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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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