unanimous. Breyer thinks that they were the most important rulings of his clerkship.

There was another case with far-reaching effects that was decided during Breyer’s clerkship: Griswold v. Connecticut. The plaintiffs, Estelle Griswold and C. Lee Buxton, opened a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven and were arrested for counselling married couples about birth-control devices, which were illegal under the state’s anti-contraception law. Griswold and Buxton argued that, since the law was unconstitutional, they could not be prosecuted for advising women to break it. In a 7–2 decision, the Court agreed. What constitutional provision did the Connecticut law violate? The right to privacy.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion of the Court, and it is a classic of judicial inventiveness. Nowhere does the Constitution mention a right to privacy, but Douglas proposed that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” By this jurisprudential alchemy, the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments could be interpreted as defining a “zone of privacy” whose penumbra would extend to the marital bedroom.

Douglas concluded his opinion with an encomium to marriage. He got quite worked up about it. “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” he wrote. “It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.” Douglas was sixty-six. A year after Griswold, he divorced his twenty-six-year-old third wife, Joan Martin, to marry Cathleen Heffernan, who was twenty-two.

Griswold became a key precedent in two landmark cases: Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex-marriage case, decided in 2015. “The right of privacy,” Harry Blackmun wrote for the Court in Roe, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” In Obergefell, Anthony Kennedy, also writing for the Court, quoted Douglas’s reflections on marriage in their entirety and added some emanations of his own. In addition to a privacy right, he declared, constitutional liberties extend “to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.” (In a dissent, Scalia said that he would “hide my head in a bag” before putting his name to some of Kennedy’s prose.)

The shape of Breyer’s Supreme Court career therefore has an emblematic significance, because it was bookended by two decisions that undid much of what the Warren Court achieved in Heart of Atlanta and Griswold. Breyer’s first major dissent came in 1995, in U.S. v. Lopez, a commerce-clause case; his last was in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade .

Lopez turned on the constitutionality of the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which made it a federal crime to possess a firearm in a school zone. In a 5–4 decision, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the act was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power under the commerce clause. It was the first time since 1936 that the Court had struck down a federal law for exceeding the commerce-clause power.

Much of the New Deal was made possible by the commerce clause. In his dissent, Breyer noted that more than a hundred federal laws include the phrase “affecting commerce.” How many was the Court bent on invalidating? Some, anyway. Five years later, in U.S. v. Morrison, the Court threw out provisions of the Violence Against Women Act on the ground of commerce-clause overreach.

Breyer’s dissent in Dobbs, in 2022, was joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor . The privacy right in Roe “does not stand alone,” they wrote. “The Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. . . . They are all part of the same constitutional fabric.” They wondered, again, how much the Court was prepared to unravel. In his concurrence, Thomas suggested that the Court might want to reconsider Griswold and Obergefell.

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What happened? Breyer has an explanation, and he lays it out in the new book. He thinks it’s all a matter of interpretation.

As Breyer points out, a majority of the Court now subscribes to the interpretive methods known as textualism and originalism. Textualism and originalism tend to be run together as types of what used to be called “strict construction” (a term that seems to have fallen out of use). But there is a difference. Textualism is primarily a way of interpreting statutes, and originalism is a way of interpreting the Constitution.

Textualists ask what the words of a statute literally mean. Information like legislative history or social-science data is largely irrelevant. Textualists don’t ask, “What would Congress have us do?” They just say, “What is the rule here?” and try to follow it.

Originalists, on the other hand, ask what the Framers would have them do. Originalists can consult the records of the Constitutional Convention (which are hardly comprehensive) and documents like the Federalist Papers (which is a collection of op-eds). But they claim to stick to the “original public understanding” of constitutional language—that is, what the words meant to the average voter in the eighteenth century. They do not invent rights that the Framers would not have recognized, as originalists think Douglas did in Griswold.

More recently, originalists have looked to something called “history and tradition,” highly malleable terms—whose history? which tradition?—by which they tend to mean things as they were prior to circa 1964. Writing for the Court in Dobbs, Samuel Alito explained that the decision turned on “whether the right at issue in this case is rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition.” The constitutional right to abortion was then fifty years old. For women likely to rely on it, the right had existed for their entire lifetimes. But what mattered to the originalists was whether women could rely on it in the nineteenth century.

The use of race as a plus factor in college and university admissions is even older. The practice dates from the late nineteen-sixties, and has been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court three times: in 1978, in 2003, and in 2016. But the majority had little trouble wiping it out last term, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard . It is a bit brazen to be shouldering aside precedents under the banner of “tradition.”

