An authoritative look at how lawyers have successfully used a multilayered approach to effect social change.
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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For those satisfied with blame-the-victim tidbits of received wisdom.
The noted conservative economist delivers arguments both fiscal and political against social justice initiatives such as welfare and a federal minimum wage.
A Black scholar who has lived through many civil rights struggles, Sowell is also a follower of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who insisted that free market solutions are available for every social problem. This short book begins with what amounts to an impatient declaration that life isn’t fair. Some nations are wealthy because of geographical advantages, and some people are wealthy because they’re smarter than others. “Some social justice advocates may implicitly assume that various groups have similar developed capabilities, so that different outcomes appear puzzling,” he writes. In doing so, he argues, they fail to distinguish between equal opportunity and equal capability. Sowell is dismissive of claims that Black Americans and other minorities are systematically denied a level playing field: Put non-white kids in charter schools, he urges, and presto, their math scores will zoom northward as compared to those in public schools. “These are huge disparities within the same groups, so that neither race nor racism can account for these huge differences,” he writes, clearly at pains to distance himself from the faintest suggestion that race has anything to do with success or failure in America. At the same time, he isn’t exactly comfortable with the idea that economic inequalities exist, and he tries to finesse definitions to suit his convictions: “The terms ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are misleading in another and more fundamental sense. These terms apply to people’s stock of wealth, not their flows of income.” As for crime? Give criminals more rights, he asserts, as with Miranda v. Arizona, and crime rates go up—an assertion that overlooks numerous other variables but fits Sowell’s ideological slant.
For those satisfied with blame-the-victim tidbits of received wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781541603929
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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