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Author: Corey Robin
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1627793844
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.
Author: Corey Robin
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1627793844
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.
Author: Ellen Berrey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022624637X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That’s a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it? Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences. Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.
Author: Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
In the decades that followed Reconstruction, the Supreme Court struck down civil rights legislation, validated Jim Crow laws, and stopped the government from regulating big business in almost any form. One justice, however, stood against the conservative trend: John Marshall Harlan. His advocacy of a color-blind Constitution in his powerful dissents established a rich legacy that was validated decades later by the Warren Court. But behind the legal opinions, the great dissenter was a complex, enigmatic, even contradictory man. In Judicial Enigma, Tinsley E. Yarbrough offers the most complete portrait we have ever had of this critical figure. He follows Harlan from antebellum Kentucky, when he was an outspoken Whig and Unionist, through his exploits as a colonel in the Civil War, to his political career before his appointment to the Court in 1877. Harlan's early life presents a fascinating contrast to his later stands on civil rights. Yarbrough shows, for example, that Harlan maintained a wary relationship with his black half-brother Robert (who rose to wealth during the California gold rush and to influence as a prominent Ohio Republican). The future justice also spouted openly racist language as he campaigned in postwar Kentucky--reflecting views he never entirely discarded. Even in later life, the man who became the Court's greatest moral force was not above using his position to escape his many creditors; he also did nothing to save his alcoholic, opium-addicted brother James from dying in a Kentucky almshouse. Yet moral force he was, and Yarbrough deftly explores his astonishing record as he dissented against a roster of decisions that are now considered a roll-call of error and injustice: Plessy vs. Ferguson (validating Jim Crow laws), Lochner vs. New York (overturning a law limiting working hours), the Sugar Trust Case (gutting the Sherman Antitrust Act), and many more. And yet, even here Harlan remained an enigma; as Yarbrough shows, he sometimes contradicted the same sentiments that have since sanctified his memory. In biographies of Justice Hugo Black, Judge Frank Johnson, J. Waties Waring, and John Marshall Harlan's grandson, the second Justice Harlan, Yarbrough has shown himself to be a gifted chronicler of the great figures of American law. In this volume, he offers the most insightful account of the man still remembered as the great dissenter.
Author: Joan Biskupic
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093280
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic Chief Justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far. John Roberts was named to the Supreme Court in 2005 claiming he would act as a neutral umpire in deciding cases. His critics argue he has been anything but, pointing to his conservative victories on voting rights and campaign finance. Yet he broke from orthodoxy in his decision to preserve Obamacare. How are we to understand the motives of the most powerful judge in the land? In The Chief, award-winning journalist Joan Biskupic contends that Roberts is torn between two, often divergent, priorities: to carry out a conservative agenda, and to protect the Court's image and his place in history. Biskupic shows how Roberts's dual commitments have fostered distrust among his colleagues, with major consequences for the law. Trenchant and authoritative, The Chief reveals the making of a justice and the drama on this nation's highest court.
Author: H. N. Hirsch
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
ISBN: 1610272463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
A recognized, fascinating, and much-cited classic of judicial biography and Supreme Court insight is now available in a quality ebook edition—featuring active contents, linked notes, proper formatting, and a fully-linked Index. Felix Frankfurter was perhaps the most influential jurist of the 20th century—and one of the most complex men ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Mysteries and apparent contradictions abound. A vibrant and charming friend to many, why are his diaries so full of vitriol against judicial colleagues, especially Douglas and Black? An active Zionist, why did he so zealously enjoy the company of Boston Brahmins, whose snobbery he detested? Most puzzling of all: why did someone known before his appointment to the Court as a civil libertarian—even a radical—become our most famous and persistent advocate for austere judicial restraint? In answering these and other questions, this pathbreaking biography of Frankfurter explores the personality of the man as a key to understanding the Justice. Harry Hirsch sees in Frankfurter's fascinating and complex persona a clue to the biggest mystery of all: the contrast between the brilliant and ambitious young immigrant rising by his intellect and charm to leadership in U.S. academic and political life; and the judge, equally brilliant, but increasingly isolated, embittered, and ineffective. "Hirsch's well-written book ... dispels the contradictory image that has long mystified students of Felix Frankfurter. His portrait is unvarnished, yet scrupulously fair. Revealed is a consummate manipulator of public men and policy. No future biographer can safely ignore the brilliant biographical work." — Alpheus Thomas Mason, Princeton University "Hirsch's carefully constructed and supported psychological analysis of Justice Frankfurter gives us an exciting look at the inner workings of the Supreme Court." — Martin Shapiro, University of California, Berkeley A new addition to the Legal History & Biography Series from Quid Pro Books. This is an authorized and unabridged digital republication of the acclaimed book first published by Basic Books.
