Dana El-Kurd

The surroundings included Crow's unnerving souvenirs once described on the program Inside Edition.

The estate also includes what Crowe has called the Garden of Evil, a collection of imposing statues of past authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nikolai Ceausescu, the eccentric Romanian tyrant violently deposed in 1989, as well as a bust of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb nationalist who triggered World War I with his assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Crowe claims that his collection is somehow a statement of his hatred for both communism and fascism.

The creepy artwork perhaps foreshadowed Ho's ominous career in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

On that bench, he has become infamous for weirdly written and extreme opinions in which he has suggested that the children of migrants might not be eligible for birthright citizenship because the country is being, quote, invaded and that abortion actually somehow injures doctors because they are denied the intense pleasure of delivering babies.

Those antics might lead him to one day occupy a seat on the United States Supreme Court, potentially succeeding Thomas or Samuel Alito, the two oldest justices on the nation's highest bench.

In this episode, we'll look at the career of Judge James Ho, his alarming right-wing judicial activism, and the strange history of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which since the Reagan administration has transformed from one of the most liberal judicial bodies in the country to perhaps the scariest court in America.

Given its current reactionary reputation, it's a bit ironic the Fifth Circuit Court convenes in a New Orleans courthouse named after John Minor Wisdom, a New Orleans native who formed a critical part of a quartet of liberal judges known simply as the Four, who in the 1950s and 1960s issued a series of revolutionary rulings that advanced the civil rights movement.

President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Wisdom to the bench in 1957.

He quickly formed an alliance with three other liberal judges on the Fifth Circuit, Albert P. Tuttle of Georgia, John R. Brown of Texas, and Richard T. Revis of Alabama.

Rivas was the only Democrat on the squad that came to be known as the Fifth Four.

These liberals typically prevailed over the conservatives serving on the Fifth Circuit.

And at that point, the Fifth Circuit heard cases from states that spread across the core of the one-time Confederacy, including Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia.

This placed the Fifth Four on the front lines of the civil rights struggle.

In 1958, the Fifth Circuit began chipping away at Jim Crow.

The court heard the case of Joe Dorsey Jr.

of New Orleans challenging a Louisiana law that outlawed matches between black and white boxers.

Wisdom wrote the majority opinion, which declared such legislation made a mockery of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

That opinion, like many Wisdom wrote, would be upheld the following year by the Supreme Court that was presided over by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Louisiana integrated boxing matches, but for years outside the ring, the arenas divided into black and white seating.