Though he strives mightily to be fair, Chemerinsky’s analysis remains vulnerable to the charge he most fears: an inevitably...
The dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, places our most revered governmental institution on trial and finds it deeply flawed.
If, as Chemerinsky (The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, 2010, etc.) posits, the Supreme Court’s two most important responsibilities are to protect the rights of minorities and to uphold the Constitution against the impulse of political majorities, it has too often failed. By these terms, he makes a convincing argument. He draws on a number of crucial (and, he insists, wrongly decided) cases from all eras and across many different areas of the law to demonstrate the court’s dereliction. When it comes to race, the court has historically done more harm than good. In times of crisis—during war, in the wake of 9/11, etc.—the court has failed to restrain majorities, has allowed free speech to be trampled, and has permitted the wrongful detention, incarceration and internment of citizens. Instead of protecting employees and consumers or ensuring a path to recovery for the injured, the court has favored protecting property, freedom of contract and states’ rights. Nor does the performance of the Warren-led court, far more in keeping with Chemerinsky’s forthrightly acknowledged liberal politics, absolve the court of its many lapses. He reminds us that Warren’s tenure was brief and argues that even in the areas of its greatest successes—voting rights, school desegregation, ensuring counsel for criminal defendants—the court did much less than was necessary. Needless to say, the Roberts-led court comes in for a shellacking. Taking hope from the stirring dissents contained in most of the especially important cases he cites, Chemerinsky rejects recent scholarly calls for the abolition of judicial review and offers instead a number of reforms designed to improve the court and return it to its proper mission.
Though he strives mightily to be fair, Chemerinsky’s analysis remains vulnerable to the charge he most fears: an inevitably biased critique, amounting merely to the complaint that “the Court’s decisions have not been liberal enough.”Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02642-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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