Through a series of ever-vibrant essays—some original, some reprints—Harvard law professor and legal celebrity Dershowitz (Letters to a Young Lawyer, p. 1260, etc.) advances his sensible theory that experience filtered through democratic processes is the source of our notions of right and rights.
Where do our rights come from? Considering Dershowitz’s contentious, free-spirited personality, it comes as little surprise that natural law has little appeal to him, nor does the positivist strain of pure-human constructs. It is easy to puncture the sanctity of these approaches, and Dershowitz does just so. In their stead, he proposes the idea of “nurtural” rights: slow accretions of experience from previous injustices, rude lessons from the past, our collective run-ins with wrongs. There may be no consensus on what perfect justice is, but we are often able to find common ground on what is wrong: the Holocaust, the Crusades, slavery. Through this process of trial and error, and applying the tools of democratic politics, we have fashioned a body of fundamental rights—of speech, of and from religion, assembly, and such—and individual rights, particularly as they relate to limitations on the power of the majority. And each right is also a dynamic product, “informed by the gradual changes of history and experience,” both from legal and moral perspectives, and “one must constantly defend it, reconsider it, redefine it, and be prepared to change it.” Because, he states, that is what our law is about: devising processes for resolving conflicts in a pluralist democracy while making sure the majority does not tyrannize the minority, especially the minority of one. Dershowitz understands and accepts liberty's burden—the important rights extended to the unpopular, the marginalized, even the dangerous—and makes a convincing case that such a burden is worth the price.
Dershowitz turns the spotlight from himself and onto his ideas, which shine with decency and the kind of provocation that makes one want to think good and hard.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-18141-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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