Breyer sums up textualism and originalism as attempts to make judicial reasoning a science and to make law a list of rules. In our system of government, the Constitution is the big trump card. But it doesn’t come with a user manual. The document is basically a list of clauses—the commerce clause (sixteen words), the equal-protection clause (fourteen words), and so on. And the Constitution gives the reason for a clause only twice: in the patent-and-copyright clause in Article I and in the right-to-bear-arms clause in the Second Amendment. (We could add the preamble, the “We the People” clause, which gives the rationale for having a written constitution in the first place, a novel idea in 1787.)

Some constitutional clauses, like the requirement that the President be native-born, are rules, but many, like the equal-protection clause (the only reference to equality in the entire document), are principles. They do not mark out bright lines separating the constitutionally permitted from the constitutionally forbidden.

Courts, however, are obliged to draw those lines. Judges cannot conclude that the law is a gray area. Textualists and originalists believe that their approach draws the line at the right place. Breyer thinks that the idea that there is a single right place, good for all time, is a delusion, and that his approach, which he calls “pragmatism,” is the one best suited to the design of the American legal system. Pragmatism makes the system “workable” (a word Breyer uses many times) because it does not box us into rigid doctrines and anachronistic meanings.

Pragmatist judges therefore look to the law’s purposes, consequences, and values. They ask, “Why did the lawmakers write this? What are the real-world consequences for the way the Court interprets it? And what are the values that subtend the system of government that courts are a part of?” These are questions that literal readings can’t answer.

An originalist like Scalia, for example, thinks that the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment makes unconstitutional only punishments that would have been considered cruel and unusual in 1791, the year the amendment was ratified. In 1791, people were sentenced to death for theft. If we said that seems cruel and unusual today, Scalia would say, “Fine. Pass a law against it. But the Constitution does not forbid it.” When he was asked what punishment the Framers would have considered cruel and unusual, Scalia said, “Thumbscrews.”

To this, a pragmatist judge would say, “Then what is the point of having a constitution?” The words “cruel and unusual” were chosen by the Framers (in this case, James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights) because their meanings are not fixed. And that goes to the purpose of the clause. The Constitution does not prohibit cruel and unusual punishment because cruelty is bad and we’re against it. It prohibits punishment that most people would find excessive in order to preserve the public’s faith in the criminal-justice system. If we started executing people for stealing a loaf of bread today, the system would lose its legitimacy. Surely an originalist would agree that the Framers were big on legitimacy.

The same is true of many other clauses—for example, the free-speech clause in the First Amendment. Free speech is protected not because it’s a God-given right. It’s protected because, in a democracy, if you do not allow the losers to have their say, you cannot expect them to submit to the will of the winners. Free speech legitimizes majoritarian rule.

Breyer’s book is organized as a series of analyses of some twenty Supreme Court cases, most of which Breyer took part in during his time on the Court. Some are major cases, like District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the originalists found a right to possess a gun for self-defense in the Second Amendment, which says nothing about self-defense. (“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the eighteenth century are protected by the Second Amendment,” Scalia wrote in the Court’s opinion. Hmm. What happened to the Thumbscrews Doctrine?)

Other cases are perhaps less than major, like Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service, which answered the question of whether the federal government is a “person” capable of petitioning the Patent Trial and Appeal Board under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. (It is not.) Breyer explains how originalists and textualists decided each case and how he, as a pragmatist, decided them. His book is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical. It is addressed to non-lawyers.

It also seems weirdly naïve. Or maybe purposefully naïve. In most of the cases Breyer discusses, where there was disagreement on the Court it resulted not from differences in interpretive methods but from differences in politics. In almost every case, the originalists and textualists came down on the conservative side, restricting the powers of the federal government and expanding the powers of the states, and the pragmatists and “living constitutionalists” (another term that’s now largely avoided) came down on the liberal side.

What is naïve is to believe that the conservative Justices—which means, on the current Court, the six Justices appointed by Republican Presidents, though they are not always on the same page—would decide cases differently if they switched to another method of interpretation. Judicial reasoning doesn’t work that way. Judges pretty much know where they want to come out, and then they figure out a juridically respectable way of getting there.

Why would Breyer want to ignore, or seriously understate, the part that political ideology plays in Supreme Court decisions? The answer lies in an earlier book, “ The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics ,” based on a lecture he delivered at Harvard in 2021. It’s all about legitimacy.

Legitimacy is why the Warren Court was on a mission in 1964. The Supreme Court’s reputation—you could say its mystique—is all that it has. It cannot tax or spend. Only Congress can do those things, and only the President can send in the Army. When Southern school districts ignored Brown and refused to integrate, the Court was in danger of being exposed as a paper tiger. It was crucial, therefore, that everyone believe that the Justices were not making law, only finding it. The Constitution made them do it. That was the Court’s claim to legitimacy.

