Though repetitive and a touch too sweeping at times, this is a worthy addition to the literature of critical legal...
A law professor and cyberactivist examines America’s “constitutional fundamentalists.”
It’s an article of faith, writes Franks (Univ. of Miami School of Law), president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, that the Constitution is the embodiment of a foundational wisdom that has not come along since. Yet, she argues, it also embodies a “founding fraud”—i.e., that the authors of that document really believed that “we the people” included everyone and not just adult white male property holders. “Constitutional fundamentalism,” writes Franks, “whether of the right or left, sanctifies the men and the moment of the founding era: that is, an era in which the interests of women and racial minorities were subordinated to those of white, economically powerful men.” The First Amendment is a particularly active battleground in that clash of interests, with adherents to the cult of the Constitution insistent that freedom of speech is absolute even as the author and like-minded critics seek legislation to protect Americans from such things as cyberstalking. In that amendment, she writes, civil liberties organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Freedom Foundation were as implacably opposed as any conservative think tank. As for the Second Amendment, Franks argues that the idea that self-defense requires access to firearms is “reductive and dangerous to the general welfare.” Moreover, its protections are unevenly distributed: “Who gets to stand their ground?" she asks, provocatively, observing that the National Rifle Association and other gun-freedom groups have never been quick to encourage armed self-defense on the part of black Americans. Such double standards are abetted by strict interpretations of a document that, Franks allows, has become more sympathetic to the interests of minorities, as with the 14th Amendment—but even so, such changes “have at most modified white male supremacy, not dislodged it.”
Though repetitive and a touch too sweeping at times, this is a worthy addition to the literature of critical legal studies—and a timely text as battles over the Constitution and its interpretation continue to rage.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0322-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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