In its infancy, the U.S. Supreme Court was the runt of the litter of America’s new institutions. 

The court had little power compared to Congress or the presidency. Justices traveled the country hearing cases in grueling, unglamorous “circuits.” When they weren’t doing that, they worked out of the U.S. Senate basement. John Rutledge, one of the first justices, resigned inside of a year to serve on South Carolina’s highest court. 

Today, almost 250 years later, the high court has matured, and its voice in American democracy has perhaps never been louder. Whether it’s redrawing the landscape of constitutional rights, determining the limits of the federal government’s regulatory power, or policing how states can and can’t run elections, the Supreme Court and its nine justices almost by default have become who we rely on to resolve the country’s toughest issues.

Consequently, since the Warren Court era of the 1960s, the court has been a political flashpoint. 

And over that time, the American judiciary has ceased to be a model for constitutional democracies around the world. Features of the American system – a rigid, difficult-to-amend Constitution; justices with lifetime appointments; hyperpartisan confirmation processes – are bugs in court systems around the world.

Both Congress and President Joe Biden have explored ways to reform the Supreme Court in the past year, including controversial calls to add more justices to the court, but there is no widespread support for structural reforms. Meanwhile, confidence in the court hit a historic low in June of this year, even before it overturned the right to abortion and granted itself broad power to strike down federal regulations. Next term could be just as momentous, with the court hearing a case through which it could transform how federal elections are run.

“We have decided that we need a decider in our system. And you need that in a political system,” says Sara Benesh, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

“The [Supreme] Court has always been political ... but never to this extent,” she adds. “People are really reacting to the court the way they react to politicians, and that is new.”

AP/File

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1962 in Washington. Front row, from left: Justices Tom Clark and Hugo Black; Chief Justice Earl Warren; Justices William Douglas and John Harlan. Standing: Justices Byron White, William Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart, and Arthur Goldberg. Beginning with the Warren court, the high court has been seen as both more powerful, and more political.

High courts are different in other countries

Today, the role the U.S. Supreme Court plays in its government system may be unique among nations. 

When Argentina set up its court system in the 1860s, it looked to the U.S. Five justices staff the country’s supreme court, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They serve until age 75, at which point they can stay for five-year terms pending approval from the president and the Senate.

Colombia took a similar path after it became independent, but the judiciary’s power remained minimal even as the country adopted 13 different constitutions over a century. The most recent constitution, enacted in 1991, broke from the American model by creating four high courts, including a supreme court and a constitutional court. Their sizes range from nine judges to 27, and most judges serve nonrenewable eight-year terms.

Most Latin American judiciaries resemble Colombia’s, says David Landau, a professor at Florida State University College of Law, and “in that respect Latin American looks a lot like Europe.”

“What that means is you have high courts very involved in politics,” he adds. But those more modern features, like term limits, larger courts, and easier-to-amend constitutions, “reduces the friction between the judiciary and democracy.”

Courts in Europe and Africa exemplify this approach. The U.S. Constitution is four pages and 5,000 words long, and it has been amended 27 times in its 230-year history. Germany, meanwhile, amends its constitution roughly once a year. South Africa’s Constitution is over 70 pages long and includes explicit rights to water, health care, housing, and reproductive rights. The South African Constitution has been amended 17 times since its ratification in 1996.

That may seem like a recipe for instability, if not chaos, but scholars who study foreign courts say that having a broad menu of ways to respond to court decisions reduces the pressure and scrutiny on the courts. Stakes are lowered, because even those who disagree with a major court ruling have avenues for recourse, and alternatives to despair.

“Ironically, you want a court to be held in high esteem, but you also want it to not be the last word,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University who has studied fledgling judiciaries in Europe.

“You want it to be the almost-last word,” she adds. “If [the court] does something that generates a huge political backlash, you want the backlash to go through politics, not the court. You want the law to be changed rather than the court be destroyed.”

Germany has two high courts, for example, with 16 high court judges, so there are no cases decided by a single “swing” judge. Their decisions are also all unsigned, so the public doesn’t know how individual judges vote in cases. Again, this is anathema to the U.S. system – and it’s certainly less transparent – but Dr. Scheppele believes this reinforces public confidence of the courts.

