Feinman’s provocative essay provides, among other things, an interesting take on the spilled-coffee-at-McDonald’s case.
A powerful right-wing conspiracy is gunning for the law—and seeking to discard a hundred and more years of constitutional precedent.
So argues contract-law specialist Feinman (Distinguished Professor of Law/Rutgers Univ.; Law 101, not reviewed) in this dissection of the “comprehensive and coordinated campaign to reshape the common law” being mounted by a neoconservative cabal of industrialists, land developers, bankers, politicians, insurance companies, and even some academics, all backed by “a network of trade groups, think tanks, right-wing foundations, membership organizations, lobbyists, and litigation centers.” Their goal, by Feinman’s account, is to restore the classical legal theory of the Gilded Age, when robber barons ruled the roost and working people were afforded few protections by the law. The social Darwinism implicit in that theory was pretty well discarded a century ago, writes Feinman, but it’s now back, manifested in arguments that hold that government is the problem and not the solution, and that market values are the sole measure of social good. Such arguments, advanced with increasing force in just the last few years, have been raised against a legal system supposedly gone mad, against the bogeyman of fat-cat trial lawyers out to enrich themselves at the expense of their poor clients. In fact, Feinman holds, this characterization is grossly exaggerated if not downright false. Any attempt to limit awards for damages will result in injustice: “Because they take cases on a contingent fee basis and advance the costs of litigation, victims’ lawyers will only take cases where the probable recovery is much greater than the expense of investigating and pursuing the case.” Moreover, he adds, the present tort system provides a needed check: manufacturers and providers take greater pains to issue safe products and services when the threat of liability hangs over them, and “if other forms of government protection are decreasing, tort law as a regulator of safety becomes more, not less, important.”
Feinman’s provocative essay provides, among other things, an interesting take on the spilled-coffee-at-McDonald’s case.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8070-4426-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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
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