 |
 
|
Books-on-Law Home || Book Reviews || Book Notices || Publishers || Archive
—————————————————————————————
JURIST: Books-on-Law is edited by Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover of the Seattle University School of Law
Editorial Consultants:
—————————————————————————————
We start this year off with a Commentary by Professor Erwin Chemerinksy. It is a response to some of the critics of Edward Lazarus’s Closed Chambers (Time Books, 1998). Last July, Lazarus responded to his critics. Now, the debate goes on . . . with more to come in the Yale Law Journal.
Jurists on JURIST
We are proud to offer our second lineup of "Jurists on JURIST." Our first such issue of reviews by judges appeared in our inaugural April 1998 issue.
Justice Ian Callinan (High Court of Australia) opens with an outsider's evaluation of fictional law as portrayed on American television. Judge Morris S. Arnold (8th Circuit) then comments upon a widely recognized book by a noted First Amendment lawyer. Judge Norma L. Shapiro (ED Pennsylvania) has some sobering things to say about men, women, and the law. Judge Avern Cohn (ED Michigan) reflects upon a scholarly tract concerning evidence law. And finally, Judge J. Clifford Wallace (9th Circuit) discusses an important book on courts and Congress.
Read them over and judge for yourself -- file your opinion by way of Talkback.
More on Marshall (Thurgood)
Some fifteen books have been devoted to Thurgood Marshall. Plus two picture books. Plus two audio cassette sets and two videos. Plus some eleven children's books. Plus a dozen or more websites, including a very educational one keyed to Juan Williams's just-released Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (Times Books/Random House, 1998).
Add to the list the soon-to-be-published Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America (Crown, 1999) (cloth: $27.50, pp. 448) by University of Vermont political science professor Howard Ball. With seventeen constitutional law and judicial books under his belt, Professor Ball is no newcomer to the field.
Work on Defiant Life began in 1991. The book, Ball told us, discusses "Marshall's continuous anger at the racism he experienced, even on the Supreme Court." It does so in the context of a biography of Marshall's remarkable legal career, first as a litigator and then as a jurist. While the book sometimes overlaps topics discussed in Mark Tushnet's work on Thurgood Marshall, it offers a new look and detailed discussion of the cases that Marshall litigated accompanied by an analysis of the cases he later decided as a judge. Professor Ball also examines how Marshall interacted with his fellow Justices at the Supreme Court. "He saw a sort of malevolent race dilemma with Douglas and Rehnquist," Ball said. As for Justice Lewis Powell: "For Marshall, Powell epitomized the Southern power holder, [the likes of which] Marshall had always clashed. He saw his Bakke opinion as racist."
Other books of related interest by Professor Howard Ball include his Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior (Oxford University Press, 1996), Of Power and Right: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and America's Constitutional Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1991) (co-authored), and The United States Supreme Court: From the Inside Out (Prentice Hall, 1995) (coauthored).
Novel Justice
It starts out with an account of a thirty-five year old woman whose body has been discovered submerged in a Jaguar in a bay. How did she die? Accident? Or was it at the hands of her father, husband, ex-lover, or a bishop on whose charity committee she served? The coroner must decide. But the coroner is preoccupied. You see, fate has presented him with another matter to resolve: whether or not to withdraw life-support to keep his brain-dead wife existing. Enter the themes: Conscience, Rejection, Justice.
Justice Ian Callinan of the High Court of Australia is the author of Louise and the Coroner's Conscience (University of Queensland Press, 1999). That's the provisional title of this book to be published later this year.
Equal Justice vs. Criminal Justice
"In teaching criminal justice to first year law students, I was struck by two things: First, the rosy view most students have of the criminal justice system; and second, the starkly different perception that minority and less privileged students have of that same system," Professor David D. Cole (Georgetown Law) told Books-on-Law.
That observation is ably reflected in his just-published and provocative book, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press, 1999) (cloth: $25.00; pp. 224). In his book, Cole argues that, while the criminal justice system is predicated on the premise that all are equal before the law, the rules that govern it -- and, in particular, the rules of constitutional criminal procedure -- are constructed in such a way as to exploit inequality. Professor Cole explores this two-track system of justice by analyzing the rules governing police investigatory techniques, the right to counsel, jury selection, and sentencing.
Not only are such standards morally illegitimate, writes Cole, but they are also counterproductive, because they undermine the law's most potent enforcement tool -- its own legitimacy -- and thereby encourage crime. The book concludes by discussing remedies, including ways to reduce or eliminate our reliance on double standards in order to restore legitimacy, and ways to rebuild community as a force in law enforcement.
Coming Soon
The February 1999 issue of Books-on-Law will contain the following book reviews:
- Yale Kamisar, reflecting on David Simon's Homicide
- Charles D. Weisselberg, reflecting on David Simon's Homicide
- Lawrence E. Mitchell, reviewing Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
- Margaret Chon, reviewing J.M. Balkin, Cultural Software
- Andrew J. Morris, reviewing David Kairys, editor, The Politics of Law (2nd edition)
- Dennis Patterson, reviewing Richard Markovits, Matters of Principle and Peter Morton, An Institutional Theory of Law
- Frank H. Wu, reviewing Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society
Ronald K.L. Collins & David M. Skover, Editors, Books-on-Law
————————————————————————————— Board of Editorial Consultants: Raj Bhala, George Washington University Law School; Miriam Galston, George Washington University Law School; Kermit Hall, Ohio State University College of Law; Yale Kamisar, University of Michigan Law School; Lisa G. Lerman, Catholic University of America School of Law; David M. O'Brien, University of Virginia Department of Government and Foreign Affairs; Judith Resnik, Yale Law School; Edwin L. Rubin, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Steven H. Shriffrin, Cornell Law School; Nadine Strossen, New York Law School; David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School.
Administrative Assistant for Books-on-Law: Ms. Nancy Ammons
© Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, 1999.
JURIST: Books-on-Law™ is edited by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover of the Seattle University School of Law.
JURIST: The Law Professors' Network™ is directed by Professor Bernard J. Hibbitts, Associate Dean for Communications & Information Technology, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, in consultation with an international Advisory Board. E-mail JURIST at JURIST@law.pitt.edu.
© Bernard J. Hibbitts, 1999. All rights reserved. These pages may not be copied, reposted, or republished, in whole or in part, electronically or in print, without express written permission.
NOTICE
JURIST regrets that it cannot provide legal advice. For assistance with specific legal problems, please consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.
—————————————————————————————