“What judges should aim to be is to be consistent with the court, and that may mean they change their views from case to case,” she says.

In America, “judges feel a pressure to be consistent with themselves,” she adds. “But it’s not about them, it’s about the court.”

Uwe Anspach/dpa/AP/File

The Federal High Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, Germany, Oct. 31, 2017. Germany has two high courts, with 16 high court judges, so there are no cases decided by a single “swing” judge.

How Supreme Court became U.S. “decider”

Not only is it more about the court than the judges, but it’s more about the democracy writ large than the court. And in America, the Supreme Court’s influence has grown as other checks on its power have diminished, experts say. 

First, because the U.S. Constitution is unusually difficult to change compared to other countries – an amendment must be approved by two-thirds of Congress and then ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures – the court’s role as chief interpreter of what the Constitution protects gives it outsized influence compared to other countries. When the court interprets the Constitution in an unpopular way, it’s very difficult to respond by changing the Constitution.

Another avenue of democratic response – legislation – has also become more difficult. The framers of the Constitution didn’t anticipate the rise of political parties (let alone the intense partisanship dividing America today). Instead, they designed American democracy with the idea that different branches of government would check each other. If the court made a decision the people didn’t like, they could pressure Congress to pass a law reversing it. 

But with rising partisanship, members of Congress have become more loyal to their party than their institution, and “they have done none of that checking of the Supreme Court,” says Anna Law, a political science professor at City University of New York, Brooklyn College.

“The Framers could not have predicted that one of the branches of government would not check the other simply because of partisanship,” she added.

One marker of the significance of the court’s past term is that Congress has acted in response – and in anticipation. Amid concerns the Supreme Court decision overturning the right to abortion could lead to other unenumerated rights being overturned, the House last month passed bills codifying the right to same-sex marriage and birth control. Their prospects are uncertain in the Senate.

“Over time the court does follow public opinion, and [that’s] because of that electoral connection to the president and the Senate,” says Dr. Benesh at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

“Once you break that electoral connection, then everything downstream is broken too,” she adds.

The U.S. is trying to exert, and reinforce, that electoral connection. But the existing constitutional system makes it difficult. A presidential commission on the Supreme Court last year made several recommendations for reforming the court, but none of the more significant proposals – such as increasing the number of justices, or imposing term limits on them – have gained traction.

“There are lots of choke points in our democratic system, even when it’s working the way it’s supposed to,” says Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a member of the presidential commission.

It’s for this reason the Supreme Court “does play a larger role in our politics than just about any other country’s high court,” he adds. And it’s for this reason the U.S. judicial system has fallen out of favor globally.

The more popular judicial model may now be Germany, according to Dr. Scheppele. There, judges often talk openly about their work and its implications. In America, current and prospective Supreme Court justices are subject to intense scrutiny but say precious little about their work, creating an aloofness that can be damaging.

Justices are unelected and serve for life, but “you can’t talk to them about their jobs,” says Dr. Scheppele. Globally, “the [U.S.] Supreme Court is an outlier in this extreme personality cult of the [justices].”

Canada has some unique features as well that divert political heat from its supreme court. Parliament or a provincial legislature can pass legislation overriding a supreme court decision, but the legislation must be reapproved every five years. The clause is rarely used, but “it sets up a dialogue,” she says.

“When the court makes a [unpopular] decision in the U.S., there’s no place for the flames to go,” she adds. “In Canada there’s a place for the flames to go.”

“It’s like we’re driving around a Model T and everyone else has some futuristic car that flies. It’s such an antiquated technology, and it’s not suited to the moment.”

Under the pressure of war, crackdown, and emigration, Russia’s media landscape looks increasingly as it did in the bygone Soviet era.

In the Cold War, that meant a consolidated national press offering the official narrative with little political diversity, and a range of alternative voices based outside the country trying various means to penetrate official obstacles to reach Russian audiences.

It’s not quite that bad yet today.

