Author: Joel Levin

A great deal of literature, films, novels, histories and legends, myths and religious texts, the stories we tell each other in small gatherings on social media or online center on poetic justice. The bad guy or wrongdoer or evil character, seemingly getting away with terrible acts, time and again, to the consternation or even complicity of authorities, gets their rightful dues in the end.

It is difficult to be enthusiastic about the mediocre. Why is getting a C good? Why is making the team but riding the bench, being the eternal “spare,” a cause for happiness? We all want to be part of Lake Wobegon, as Garrison Keeler described it: belonging to a place where “All the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average .”We are not there, and that is not very reassuring. Perhaps worse yet, we are even more distressed when the mediocre is celebrated.

Downtown Volgograd in 1996 had very little in the way of charm. Essentially destroyed in the Battle of Stalingrad a half century earlier, in the post-Stalinist era, an era of some slight optimism in the Soviet Union. The downtown had been rebuilt, but by Stalin, lacking imagination, money, or any real vision. Instead, it witnessed the construction of obligatory building after obligatory building, thrown together in the Soviet style.

Choice is at the center of our politics and of our economy. We think, in the economy, that consumers should have the right to choose, that buyers and sellers should also have that ability, that our selection or election or choosing ought to be our own, knowledgeable and uncoerced, and that it is a central role of the market to make that happen.

When we set out to assess the American judicial system, we typically do it piecemeal, decision by decision, aiming our focus first at individual judges, then courts, then the role of judges in our system generally.