A lifetime of scholarship and an elegant pen combine for an outstanding read.
A distinguished legal historian looks at how dissents have influenced our understanding of the Constitution.
Mindful of the institution’s authority and prestige, chief justices have always preferred that the Supreme Court speak with one voice. But disagreements—hardly surprising among powerful personalities asked to navigate the most difficult legal issues—have always been a part of the jurisprudence. While it’s true that most dissents are eminently forgettable, some have contributed mightily to our ongoing Constitutional dialogue. The dissenters address first, of course, the majority, pointing out weak arguments or misunderstood facts; second, the bench, bar, and legal academy; third, the other branches of government; and finally, the public and posterity, all in an attempt to move the law in a direction the majority declines to follow. In this scholarly yet wholly accessible treatment, Urofsky (Emeritus, Law, Public Policy, History/Virginia Commonwealth Univ.; Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, 2009, etc.) chronologically examines notable dissents and dissenters in the court’s history and considers the phenomenon from all angles, including how even the threat of a dissent can help shape the majority opinion. He supplies illuminating discussions of John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Brandeis, great dissenters whose opinions “carried the seeds for growth and the future transformation of judicial doctrine.” Readers will appreciate Urofsky’s resurrection of some lesser-known justices—Stephen Field, Wiley Rutledge—and their contributions to our Constitutional discourse. Also noteworthy is the author’s dissection of the rhetorical combat among Franklin Roosevelt appointees, his tracking of the evolving understanding of privacy, affirmative action, and sexual orientation from the Warren through the Roberts court, and his treatment of the “permanent dissents” on capital punishment cases. Whether it’s Jackson on wartime internment or Black on the right to counsel, the very best dissents constitute, in one scholar’s words, “buried ammunition for future generations to unearth when the time comes.”
A lifetime of scholarship and an elegant pen combine for an outstanding read.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-37940-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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