The funding for state media has indeed tripled since the war began, even as laws to curtail critical journalism have proliferated. And most independent media – and the journalists who worked with them – have left Russia in recent months after being declared “foreign agents,” forbidden from reporting on the war and, in many cases, physically shut down by authorities.

But thanks to the advances and ubiquity of the internet, independent media today are able to make their voices heard in a way that was impossible during the days of the USSR. Some of them have established full-scale operations from a safe perch outside the country, aiming to bring alternative news and views to Russians online. Quite a few journalists have remained in Russia but retreated to obscure precincts of social media to express themselves, or to provide information anonymously for existing outlets.

“There are so many ways to reach people nowadays that were unimaginable in the past,” says Masha Lipman, co-editor of the Russia Post, an online journal of expert debate in English and Russian that still seems to be accessible in Russia without using a VPN. “As long as the internet exists, and the restrictions are not impenetrable – the Russian government is trying – then it’s as if the émigré press now has a real foothold and can compete in the Russian information sphere.”

Russians setting the agenda

Not every independent journalist has decamped abroad. Some continue working within the still-permitted spectrum, trying to produce valuable work within increasingly restrictive legal conditions. And a few say they’re just not leaving, no matter what.

“I was born in Russia and have lived here all my life. Why should I leave?” says journalist Vasily Polonsky. He’s worked for several alternative outlets, including TV Dozhd and the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and has been declared a “foreign agent” under Russian law. “Who will stay here to express a position different from the official line?” he asks. “As long as it’s possible, I’ll stay here and work, even if I can only seem to use about 15% of my professional capacities.”

But most of Russia’s critical media voices now operate outside the country – a situation that is starting to resemble the old Cold War.

Then, the Russian émigré press was largely confined to exiled readerships, with few opportunities to reach audiences inside the USSR. Only big state-supported radio stations such as Radio Liberty, the BBC, and Voice of America had the capabilities to counter Soviet jamming efforts and bring a different narrative to Soviet citizens in their own languages.

“In those days, millions would be listening, and they considered those signals from outside the country to be the voice of truth,” says Ms. Lipman.

But there are some important differences from the past, she says. “Those Cold War-era radio stations were run by foreign governments who were fighting their ideological battles with the USSR. Russians may have worked for them, but they were not in charge. Today Russians are running these [exiled] media ventures; they are the bosses and they set the agenda.”

The online newspaper Meduza, probably the most popular opposition-minded voice, decamped years ago to Latvia where, despite mounting difficulties with news-gathering inside Russia, it continues to make its coverage available to any Russian able to use a VPN. The TV station Dozhd was finally hounded out of its Moscow studios in March, after years of tightening regulations, and recently started broadcasting from a borrowed studio in Riga, using YouTube, a platform that has not yet been blocked in Russia.

“It didn’t make any sense to stay. We’d have been no use to anyone, including our families,” says Ekaterina Kotrikadze, news director at Dozhd. “This is really different. How do you reach people? How do you understand the country when you are outside of it?”

Staff members at Dozhd have been debating how to continue gathering news and contributions from inside Russia, bearing in mind that such work may be criminalized by Russian authorities, putting journalists at serious risk. They are especially concerned for people like Mr. Polonsky, Ms. Kotrikadze says.

“It’s just impossible to do your job as a journalist from inside the country now,” she says. “There are several journalists who remain and continue to work. Polonsky is one of ours who refuses to leave. What to do about him?”

“People were waiting for us”

Despite government efforts to silence them, independent media have been able to maintain a connection with their audience. Ms. Kotrikadze says her first show in late July from Latvia – she’s also an anchor – got a million and a half views, and a lot of positive feedback.

“People were waiting for us, and knew where to look,” she says. “We’ve kept in touch on Telegram channels, of course, and our relaunch is still partial. But we are back on the air.”

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP

Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, celebrates after auctioning off his 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for $103.5 million at the Times Center, June 20, 2022, in New York. Novaya Gazeta was forced to stop publishing in Russia in March, despite its efforts to comply with Russian law.

The now-closed Ekho Moskvy radio station has also fallen back on YouTube. Several of its top contributors now broadcast their familiar critical commentary on a channel they call Live Nail, though not full time.