Breyer thinks that the Court still operates this way. All Justices, he says in “The Authority of the Court,” “studiously try to avoid deciding a case on the basis of ideology rather than law.” The reason that “different political groups so strongly support some persons for appointment to the Court and so strongly oppose others” is that people “confuse perceived personal ideology (inferred from party affiliation or that of the nominating executive) and professed judicial philosophy.”

But Presidents and Senate majorities certainly think they are appointing Justices who share their political beliefs, even when they profess to be simply looking for the most qualified jurist. Sometimes Presidents are wrong. Earl Warren, appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, no enthusiast of race-mixing, is a famous example. But that is not because Warren was apolitical. Warren was a Republican politician. He had been elected governor of California three times and had run for Vice-President on the ticket with Thomas E. Dewey, in 1948. For Warren, the political constituency that mattered when he became Chief Justice was not the President or Congress. It was the public.

He could see that, in the postwar era, public opinion was likely to favor expanded liberties—the United States was presenting itself, after all, as the leader of the free world—and although his court may sometimes have got a few paces ahead of public opinion, it was largely in step with the times. It was a liberal era. We are not living in a liberal era anymore, and the Court reflects this.

Politics is the art of governance. The Supreme Court is a branch of government, and is therefore a political body. Its decisions affect public life. If by “political” we mean “partisan,” we are still talking about governance, because partisanship is loyalty to a political ideology, normally instantiated in a political party. Politics, therefore, cannot not be partisan. Partisanship is how politics works. Even when politicians say, “This is no time for politics,” they are saying it for partisan reasons. They are saying it because it is good for their side to say it.

What makes the Court different from other political actors is stare decisis, the tradition of respecting its earlier decisions, something Congress does not have to worry about. There is no rule against overturning a precedent, though. So why has the Court been traditionally reluctant to do so? Why does Thomas’s suggestion that it might be time to overrule Griswold and Obergefell seem so radical? It’s because the Court’s legitimacy is intimately tied to the perception that, in making its rulings, it looks only to what the Constitution says and what the Court has previously decided. When the Court overturns a case, it has to make it appear as though the decision was wrong as a matter of law.

This is why Breyer insists that it’s all a matter of legal forensics, of what interpretive lenses the Justices use. He wants to preserve the authority of the Court. He wants to prevent the Justices from being seen as the puppets of politicians.

His toughest moment on the Court, for this reason, must have been Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, decided in 2007. In that case, the Court struck down a Seattle policy of using race as a factor in assigning students to high schools with the aim of attaining rough racial balance.

It was the kind of policy that the Court had approved a number of times since Brown. Now, in an opinion by John Roberts, the Court declared that it had had enough. Roberts ended with a memorable line, no doubt saved up for the right occasion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

After Roberts announced the Court’s opinion, on the last day of the term, Breyer delivered a speech from the bench. “Bristling with barely concealed anger,” according to an account by the legal scholar Lani Guinier, he accused the Court’s Republican appointees of voting their policy preferences. “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” he said.

In 2019, Breyer’s speech from the bench was published as a pamphlet by Brookings. The title he gave it was “Breaking the Promise of Brown.” ♦

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A journalist grapples with her new identity as an Army wife

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By Simone Gorrindo Gallery/Scout Press: 416 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Simone Gorrindo, whose new memoir, “The Wives,” details her life as a military spouse, had an important motivation for writing her book. “When I got to Georgia,” — Fort Benning, the Army post in Columbus where her husband was stationed — “I was 28, an adult with my own education and career. I was one of only a few spouses who didn’t have children. In New York, everyone asks, ‘What do you do?’ In Georgia, that was not something I was asked. Instead the question was, ‘Where are your children? How many children do you have?’ It was an upending time for my identity. I had to figure out who I was.”

Gorrindo spoke via videoconference from her family’s current home in Washington state. Raised in the Bay Area by parents with distinct countercultural leanings (they both “were born into the golden age of California when rent was low and college was affordable,” she writes), she considered herself a pacifist. “If there was an antiwar march, I was there.” She moved to New York City, put herself through college at NYU and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She got a job as an editor and was happily living in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, Andrew, when he told her he wanted to enlist in the Army. It wasn’t a complete shock. Andrew, who had earned his bachelor’s degree at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., read deeply in philosophy and had been thinking about a life in military service.

