Book Reviews

Laura Kalman’s The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism is a rollicking romp through a half-century of law and legal scholarship. Suggesting that law professors read the book is something akin to asking playwrights to read their latest reviews. Kalman, a law-trained historian, tells us there was a time when she read law review articles to ease her to sleep, a strategy that failed her once the articles had “become too interesting.” Kalman’s subjects, legal scholars, are likely to find her book equally engrossing, and for reasons that reach far beyond membership in a mutual admiration society.

The second volume in a series entitled “Race and the American Legal Process,” Shades of Freedom continues an odyssey that Judge Higginbotham embarked on over thirty years ago. This work shepherds the reader through centuries of ever-changing legal oppression of African Americans. As elegantly put by Judge Higginbotham himself, this book “delineate[s] the law’s contribution to the frequent dehumanization of many African Americans and its impact on the journey from the midnight of total oppression to some early dawns, where there were occasional glitters of light and muted shades of freedom.”

Lori Wallach & Michelle Sforza, Whose Trade Organization? Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy: An Assessment of the World Trade Organization. Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen (1999). Pp. xii, 229, index. $15.

Review of The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review

Almost a century ago, Charles Beard’s study of the American Founding, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, set the terms of debate about constitutional history for the Progressive era and informed the way lawyers viewed the Constitution for even longer. In The People Themselves, Larry Kramer has quite possibly done the same for a new generation of lawyers. Beard took an irreverent, tough-minded approach to the American Founding; Kramer is deeply skeptical of the conventional way that the Constitution is defined and offers an alternative that puts ordinary people, rather than judges, at the center of constitutional interpretation. If there is another Progressive era, it now has one of its foundational texts.

Book Review of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. By Daniel J. Solove. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 256. $24.00.