YouTube remains a viable platform for alternative Russian media because its made-in-Russia replacement, RuTube, is still not ready after suffering from a devastating hacker attack early in the war. Many official Russian news channels, and pro-Kremlin voices such as Sputnik and Russia Today, still rely on YouTube, and hence it remains one of the few pluralistic platforms that Russians can access without a VPN.

The biggest worry, Ms. Lipman says, is that independent media have lost their former business models. “News outlets like Meduza and Dozhd used to get advertising income in the Russian market, and were relatively successful. Now they are completely cutoff from that, and it’s going to become a problem.”

“The situation is changing very fast”

Some independent outlets try to carry on within Russia, despite being labeled “foreign agents” and subjected to constant legal harassment. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta attempted to continue publishing without breaking any of the new laws concerning war reporting, but nevertheless was forced to stop in March. In early July, it successfully registered the first issue of a weekly magazine, called No, but its site was subsequently blocked.

Nadezhda Prusenkova, Novaya Gazeta’s press secretary, says the staff has no idea what will happen next.

“We’re going through a very difficult period,” she says. “It’s not clear whether we’ll open a new site, or issue another edition. Right now, all I can say is that the situation is changing very fast.”

One publication that continues with some tiny semblance of normality is the 20-year-old Caucasian Knot, which produces critical news coverage about southern Russia and the wider Caucasus region. It’s been declared a “foreign agent” and its website has been blocked in Russia. But despite pending court cases, the site has been able to keep working so far.

Its editor, Grigory Shvedov, attributes that to the fact that its area of focus is not Ukraine. It employs a network of regional journalists and bloggers, most of whom are not anonymous, to concentrate largely on human rights issues in the Caucasus. They have attempted to calculate casualty rates for Russian soldiers from the region who’ve been sent to Ukraine, but only using open and official sources.

“It’s not getting any easier,” he says. “Some can’t work at all. Some topics cannot be covered. But we want to keep working. And we intend to do that until it becomes impossible.”

Early one morning, servers at the Al-Aseel Al-Dimishqi restaurant began their usual preparations for the day. They laid out rows of baklava, kunafa, and other syrup-drenched, nut-stuffed delectables. But the offerings weren’t for customers who flock to the upscale New Cairo suburb. 

Instead, within an hour, staff from an organization called Tekeya had arrived to whisk away 135 portions of perfectly edible dishes.

The reason? The desserts – made a day earlier – weren’t considered fresh enough to dish up. 

Throughout Egypt, which boasts a rich culinary history, such views aren’t uncommon. The Arab-speaking country is the largest producer of food waste in the Middle East, and the 12th biggest offender globally, with each household averaging over 200 pounds of annual food waste. Now, though, amid a global reckoning over the food chain and its role in the climate crisis, attitudes in Egypt are slowly changing. 

The Al-Aseel restaurant is one of around a dozen across the Egyptian capital that Tekeya staff visits each day in a quest to stop fit-for-consumption food from being dumped. Restaurants pay a small annual fee that allows them to alert Tekeya whenever they have unsold food. Personal users of the app can then buy that food at half-price, or either the restaurant or the user can request Tekeya  deliver the food to a food bank or charity of their choosing. In total, up to 40 plates are saved from going to the trash each day.

A handful of similar apps can be found in the West, where staggering wastage is also the norm. But few exist in developing countries,  where growing Western-style overconsumption sits alongside soaring rates of malnutrition. Tekeya, which was inspired in part by the rituals around Ramadan, is the first such app in Egypt, where poor nutrition and undernourishment account for up to 55% of annual child deaths.  

“I’ve seen several platforms helping fight food waste across Europe. It’s uplifting to find one that does the same here in Egypt,” says Al-Aseel’s manager, Ramez Abo Abed, who has been using the app for three years.

Disposing wisely

In 2019, Menna Shahin had an idea particularly inspired by Ramadan, the Muslim holiday when the devout give to poor people and fast throughout the day. That prompts both celebration and waste. Since fasts are eventually broken with lavish meals at dusk, demand for food commodities soars by up to a third, and waste, in turn, also multiplies. 

