By Peter W. Barnes, Cheryl Shaw Barnes
A cheese law gets passed, the mice hate it and sue, and now nine mice in robes have to decide whether the mouse Congress had the right to pass it at all.
The National Cheese law passes. Every mouse in the United Mice of America now has to eat the same cheese every single day, and plenty of them don't want to, so they take it to court. Chief Justice Marshall and his eight fellow justices agree to hear the case. From there the book walks you through the whole route a case takes: how it climbs all the way up to this Court, the petition, the justices deciding whether to hear it at all, the lawyers standing up to argue to the bench, the justices going off on their own to talk it over, the vote, and the written opinion that follows. It also shows the part most books skip. The justice who loses the vote writes down why, and that dissent gets published right alongside the majority. The mice wear black robes, the courtroom is drawn from the real one, and the whole thing rhymes in couplets. The publisher pegs it at roughly grades one through three, so it's meant as a first look at how the Court works.
Of the three mouse books, this is the one I'd pick if I picked only one, because it takes on the idea that's hardest to teach and easiest to get wrong. Most children can follow that Congress makes laws and the President signs them. What a diagram can't give them is why anyone should then be allowed to cancel a law that was made the right way. This book drops a child straight into that question instead of handing them the answer. The cheese is doing real work here. It's a law everyone can see is silly, and it still got passed properly, which is exactly the kind of situation judicial review was built for. The losing side gets its page too, so children come away knowing that the justice who disagreed wrote down why, and that those reasons are kept. A caution, same as the rest of the series: the verse is functional rather than a treat, plain couplets wrapped around words like 'unconstitutional,' and if rhyme already puts your child off, this isn't the book that turns them around.