A provocative and maddening study of judicial activism for the benefit of the haves over the have-nots.
Equality is supposedly enshrined in the law of the land, but inequality reigns supreme thanks to a battery of rulings by the Supreme Court.
From the time of the New Deal until the end of the Warren Burger era, the Supreme Court was an instrument of social policy for the benefit of the poor, shattering such things as the “anti-Okie laws” that made it a crime to transport a poor person across the borders of some 28 states and made it a highly desired career track to be a “poverty lawyer.” This track was followed by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who made her first Supreme Court argument against an Air Force policy that awarded higher benefits to male than female officers. However, writes Cohen (Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, 2016, etc.), the Nixon era saw the emergence of a right-tending court that poverty lawyers sought to avoid, one that, after Burger retired in 1986, took a definite shift toward favoring corporate interests over individual ones. The inequalities that ensued are of several kinds. Court rulings in the field of education, for example, have validated “the widespread model of overwhelmingly minority urban school districts surrounded by largely white suburban ones,” with the money flowing away from those urban centers and the concomitant “extremely high levels of school segregation.” A different ruling might have created equality of opportunity instead of a clear path to failure, Cohen suggests. Similarly, rulings on political campaign finance have favored corporations, as in the case of Citizens United, and other interventions in politics, as with Bush v. Gore, have worked against the “fundamental principle of American law that court rulings have precedential value.” Throughout, Cohen examines roads not taken, ones that might have “built a different society,” while noting that the court is likely to take an even more rightward tack in coming years.
A provocative and maddening study of judicial activism for the benefit of the haves over the have-nots.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2150-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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