The Land That Law Forgot: The Supreme Court & The New York Legal Wasteland
24th June 2024
In 1976, Saul Steinburg’s hilarious “View of the World from 9th Avenue” was published on the cover of the New Yorker. The map showed Manhattan occupying most of the known world with wilderness on the other side of the Hudson River between New York and San Francisco. The cartoon captured the distorted view New Yorkers have of the rest of the country.
When I was at Yale a large number of students had this framed on their walls.
Roughly 50 years later, the image has flipped for many. With the Trump trial, Manhattan has become a type of legal wilderness where prosecutors use the legal system to hunt down political rivals and thrill their own supporters. New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) ran on a pledge to bag former president Donald Trump. (She also sought to dissolve the National Rifle Association.)
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also pledged to get Trump. Neither specified how they would do it, but both were elected and both were lionized for bringing controversial cases against Trump.