A diffusive, but always interesting, exploration of science in the law.
Law is more art than science. Yet the law adds to and subtracts from its knowledge base, like science, and relies on scientific findings for guidance.
So observes Faigman (Law/Univ. of California, Hastings; Legal Alchemy, not reviewed), noting that the layers of science that run through American case law produce sometimes puzzling results: “The Constitution . . . is a strange admixture of abiding fundamental values and archaic and obsolete natural philosophy,” and “the Supreme Court adheres to constitutional doctrine sometimes in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Even so, Faigman adds, the flexibility of the Constitution allows for endless new layerings. Thus, even as vestiges of the anthropology that defended slaveholding in the Dred Scott case—and that made Thomas Jefferson wonder whether he were right in the matter of “all men are created equal”—continue to float about in the depths of the law, contemporary jurists draw on the latest sociological findings of the role of race in, say, educational attainment to argue playing field–leveling programs pro and con. Thus, too, Justice Stevens was recently moved to remark that “if a constitutional rule is premised on empirical facts, then the rule should change when the facts, or our knowledge of the facts, change,” concurring with Justice O’Connor’s hopeful determination that while today using race to balance student-body composition is necessary, “twenty-five years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interests approved today.” (Notes Faigman, “It will be the social scientists of 2028 who will tell us whether Justice O’Connor’s prediction has come true.”) The law’s admission of and reliance on science—especially statistics, that most empirical of disciplines—is sometimes a source of conflict. An even greater conflict, Faigman argues, is the failure of the Court to develop a “set or systematic criteria by which to measure constitutional facts”: that is, to develop a science of its own.
A diffusive, but always interesting, exploration of science in the law.Pub Date: June 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7274-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
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
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