A carefully reasoned plea for a continuing engagement of the American judiciary in establishing a worldwide rule of law.
A liberal Supreme Court justice takes on a conservative bugbear.
Associate Justice Breyer (Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View, 2010, etc.) notes that consideration of the decisions of foreign courts in Supreme Court opinions has recently "sometimes evoked strongly adverse political reactions," even though references to foreign decisions appear from the court's earliest days. The author attempts to allay such concerns by placing the court's modern engagement with foreign law in the context of a global economy. "The objections of critics," he writes, "do not reflect the reality of today's federal court dockets….It is not the cosmopolitanism of some jurists that seeks this kind of engagement but the nature of the world itself that demands it." Breyer argues that as American government and business become more closely enmeshed with foreign governments and with international organizations and commercial interests, federal courts cannot function effectively without taking perceptive account of the decisions and underlying reasoning of other nations' courts. While he acknowledges concerns that decisions based in part on foreign law may lack political legitimacy, particularly in the context of determining what constitutes unacceptable "unusual" punishment under the Eighth Amendment, he dismisses these cases as a sideshow. Breyer illustrates the plethora of international issues confronting the court by examining at length a number of cases involving, for example, the geographical reach of the Securities and Exchange Commission rule prohibiting fraud in securities sales and the interaction between a treaty on a foreign defendant's consular access and American criminal procedure. Breyer's style and exposition are remarkably clear. His summaries of cases are sufficiently detailed to highlight the complexity and subtlety of the issues presented for decision without being entirely daunting to readers outside the legal profession. Nevertheless, few but lawyers will likely have the patience to work through the arguments.
A carefully reasoned plea for a continuing engagement of the American judiciary in establishing a worldwide rule of law.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-94619-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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