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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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