Not every citizen will read this book, but we’d be better off if a good many did.
A veteran of the bench hands down sobering judgments about the U.S. judicial system.
We want to think that when we have our day in court, justice will be served. In this debut collection of essays, Rakoff, drawing on two-plus decades of experience as a federal judge, suggests otherwise, describing a system “beset by hypocritical pretentions, conundrums, paradoxes, and shortcomings.” Our courts, he argues, function differently than how the Founding Fathers intended, contrary to what is portrayed in the media and in opposition to the notions of most Americans. The author comes at his topic from varying angles, arguing that eyewitness testimony is dubious; the death penalty is far from error-free (and more expensive than incarceration); and the amazing forensics portrayed on TV shows are not necessarily based on reliable science. Saliently, he also shows that many accused enter into pleas in which prosecutors hold all the cards, and a compelling minihistory of Chief Justice John Marshall illustrates how his court set the standard for a judicial system “more deferential to the executive branch…than to the legislative branch,” the echoes of which are heard today. Some of these pieces began as articles in the New York Review of Books and remain in that style. Although Rakoff sometimes uses unnecessarily dense language—e.g., “the future deterrent value of successfully prosecuting individuals far outweighs the prophylactic benefits of imposing compliance measures that are often little more than window-dressing”—a law degree is not required to follow the narrative, which never slips into screed. As the author makes clear, our justice system affects all of us. We pay dearly—financially and otherwise—when people are imprisoned falsely or for longer than they should be. In addition to laying out the flaws, Rakoff offers practical solutions. Even if you do not agree with his answers, it’s hard to refute his case that we have serious problems that deserve attention.
Not every citizen will read this book, but we’d be better off if a good many did.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-28999-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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