One of the most significant works about constitutional interpretation in recent years.
An incisive rethinking of the U.S. Constitution.
Sunstein, the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, begins by pointing out the irrefutable fact that “the Constitution does not contain the instructions for its own interpretation.” Thus, “no approach to constitutional interpretation is required or self-justifying.” On those grounds, he briskly swats away every jurisprudentially, philosophically, and historically justified interpretive scheme—“anti-originalist” as well as “originalist,” of the left as well as the right—that has been advanced since the 19th century. All schools and schemes of interpretation fall before his generous-spirited ax strokes. In their place, he argues, there can be only one acceptable, humane approach to judicial interpretation: the search among jurists for a “ ‘reflective equilibrum’ in which [jurists’] judgments, at multiple levels of generality, are brought into alignment with each other” in order to achieve the most democratically acceptable and fairest outcome achievable at the time. “There is no alternative to the search for reflective equilibrium,” writes the author, because “no theory makes sense for every imaginable world.” Though disarmingly and intentionally “simple and straightforward,” as well as open-hearted, common-sensical, and succinct, Sunstein’s text, given its grave and demanding subject, requires readers’ attentiveness. Despite the author’s fair-mindedness, it’s clear that his main targets are the originalist and traditionalist arguments that have recently captured the radical right and are overturning decades of settled constitutional law. Is Sunstein’s interpretive scheme strong enough to halt the further advance of originalist and traditionalist thinking on the Supreme Court? Probably not. But it’s a brave, muscular, and compelling roadblock now standing in the way of originalist ideologues. This book should be in the hands of every law student, constitutional lawyer, judge, and Supreme Court justice.
One of the most significant works about constitutional interpretation in recent years.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780691252049
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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