In an important and long-awaited sequel to his classic Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (1977), Horwitz tells how the Progressive movement—a program for political and economic as well as legal reform—transformed American legal thought from a search for impartial norms into a discipline that acknowledged the elasticity of its own rules and that borrowed the methodologies and some of the values of the social sciences. Horwitz describes the Progressive movement (and its progeny, the Legal Realism movement of the 1920's and 1930's) as an assault on ``classical legal thought''—the view that the law constitutes an impartial body of rules administered by neutral arbiters. The author argues that centralization of the American economy—with the accompanying problems of urbanization, immigration, industrialism, and polarization of economic classes—led to a gradual reexamination of classical legal thought, particularly the bias in legal orthodoxy against redistribution of wealth. Horwitz describes how economic and, ultimately, social changes brought about by WW I put irresistible pressure on courts and legal scholars to bring jurisprudential thought into closer touch with America's rapidly changing society. But, Horwitz explains, it was the Supreme Court's controversial decision in Lochner v. New York (1905)—which invalidated a maximum-hours law for bakers on the grounds that it unconstitutionally interfered with the freedom of contract—that truly catalyzed the attacks of Progressive legal scholars on the claim that law was a politically neutral science. Through a discussion of the evolution of thought in specialized legal fields and problems, and by offering short sketches about the thought of influential figures of the period like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Legal Realists Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank, Horwitz demonstrates that the effect of the new thinking on American law was pervasive and lasting. Finally, he argues persuasively that the Legal Realist tradition has had an extensive effect on the development of American law in the post-WW II period. An excellent and significant reexamination of the work and impact of the Progressive and Realist legal thinkers.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-19-507024-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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