“I would put so much thought into how to dispose of [food] responsibly without harming the environment, and how to minimize my excess usage,” Ms. Shahin says. “I thought to myself, why not assist everyone to dispose of their excess food wisely?”

Ms. Shahin ended up co-founding Tekeya along with her husband, Max Hartzen. By Tekeya’s second Ramadan, some 10,000 discounted meals were ordered during the holy month, with users choosing to donate roughly a quarter of those to charities.

Courtesy of Tekeya

Through the app Tekeya, restaurants can either donate surplus food or enable customers to buy it for half the price, cutting down on food waste and losses.

Now a 15-member team, Tekeya continues to face the stigma associated with “leftover food,” says Aya Magdy, the startup’s account manager. “People presume that it’s food that has gone bad, making it difficult to convince them to buy or donate it.”

Traditional Egyptian fare includes delicately spiced falafel served piping hot, while koshary, a staple street food, provides a hearty kick through mixing rice and pasta with fresh onions, tomatoes, garlic, chili, lentils, chickpeas, and a dazzling array of spices – these and other classic dishes almost all require freshly chopped ingredients. 

But there’s a growing awareness of the impact of food waste on the environment. When food is thrown out, it rots and creates methane, a greenhouse gas that is almost 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide. To date, Tekeya counts at least 45,000 meals it has saved from ending up in landfills – preventing the equivalent of 133,000 kilograms (about 293,000 pounds) of carbon dioxide from being released into the environment, Ms. Shahin says.

The team also works hard to guarantee the quality of the food it passes on, carrying out regular checkups amid stringent requirements. And because trust is such a big factor, if clients complain that the food from a restaurant is too stale or otherwise unsatisfactory, collaboration is immediately terminated.   

The number of users has climbed steadily. The app now has more than 50,000 subscribers and 120 food suppliers in Cairo. And users tend to be conscientious themselves. Sara Harfoush, a teaching assistant in Cairo University’s Faculty of Economics and Political Science, was initially skeptical, so she conducted her own trials to gauge quality. After ordering off the app several times – and finding it satisfactory each time – she began buying food cheaply to donate to those in need. 

“The app idea is remarkable, especially in Egypt where food waste is massive. So to be able to cut that waste, easily, while saving edible food, is an excellent idea,” Ms. Harfoush says.

And, she points out, when she buys pastries from shops, she often isn’t served products baked on the same day anyway. “So I’m actually getting more for [my] money on Tekeya at half the price,” she notes.

Pioneering solutions

As with most of the Middle East, Egypt lags in official measures regulating food waste. A draft bill in Parliament proposes penalizing food suppliers who dispose of consumable food with fines of up to £500,000 (Egyptian; about $26,000) and the suspension of their licenses. But there is scant political will to tackle the problem or enforce regulation, says Zahra Saleh, a food industry researcher at the government-run National Research Center.

“This is why initiatives like Tekeya are priceless. They are pioneers and pave the way for more to be done to truly fight food waste,” says Mr. Saleh. 

The idea is catching on with well-known brands. Alban Khalifa, a dairy shop with multiple branches across Cairo, has been reducing food waste and financial losses through Tekeya for nearly two years. Regulars know they can snap up half-price puddings through the app at the close of day.

That food would otherwise join the tens of thousands of tons of ingredients overflowing from trash cans on many streets of Cairo. In rural areas, heaps of discarded vegetables and harvests rot in the sun, attracting stray animals.

There are other draws beyond environmental and sanitation concerns. Soaring inflation and another round of currency devaluation in March have further squeezed citizens in a country where a third of the population is classified as low-income earners. 

Mohamed Refaat, a pharmacist in Cairo, says he quickly became a regular user after learning about Tekeya. The combination of contributing to saving the environment and getting good food at a discount is, he says, “very attractive to any user given the soaring prices and rising inflation rates.”

This article was published in collaboration with Egab.

The other day, Dino, our neighbor across the road, saw me in front of our new home in Italy and called out, “Good evening!” His English, though limited, is much better than my all-but-nonexistent Italian. “You OK?” he asked. 