Author: Kevin Merida
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767916360
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
“Justice Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court’s most reclusive member [and] a prime candidate for a careful, fair-minded biography. In delivering it, Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher have done some quiet justice of their own.”—Washington Post There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from racially conscious admissions policies. Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have never spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candid conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.
Author: Ralph A. Rossum
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700619488
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Though Clarence Thomas has been a Supreme Court Justice for nearly 25 years and has written close to five hundred opinions, legal scholars and pundits have given him short shrift, often, in fact, dismissing him as a narrow partisan, a silent presence on the bench, an enemy of his race, a tool of Antonin Scalia. And yet, as this book makes clear, few justices of the Supreme Court have developed as clear and consistent a constitutional jurisprudence as Thomas. Also little known but apparent in Ralph A. Rossum's detailed assessment of the justice's jurisprudence is how profound Thomas's impact has been in certain areas of constitutional law—not only on the bench but also even among some of his erstwhile disparaging critics. During his years on the Court, Thomas has pursued an original general meaning approach to constitutional interpretation; he has been unswayed by claims of precedent—by the gradual build-up of interpretations that, to his mind, come to distort the original meaning of the constitutional provision in question, leading to muddled decisions and contradictory conclusions. In a close reading of Thomas's hundreds of well-crafted, extensively researched, and passionately argued majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions, Rossum explores how the justice applies this original meaning approach to questions of constitutional structure as they relate to federalism; substantive rights found in the First Amendment's religion and free speech and press clauses, the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms, the Fifth Amendment's restrictions on the taking of private property, and the Fourteenth Amendment regarding abortion rights; and various criminal procedural provisions found in the Ex Post Facto Clauses and the Bill of Rights. Thomas grounds his original general meaning approach in the Declaration of Independence and its "self evident" truth that "all men are created equal"; that truth, he insists, "preced[es] and underl[ies] the Constitution." Understanding Clarence Thomas traces the many consequences that, for Thomas, flow from the centrality of that "self evident" truth, and how these shape his opinions in cases concerning desegregation, racial preference, and voting rights. The most thorough explication ever given of the jurisprudence of this prolific but little-understood justice, this work offers a unique opportunity to grasp not just the meaning of Clarence Thomas's opinions but their significance for the Supreme Court and constitutional interpretation in our day.
Author: D.L.C. Maclachlan
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773588426
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
How do we acquire knowledge through a sensory input from our environment? In The Enigma of Perception, D.L.C. Maclachlan revives the traditional causal representative theory of perception which dominated philosophical thinking for hundreds of years by revealing the important element of truth the theory contained. The traditional theory was not a complete explanation of perception, because it presupposed a causal system including both the physical objects and the subjective experiences. The pattern of inference from sensations to external objects, which lies at its heart, is nevertheless legitimate, because the assumptions on which it depends are generally recognized as true. The emerging enigma is how to explain this original knowledge of the world on which the traditional theory depends. The key idea is that sense experience is constructed as a response to sensory input - an act whose purpose is to represent a reality beyond the cognitive subject. The Enigma of Perception develops original ideas to explain this process in detail, with help from numerous philosophers from John Locke to David Chalmers.
Author: Andrew Hodges
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865123
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 768
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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before his suicide at age forty-one. This New York Times–bestselling biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing's royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. Capturing both the inner and outer drama of Turing’s life, Andrew Hodges tells how Turing’s revolutionary idea of 1936--the concept of a universal machine--laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing’s leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program--all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime. The inspiration for a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Alan Turing: The Enigma is a gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution.
Author: Morris A. Inch
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1608997634
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
While justice is thought indispensible for a healthy society, its complex character gives rise to conflicting applications. Accordingly, The Enigma of Justice serves as an appropriate title. In greater detail, the course is set with a consideration of justice in context of the prophets. These were faced with the unenviable task of fine-tuning the monarchy to its covenant ideals. The topic is then treated in its classical setting, as one of the cardinal virtues. This introduces a series of competing theories, more or less compatible with one another. In still greater detail, the text treats a wide range of related topics, such as justice in conjunction with poverty, mercy, and freedom. In conclusion, it touches on justice from an international perspective.
