by Scott L. Cummings ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 2020
An authoritative look at how lawyers have successfully used a multilayered approach to effect social change.
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An assessment of lawyers’ contributions to public service and social change in Los Angeles.
In this nonfiction book, Cummings describes in detail several advocacy and litigation projects undertaken by lawyers in Los Angeles from the 1990s through the 2010s. The title is a play on words, encompassing both the goal of making Los Angeles a place of equality for its residents as well as putting legal action on the same plane as politics in the quest for social justice. The book focuses on combating sweatshops in the garment industry, protecting the rights of day laborers to gather and solicit work, fighting for living-wage jobs, balancing the needs of big-box stores and local businesses, and dealing with the environmental and labor challenges of truck drivers in the local ports. Cummings writes about the lawyers involved in each project, the nonprofit organizations and community leaders they collaborated with, and the variety of strategies they pursued—litigation, mediation, community organizing, and legislation. Cummings analyzes the implications of each project in its own chapter and concludes with a wide-ranging assessment of successes, failures, and lessons learned along with an evaluation of how LA has changed as a result of the work done by the lawyers featured here.
Cummings, a law professor and author of Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America's Port(2018), traces the book’s origins to a public interest seminar he taught, and with its thematic organization, the book often feels like a class syllabus, with discrete components contributing to a cohesive overall product. Its narrow geographic focus allows for a comprehensive view of public interest activities without becoming unwieldy. The author presents his findings and analysis with a meticulous attention to documentation and detail—the list of abbreviations used in the text runs to four and a half pages, and the book’s backmatter includes 100-plus pages of notes; legal and political scholars will find it a useful, informative resource. The work is clearly aimed at a specialist audience, and while generalist readers will have no trouble with it—Cummings avoids jargon of all sorts and does an excellent job of making the law comprehensible to non-experts—the density and length do not make for light reading, and on occasion, the minutiae of lawsuits, appeals, and lawmaking can be overwhelming. For its narrow audience, however, the book is a well-written and thoughtful compilation of public interest law projects that have made demonstrable differences in the lives of Angelenos, like protected spaces for day laborers and improved conditions in garment factories. The chapter on day laborers is particularly well done, offering a comprehensive perspective on the interplay of legal and political solutions while situating the lawyers’ actions within the broader historical and cultural debates around immigration in California. The author offers a solid analysis of how effective public interest law has been in bringing about necessary changes, and the book’s conclusion provides both topics for consideration and concrete, actionable recommendations to other lawyers working on behalf of the public.
An authoritative look at how lawyers have successfully used a multilayered approach to effect social change.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-021592-7
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
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