He had greeted me before, usually with a Buongiorno (good morning) or a Buonasera (good evening). Once, seeing him trying to fix a tall street lamp, I’d held a ladder for him to climb. But that was pretty much it for us: a general air of cordiality prevailing, nothing more. 

I’d just concluded 46 years living in New York City, where you can live next door to someone for 10 years without saying hello, much less introducing yourself. But now I’m living in a town in Italy’s Puglia region, and everyone here except my family is a stranger. And, residing in the countryside as we do, I’ve started to feel pangs of rustic isolation. 

This moment therefore seemed an opportunity to get to know Dino a little. I could have stayed behind our gates to talk with him through his gates, as if from cell to cell in a prison. But instead I unlatched our front entrance and crossed the road toward him. I then recalled how someone had once said of Italians that if you take half a step toward them, they will take a full step toward you. 

And that’s what happened. I stood in the street talking with Dino and his wife, Grazia – I in English, they in Italian. One minute later they invited me in for a tour. 

Here, for starters, was a fig tree, thick of trunk and branch, more than a hundred years old, bearing ripe figs. Dino plucked a few of the plump fruits and handed them to me. My cupped palms were soon brimming with figs. 

“You can eat these?” I asked. “Sì,” he said. Dino held a fig in front of me, tore it in half, and popped one-half in his mouth. He handed me the other half and signaled for me to follow suit, and I did. 

“Delizioso!” I declared. 

I once saw a wonderful documentary about Gregory Peck. In it, the older actor travels to Ireland to meet his new grandson. But first, wandering a field, he happens upon a fig tree. He picks a fig and eats it with obvious delight. To me, the scene captures the sweetness of life and how such sweetness is all around us – if only we’d bother to reach out and taste it. 

Dino and I repeated this sequence with trees bearing plums and walnuts, too – he plucking, I sampling. He showed me around his property, ambling past a swimming pool, a trellis, and a zip line he had built for his adolescent grandchildren. We sat at a table under a canopy of pine trees, and Grazia brought out a bowl for all the fruits and nuts for me to take home. 

Despite our differences in language – neither of us knew many of the other’s words – nothing important was lost. I understood the wave of his hand inviting me to enter his property. I understood being handed figs straight from his own tree. Both of us understood all we needed to understand: that now we were true neighbors. 

AP

Supporters of Houthi rebels attend a rally last March in in Sanaa, Yemen.

A turbulent Middle East needs centers of calm to curtail its conflicts, and one showed up – again – this week. It came, rather tellingly, just before Iran and the United States restarted talks over the revival of their defunct nuclear agreement. In fact, a two-month extension of a truce in war-ravaged Yemen on Tuesday was due in large part to Oman, a small, poor country on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula whose even-tempered and tranquil mediation helped cement the original 2015 nuclear deal.

Leaders in Oman were able to renew a 4-month-old truce in neighboring Yemen by once again acting as a trustworthy facilitator through back-channel diplomacy. The Middle East needs “an environment of calm,” Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi told the Al-Monitor news website, and the best approach is through “avenues for dialogue” with everyone.

Omani diplomats were crucial go-betweens in persuading Iran-aligned Houthi rebels to renew the truce, which began April 2, with a Saudi-backed Yemeni coalition. The cessation of hostilities has kept a seven-year war on hold, saving lives and allowing humanitarian aid to flow to more than two-thirds of Yemen’s 30 million people in dire need.

The truce also opens a door for a permanent solution to the political divide inside Yemen, a country that saw a brief period of democracy after the 2011 Arab Spring. And the latest agreement may be a bellwether that Iran is ready to compromise with the U.S. in the nuclear talks.

Inclusiveness, stated Oman’s foreign minister, is the country’s core value. “For the future there is no other avenue but to have an understanding to talk with each other directly, not at each other, to reach that ultimate goal of understanding and cooperation,” he said.

Oman’s diplomats are well practiced at being serene and equable listeners. “We will continue to believe in the power of dialogue,” said the foreign minister. Such calm trust is a necessary antidote to the guns and swagger of the Middle East.