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 8/7/2011 I wanted to fall in love with James Stewart's Tangled Webs, (Penguin Press, New York: 2011). The subtitle alone persuaded me the author was on to something important: "How False Statements are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff." But my love was not to be. I read my way to...
7/19/2011 Clarence Darrow is the sort of icon whose status guarantees that new biographies will be produced about him from time to time. Although dead now some 73 years, his presence lingers. He is on anyone's short list as one of the nation's greatest trial lawyers. Andrew Kersten's, Clarence Darrow:...
7/16/2011 "The authorities were corrupt, even the best of them. The power they held was often by default.... They had as much power as we gave them, and when we wanted to take some back we could. Yes, they might jail us in the end, but only because we held ourselves back. Fear and respect flowed in our...
7/11/2011 If I could recommend one book to the lay reader about what is going in our courts, sadly, it would not be my own: It would be David K. Shipler's, The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberty. (If the reader had the taste for an earthier assessment of what it is like...
4/16/2011 The trial and death of Socrates stands alongside that of Jesus of Nazareth as a milestone in our civilization. What these deaths signify is far from clear. Neither man wrote memoirs about what he taught. Both were killed by political authorities intent on doing what politicians always do -...
3/19/2011 This current New York Review of Books features a savage review of All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, a new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, by Garry Wills. Entitled "Superficial & Sublime," Wills is impressive as always with his...
3/16/2011 "There is no such thing as justice - in or out of court." The words are Clarence Darrow's. The same Clarence Darrow who once said:"Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom. Justice is what comes out of a courtroom."
These are decidedly antinomian sentiments,...
2/13/2011 I love John Brown. I have for a long, long time. Indeed, one of the best books I have read in the past decade is about the abolitionist. Russell Banks's fictional biography, Cloudsplitter, is what fire would be like if it could be compressed into two dimensions. My mind burned as I read that...
2/1/2011 I have a secret. I think Leo Tolstoy might be reincarnate and practicing law in California. I'm not sure how far I want to go with this hypothesis, but there are certain similarities between the Russian Count and a solitary soul out West. I would never have been able to spot the resemblance had I...
10/18/2010 The Biblical story of Job can be read on several levels. On the one hand, Job is the faithful servant of a powerful God, never failing in his faith, even when he is undone by sorrows. It is also the story of a man made sport of by unseen powers: When God succumbs to Satan's dare and permits...  |
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