Years before the conservative legal scholar John Eastman devised a kooky theory to keep a losing president in the White House, he played a little-known role in crafting another bit of right-wing fiction: a religious novel about the Supreme Court.
Eastman played a prominent role in advising the legal aspects of Deadlock, a 2002 anti-abortion legal thriller that examines what would happen if a moderately liberal Supreme Court justice had a sudden brush with death—and then suddenly converted to Christianity.
It’s a fun romp of SCOTUS fanfiction, if you put aside the way the writer infantilizes a middle-aged woman whose intellect earned her a seat on the nation’s highest court, recycles tired conservative talking points about abortion mills, and demonizes liberals by reducing them to literary tropes.
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Eastman is now under intense scrutiny. He lost his job as dean of Chapman University law school outside of Los Angeles after his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. After reviewing Eastman’s private correspondence, a federal judge cited evidence of a crime. Last year, a congressional panel exposed his instrumental role in shaping former President Donald Trump’s scheme to stay in office by having his vice president refuse to certify electoral results. And he’s currently on trial against the California bar, which is trying to take away his professional credentials for threatening the nation’s democracy.
But no one has yet publicly reviewed his advisory role in Deadlock, which Eastman did while running the conservative Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at a time when he was filing Supreme Court briefs to weaken environmental protection laws and strip Americans of their birthright citizenship rights.
Eastman is the first person whom author James Scott Bell thanks in his acknowledgments.
“Professor John Eastman of Chapman University School of Law, former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, walked me through much of the Supreme Court’s day-to-day operations as well as many of the legal aspects of the novel,” Bell wrote.
“One of the ‘smart guys,’ he is a credit to his students, his school, and the enterprise of American law,” he continued.
In a call with The Daily Beast, Eastman said he doesn’t remember reading the book, but said he advised Bell on “internal workings of the court,” like how cases make their way up the chain and how justices debate issues behind closed doors.
“The plot line seemed interesting,” he said, noting that he’d just read a summary of the book on Amazon before the phone call, which he recorded.
The inner workings of the Supreme Court and its place in American government, are closely scrutinized in Bell’s novel, which explores the unthinkable: a shakeup that threatens to undermine the nation’s confidence in the judiciary. Two decades on, with public confidence in the high court at an historic low following revelations of justices cavorting with billionaires and a conservative majority that swiftly eliminated abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade, the book’s premise and drama almost feel quaint.
Deadlock opens with a suicidal Alabama girl who’s suffering trauma after an abortion at a predatory clinic. She keeps dreaming about being tied down to the floor and cut open by mysterious figures in black robes. The novel follows her precedent-setting case against that clinic, a David-and-Goliath battle led by a novice Black lawyer fighting on her own against a white-shoe Southern law firm and a liberal Yale legal scholar.
But the novel’s protagonist is Associate Justice Millicent Mannings Hollander, the Supreme Court’s powerful swing vote who gets her life turned upside down when she nearly dies, sees a brief vision of hell, and is forced to confront her new reality while recovering back home in rural California with her Bible-thumping mom. Meanwhile, Capitol Hill is alive with corruption as the president and a powerful senator are scheming to make her chief justice—but only on the condition that she’ll remain a liberal bulwark.
“Millie,” as she’s called, hasn’t gone on a date since high school 35 years ago and starts to fall for a Christian preacher in jeans and a leather toolbelt whose “tanned arms, glistening with perspiration, were strong.” There’s a hint he looks a bit like Gary Cooper: “solid, rugged, quintessentially American.”
She just sits around while he tells her, “I think our country has fallen into spiritual darkness over the last fifty years. A large part of that has to do with our courts.” (Important sidenote: This preacher also served time in federal prison for terrorizing abortion providers.)
The book asks readers to believe Millie is an intellectual powerhouse, yet bested by the legal prowess of her handsome preacher, who is also a former lawyer. Her best friend is a board member at a fictional stand-in for Planned Parenthood who calls this Supreme Court justice “kiddo.” When Millie’s not soul-searching, she’s being lectured by a retired right-wing justice who tells her to “use your noodle.”
There’s copious bourbon drinking and cigar smoking by Democrats. Journalists are referred to as amoebas, rat-like, and hungry sharks. There’s an Italian mobster who somehow only hangs out at Manhattan tourist spots and talks about Al Pacino. There’s even a passing mention of that New York buildings guy, Donald Trump.
But the heart of the legal drama in the book—what Eastman is credited with advising—centers on what goes on behind the Supreme Court’s white marble columns.
At an oral argument, the justices take turns posing questions about the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which forbids the government from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”
In a closed-door judicial conference, justices debate the constitutionality of Ohio constructing a sign at its statehouse that displays its biblical state motto, “With God, all things are possible.” The novel reaches its denouement when a converted Millie—now a textualist in the spirit of the late Justice Antonin Scalia—launches into a discussion about how the Christianity of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and their “original intent” must be taken into account when considering the role of religion in American law.
“As president, for example, [Jefferson] used federal money to build churches and sponsor Christian missionaries. He established religious requirements for the University of Virginia. He was not a strict separationist by any means,” Millie says to the horror of her liberal counterparts who now realize she’s no longer on their side.
Eastman’s role in the book first came to The Daily Beast’s attention when Bell last month donated $100 to the disgraced attorney’s legal defense fund, which has raised nearly half a million dollars since its inception two years ago.
“Praying for you, John. You helped me with my novel about the Supreme Court years ago. Godspeed,” Bell wrote.
When reached by The Daily Beast, Bell was reluctant to respond to questions about Eastman’s role in the book. He later wrote back that he came up with the plot and legal angles on his own, noting that he's a retired lawyer. Bell said he didn't share any scenes with Eastman while working on the book.
"That all came from me," Bell wrote.
