In Wildland, Evan Osnos observes the raging fires of political, environmental, and social problems in America, but his leftist orientation misidentifies how those fires got started.
Author: Betsy Clarke (Betsy Clarke)
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A Letter from ‘Smart America’
In Last Best Hope, George Packer divides America into four categories of people, about half of whom he despises, and then proceeds to lament their incompatibility as a threat to democracy.
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Abortion: Not Just for Women Anymore
Like childbearing, abortion isn’t just for women anymore. That is the message coming from the LGBT community and what were once thought of as women’s rights groups in response to Texas Senate Bill 8, the new Texas anti-abortion law. These culturally powerful groups are using the new law to promote current gender ideology, which views reproduction...
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Legal Hysteria Spreads as the Court Revisits Roe
It is hard to keep a straight face while reading the hysteria over the United States Supreme Court agreeing to hear Dobson v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case challenging the state statute prohibiting nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. For those in the legal establishment, the greatest fear seems to be that this...
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The ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Double Standard
Though the actions of President Donald Trump’s most foolish supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday were disgraceful, I can’t help but compare the news coverage of this event with the coverage of the Black Lives Matter/Antifa protesters in cities across the country last year. In my home state of Ohio, those protesting the death...
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Union Without Unity
Break It Up; by Richard Kreitner; Little, Brown and Company; 497 pp., $30.00 Stamped on the United States’ three-dollar Continental bill in 1783 was the phrase, “The Outcome Is in Doubt.” A more appropriate phrase for our own time could hardly be found. It also serves as the subtext of journalist Richard Kreitner’s fascinating new book, which chronicles the...
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Fatal Amendments
Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book, The Cult of the Constitution, an unforgiving disparagement of the Constitution’s white male origins and the allegedly unwoke...
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Supreme Court’s Drifting Days Are Done
This scrupulously objective book may be considered a gift to conservatives who have long despaired about the possibility of principled legal tenets regularly prevailing in Supreme Court opinions. For decades this long-suffering group has watched Republican Supreme Court appointees concur in various left-wing crackpot decisions that have become the law of the land. Thankfully, such...
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No Justice, No Peace
There is no pleasing Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett, author of the death-penalty-abolishment screed End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, though much about the current state of criminal justice should please him. Nationwide, death sentences and executions are at historic lows, yet he claims that the...
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Law and Liberty
Let’s say that a state passed a statute proscribing teachers from teaching reading in a language other than English until the student had passed the eighth grade. Violation of the statute was a misdemeanor. The state’s rationale was to assure that immigrant children learned English and assimilated. In fact, the state declared that teaching immigrant...
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The Court in Quandary
When the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s preliminary injunction against President Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from certain countries, it cited Trump’s statements about Islam as its rationale. American Muslims challenging the ban had alleged injury of two types: First, the Muslim plaintiffs felt marginalized by the President’s characterizations; second, they...
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Drain the Racket
When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers. Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons. Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal. In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...
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The Constitution Knows
What is the justification for abortion? Is abortion a moral or therapeutic concept? Medical or legal? Sociological or personal? These considerations underlie Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, a narrative of the comprehensive criminal enterprise of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., Philadelphia’s notorious baby killer and drug trafficker, by the Irish journalists Ann...
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The Real Target of Public Schools
Last school year, my son—who was a fourth grader at a public school— came home with a red piece of paper entitled “Family Call to Action.” The letter on the front, preprinted by a corporation but signed by his teacher, informed me that my son would be joining the Target Stores and Hanes Corporation “Kids...
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The Politics of Rape
When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...
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Continuing Legal Education
Continuing legal education is imposed on lawyers by the Missouri Bar Association and the Missouri Supreme Court, and right before the November election I took a day to fulfill the requirements. The only CLE show in town at the time was a seminar presented by the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys on using a vocational...
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Crime and Capital Punishment
“Missouri doesn’t have a death penalty,” a former prosecutor remarked to me last Christmas. He was wrong, as he well knew. The Revised Statutes of Missouri specifically allow for capital punishment. But as a practical matter, the man was right. At the time he spoke, Missouri had not put a person to death since 1965,...
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The War Toys Meltdown
At Circus World, Mattel’s Rattlor, a Masters of the Universe character, glares at his potential purchasers. “Sounds fearsome battle rattle before attacking,” the package advertises. The action figure is an “evil snake man creature with the quick strike head.” Price: $3.98. LJN Toys, Ltd., on the other hand, offers Thundercats Berserkers Hammerhand, which comes complete...
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Passage Back from India
Identifying the patterns of life, tracking the process of modern thought and action, requires an author who knows a big idea from a little one, a tall order in a day of moral relativism and cultural confusion. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala appears to be such a writer. She is German born, of Polish-Jewish descent, British educated,...
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The Surley Skies & Other Civil Slights
What kinds of behavior does our culture encourage? The question is ever in style, and usually a pat and misleading answer is on the tongue of every commentator. Greed, bellicosity, phoniness, racism, sexism, and speciesism come immediately to their minds. However, the question inevitably is worthy of a more meaningful analysis. Our culture has accomplished...
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Where’s the Baking Soda?
Nora Ephron is a genius at turning her personal life in to cash. In her essays, which she has collected in previous volumes, she has taken us to events and places including her college reunion, therapy group, and her amniocentesis. However, take away her individualized experiences and the essays become identical to those of every...