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Gorrindo found their bond strained by arguments about the Army. “Because it’s a lifestyle,” she says. “Joining the military, especially when you’re not from that background, is breaking with all you knew. You are leaving people, getting on a bus and signing your life away, to some extent. Everyone, from your parents to your siblings to your spouse, feels that on a visceral level. The Army is now going to be the most important thing in one person’s life, and there’s nothing that can supersede it.”

Like many journalists and writers, Gorrindo has read widely, and in some areas, deeply. She discusses literature about the military with ease, perhaps because her husband, Andrew, did a great deal of his own reading before choosing to enlist in the Army at age 29. The author mentions “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and “We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young” by Hal Moore and Joseph L. Galloway.

One piece she’s never heard, however, is Richard Lovelace’s poem “To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars,” which ends with the lines “I could not love thee, Dear, so much/Loved I not Honour more.” After I read it aloud to her, Gorrindo considers the words for a moment, then says, “Essentially he’s saying my love for you is deeper because I followed my calling.”

For Andrew, that calling intensified when he enlisted, hoping to reach areas of conflict quickly. After a series of training programs, including the elite Ranger School, he joined what Gorrindo refers to in the book as “the Unit.” (Andrew’s surname and his unit’s designation are never given, for security reasons.) “His leaving was scary because he was just the steadiest person in my life,” she says. “He still is somehow the person I can rely on. And yet there have been so many times I cannot rely on him in fundamental ways.”

The Unit, consisting of enlisted soldiers and noncommissioned officers, maintains a tight-knit community, like many units in all branches of service. Gorrindo sounds as philosophical as her spouse when she discusses the modern Army. “The military is a true cross-section of humanity. I know that now. I did not have a nuanced understanding of the military, and I’ve learned that people serve for many reasons.”

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When they left their 500-square-foot Brooklyn apartment and moved into a three-bedroom house outside of Fort Benning, Gorrindo was delighted — and dazed. Two weeks later, Andrew deployed to Afghanistan, and she was alone. “We military spouses are carrying burdens, and community lightens that load. You become more open to people’s backgrounds, who they are, what they believe in. Those things just don’t matter as much as whether that person shows up for you in a time of need, or in a time of celebration.” She pauses. “I do think that highly progressive people can sometimes become almost intolerant, and I don’t think I was a very open person when I got to Georgia. Now, community has become important to me. I don’t want to say we all get along a 100%. But our shared humanity outweighs those differences.”

In “The Wives,” Gorrindo dives into her relationships with fellow Unit spouses, including Rachel, who lived across the street from her for several years and became one of her closest friends. Although many of these wives defined themselves through marriage and children, there was something deeper that drew them all together: the Unit’s mission and protocol. “They refer to themselves as quiet professionals. We don’t share things on social media. We don’t tell people where our husbands are. But with each other, we could talk about all the things we weren’t allowed to share with the outside world.”

She also befriended Hillary, a former reporter whose marriage to a first sergeant meant that the couples could not socialize as a group — the Army still maintains many rank-based rules and traditions. The author saw this for herself early on at Fort Benning, when she asked Andrew to take her for a drive to see the “white elephants” — stately white stucco homes with Spanish tile roofs reminiscent of those in Mel Gibson’s 2002 film “We Were Soldiers.”

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“I said to Andrew, ‘Oh, I really like this neighborhood on post [Rainbow Avenue]!’ He said, ‘Do you want to see what we’d be living in if we lived on post?’ And he drove me a mile down the road to some apartment buildings where people were outside, sitting on stoops, smoking cigarettes. I could see inside to the dirty linoleum and yellowed walls. I was shocked by the difference in living situations.” She maintains a keen sense of how rank affects military marriages.

Gorrindo and her husband now have two small children, and the author’s reckoning with her role as mother informs a great deal of “The Wives.” “When you’re married, you sometimes forget you’re both changing, especially when you’re apart more often than you would like to be,” she says. However, other people are changing too, namely those children whose military parents spend so much time away.

She shifts a bit in her chair, softening as she talks about her 7-year-old daughter. “Recently, it was her birthday. On the night of her party, she cried herself to sleep. In the morning she said, ‘Well, at least my daddy will be back by the weekend.’ And I had to say, ‘I don’t know when he’s coming back.’ I think that was the hardest part.”

As for her own choices, the author understands what sustains her, which is applying her journalist’s eye “to know everything about the military world.” “During grad school I did some work on women veterans, from an outsider’s perspective,” she says. “Now I’m writing from an insider’s perspective. I always longed for a sense of home, and I have found it through writing this book. Writing is that safe place I have if everything else is falling apart. My relationships with my husband and children and fellow Army wives matter profoundly, but they become richer and more beautiful if I keep an ironclad relationship with myself.”

Gorrindo’s attention to her own calling has made it possible for her to live with her spouse’s.

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