A thoughtful and painstaking work of legal scholarship.
Wehle delivers a critique of the unchecked presidential power to pardon.
The author astutely observes that when the presidential power to pardon was ratified in 1788 (enshrined in Article II of the United States Constitution), it granted more power to the executive branch than was currently wielded by King George III. While generally unchallenged, the power is a peculiar one when understood within the context of a constitutional republic characterized by governmental limitations and checks and balances—Wehle describes it as “a gaping level of unconstrained power.” Of course, there were reasons for this remarkable endowment of prerogative; it allows for the expression of mercy and the granting of amnesty, and the ability to “to address fragile political situations that traditional diplomacy or the rule of law cannot outpace” can be politically expedient. However, Wehle convincingly argues that the “enormous risks of abuse” outweigh the potential benefits, asserting that such a mandate naively assumes a “fairness and integrity” with respect to the one who exercises it. In this intellectually challenging study, the author traces the complex history of the pardon power—as exercised by kings, parliaments, and clergy—and diligently charts its excesses. She recognizes the great hurdles to reforming it, chiefly the need for a constitutional amendment. There are ways to curb its abuse, she avers, including making pardon power subject to increased transparency and constraining the lobbying for pardons from presidents. Wehle’s prose is impressively lucid and accessible, particularly welcome virtues given the technical nature of the subject matter; none of her arguments presuppose that readers have specialized backgrounds in either law or American history, though either would be helpful. At the very least, she poses a provocative challenge to what is often seen as an “unlimited and sacrosanct” convention and manages to “reveal that the pardon power deserves attention and cannot be whisked atop a pedestal on the blithe assumption that the Constitution (for presidents, at least) unequivocally says this power is acceptable.”
A thoughtful and painstaking work of legal scholarship.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781954907508
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
