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HOW RIGHTS WENT WRONG

Name: HOW RIGHTS WENT WRONG
Author: Jamal Greene
ISBN: 978-1-328-51811-8

WHY OUR OBSESSION WITH RIGHTS IS TEARING AMERICA APART

by Jamal Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 2021

Intended for general readers but unlikely to register with many non–legal eagles.

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A Columbia Law School professor reframes the framers to show American rights in a new light.

In this provocative, dense assessment, Greene, a former clerk for John Paul Stevens, argues that we have handed over interpretation of the Constitution to the courts, which have veered from the vision of the Founders. Instead of a system in which societal rights are decided by communities and elected representatives, our significant legal disputes are often settled by judges in zero-sum proceedings that rest on interpretations of documents written long before any of the relevant parties were born. The author uses the term “rightsism” to describe a situation in which judges have too much power. Greene advances the pertinent argument that, rather than determine winners and losers, courts should look for middle ways: “Too often,” he writes, “U.S. courts…see their job in constitutional cases as declaring who’s right. The answer, so often, is neither side—or both.” The Constitution seldom contains clear answers to the complex questions of our age. Rather than look back, judges should, as do their counterparts in other countries, scrutinize individual cases with an eye to bringing sides together. “Judges, more than most,” writes Greene, “have the power to make it better, and instead they are making it worse.” Though the author presents a valid argument, the presentation is lacking. He describes a dizzying number of cases and characters, which makes the text overwhelming for lay readers. The first third of the book, which includes an introduction and historical overview, reads like a lecture—e.g., “Rather than concede a significant role for interest balancing or moral deliberation as essential to rights adjudication, [judges] fall back on their narrow professional training.” Greene’s arguments, which may be useful to legal scholars and students, deserve ample airing, but his style doesn’t aid wide comprehension. Jill Lepore provides the foreword.

Intended for general readers but unlikely to register with many non–legal eagles.

Pub Date: March 16, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-328-51811-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

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CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.