Recommended particularly for attorneys and other legal professionals who can appreciate, analyze, and critique the author's...
An influential legal commentator grapples with the jurisprudential legacy of Antonin Scalia (1936-2016).
During his lengthy tenure on the Supreme Court, Scalia promoted two approaches to interpreting statutes and the Constitution, textualism and originalism, with the aim of limiting what he saw as unprincipled judicial activism through the use of more objective analytical methods. Hasen (Law and Political Science/Univ. of California, Irvine; Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, 2016, etc.) argues that while Scalia was very successful in promoting both approaches in courts and law schools, neither provide the benefits Scalia claimed for them and Scalia himself was inconsistent in their use. "Scalia tried to have it both ways,” writes the author, “by describing himself as bound by strong neutral principles, and then bending those principles to adhere to other principles, such as ideology or respect for precedent." Hasen effectively supports his critique with incisive analysis of pertinent cases and legal commentary, clearly explaining the fundamental theoretical and practical weaknesses of these methodologies. While Scalia could be charming in person, his legal writing was notorious for an overbearing and sarcastic attitude, especially in dissent. His slashing prose style certainly called attention to his views, but Hasen contends that by attacking other justices personally and questioning their intelligence and motivations, he contributed to a coarsening of legal discourse and unnecessarily "took aim at the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's decisionmaking," all to the court's detriment. In later chapters, the author addresses Scalia's approach to cases involving such politically controversial topics as affirmative action and campaign financing, and here his arguments are on shakier ground. Hasen seems to disapprove of the jurisprudence of this conservative justice on largely ideological grounds, and his discussion of these topics frequently swerves from careful analysis to partisan advocacy.
Recommended particularly for attorneys and other legal professionals who can appreciate, analyze, and critique the author's viewpoint for themselves.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-22864-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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