Accessible, well-edited selections amply demonstrating the astute thinking and sharp voice of an indispensable legal mind.
This entry in the new Penguin Liberty series focuses on the case writings of the most recognizable associate justice on the Supreme Court.
Long before she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ginsburg, aka the Notorious RBG, was a crusader for such issues as equal protection for women, reproductive freedom, and civil rights. Stung by her own experiences of discrimination—during pregnancy, as a law student at Harvard, and through her struggle to land a clerkship despite her sterling record—she first grasped how the 14th Amendment, intended to end racial discrimination, could be interpreted to protect sex, as well. As editor Brettschneider, who also serves as the Liberty series editor, notes, “Ginsburg needed to show that sex discrimination fell into the same category as race discrimination—an arbitrary form of discrimination based in factors individuals did not have power over.” She wielded the Equal Protection Clause first as a litigator with the ACLU in Reed v. Reed (1971), which challenged an Idaho law upholding irrational stereotypes about women as inferior to men. In her arguments, she successfully rendered sex a “suspect classification.” Her work as a litigator culminated in what the editor deems her “crowning achievement in this area”: United States v. Virginia (1996), in which Ginsburg argued against the long-standing rule that “barred women from entering” Virginia Military Academy. She prevailed by establishing what she termed “skeptical scrutiny, a "standard made clear that women could not be denied opportunity simply because of their sex.” Other key cases have included such issues as pay equity, affirmative action, voting rights, and religious freedom. Furthermore, writes Brettschneider, whose shrewd shaping of this volume makes it a good choice for students and nonscholars, Ginsburg’s “famous dissent in Bush v. Gore linked the integrity of our electoral process to the security of the people’s rights.”
Accessible, well-edited selections amply demonstrating the astute thinking and sharp voice of an indispensable legal mind.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313511-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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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
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
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