May 6, 2008
"Exporting American Dreams"
Oh, come on. Do you expect me to believe that? Of course you didn't.
Neither did I. But we'll all have a chance to learn more about this fascinating episode in Marshall's life this summer, when Mary Dudziak's new book "Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey" hits the bookstores.
It gets a great review from Publisher's Weekly. (Go here and scroll a bit more than halfway down.)
Posted by Eric at 5:27 PM
March 24, 2008
A Book Tour for the Ages.
The photo on the page captures quite a gathering of intellects.
Yes, that's Learned Hand, lecturing alongside Paul Freund and F.S.C. Northrop about his (Hand's) then-recent book "The Spirit of Liberty." (I'm sure Professor Clarence Morris of Penn Law was no slouch either, but I'm not familiar with him.)
Now that's what I call a book tour.
Posted by Eric at 3:21 PM
January 18, 2008
"American Inquistion" on TV
Posted by Eric at 10:09 PM
January 2, 2008
A New Review of "American Inquisition"
His suggestion that the book would have been strengthened by some discussion of Hannah Arendt and the "banality of evil" is a fair one. This is something I've thought about for a long time, but my views weren't (and still aren't) sufficiently formed for me to go public with them. My next big book project will be an account of the roles that lawyers played in facilitating the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, and I expect that this will be one major theme of that work.
UPDATE: One small, but important, correction to the review. The book is a study of the bureaucratic adjudications of loyalty not of "Japanese citizens," as the review states, nor of the "Issei," or first-generation Japanese immigrants, but of the American-citizen "Nisei," or second-generation Americans of Japanese ancestry.
Posted by Eric at 8:39 PM
December 22, 2007
And worth every penny.
Posted by Eric at 10:14 PM
December 12, 2007
"American Inquisition" on C-SPAN Book TV
Posted by Eric at 10:00 AM
December 10, 2007
"The absurdities and weirdness of the loyalty procedures take on a genuine Kafkaesque quality."
Posted by Eric at 2:50 PM
November 28, 2007
Upcoming book talks -- Southern California
The first will be tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 29, at UCLA's Young Research Library, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., in the library's Presentation Room, which is Room 11348. The talk is part of the Aratani Endowed Chair Speaker Series, and is co-sponsored by the Charles E. Young Research Library, the Asian American Studies Center and Department, and the UCLA Law School's Critical Race Studies Program. UCLA law professor Jerry Kang has kindly agreed to moderate the event.
The second is a panel discussion at the University of Southern California on Friday, November 30, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., in the Garden Court of the Commons. The panel's called "History Lessons for the War on Terror: Military Tribunals, Language Interpreters, Covert Operations." The two other panelists will be Roger Dingman of USC, who'll be talking about Japanese Americans' roles as foreign language interpreters in World War II, and Brian Hayashi of Kyoto University, who'll be talking about Japanese, Chinese, and Korean American intelligence agents in World War II. Steven Lamy of USC will offer some comments. This panel is jointly co-sponsored by USC Department of Asian American Studies, Center for International Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies Services, Asian Pacific American Alumni Association, Department of History, East Asian Studies Center, and USC College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences.
Finally, on Saturday afternoon, December 1, at 2:00 p.m., I'll be giving a talk at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.
If these are events that might interest someone you know, please do mention them!
Posted by Eric at 9:55 AM
November 8, 2007
"American Inquisition" Reviewed
Posted by Eric at 10:43 PM
October 18, 2007
"American Inquisition": A Portrait of a "Disloyal" American
Before talking a bit about what happened after the Joint Board fell apart, which I'll do later today, I thought it might be useful to make this abstract system a bit more real by illustrating its impact on a real person's life.
Consider the case of Harry Iba.
He was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Los Angeles in 1915. His family was Buddhist. He did not hold dual citizenship -- just American -- and he never traveled to Japan as a child. His one trip to Japan was at age 22 in 1937, when he went on a sightseeing trip there with a number of boys in a judo club.
Unlike many Japanese Americans, Harry Iba never attended a Japanese language after-school program, and described his spoken Japanese as only "fair." He graduated from high school in Los Angeles in 1934 and went to work in the family nursery business. By 1943, he was incarcerated at the Amache Relocation Center in eastern Colorado with his parents. One older brother was in the U.S. Army and another was in medical school in Boston.
Harry Iba subscribed to the Los Angeles Times, the Examiner, Reader's Digest, Time, Life, Sunset, and Popular Mechanics. He liked to play football, ping-pong, and outdoor sports. He collected camellia plants.
On the loyalty questionnaire he filled out at Amache, he answered "yes" to the two key questions: he was willing to "forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan" and to "serve in the U.S. armed forces on combat duty wherever ordered."
A number of white Americans, including his lawyer and a former landlord, wrote glowing letters of reference about his loyalty.
He reported on his loyalty questionnaire that he had no accounts in foreign banks, but a search of bank records revealed that his parents had set up three accounts -- one in his name, one jointly in his and his mother's names, and one as a trust account with his mother as trustee -- in amounts totaling about $3500.
At its meeting on August 19, 1943, over the dissent of the representative from the civilian War Relocation Authority, the Japanese American Joint Board made an adverse finding on Harry Iba's loyalty and recommended his indefinite detention.
Posted by Eric at 9:15 AM
October 17, 2007
"American Inquisition": Buddhists Lose One Point; Christians Gain Two
With data in hand, the government next confronted the problem of processing
it. This task initially fell to a loyalty tribunal that the War
Department created specifically for this purpose: the Japanese American
Joint Board ("JAJB").
The JAJB was a tribunal with voting representatives from one civilian agency
(the War Relocation Authority, which ran the "relocation centers"
where Japanese Americans were detained) and a number of military units,
including the Provost Marshal General's Office ("PMGO") (which was
responsible for industrial security). The FBI was to have been a voting
member as well, but J. Edgar Hoover pulled his representative out after just a
few weeks.
If you have ever been on, say, an admissions committee or a hiring committee, you will quickly recognize the problem that the JAJB faced. It had tens of thousands of loyalty files to review, but it lacked the time and manpower carefully to review each file. So it did what admissions and hiring committees do in these situations: it tried to come up with a template that would allow it to process the files without having to review each one.
The first idea was a point system. Bureaucrats in the PMGO would go
through individual files – especially the loyalty questionnaires that the
internees had filled out – and assign positive and negative point values to the
answers, producing a net loyalty score for each file.
So, for example, a Japanese American who was a Christian got a plus-2; a
Japanese American who was a Buddhist got a minus-1. If he was "an
instructor in Japanese hobbies or sports" such as judo, he got a minus-2;
if he was "an instructor in [an] American sport or hobby," he got a
plus-2. For each Japanese-American periodical he received, he got a
minus-1. If he'd never traveled to Japan, he got a plus-1. One trip
to Japan earned him a minus-1. Two trips to Japan got him a minus-3.
More than three years in a Japanese-language after-school program in the
United States got him a minus-3. And so
on.
You get the idea.
For reasons that the archival record does not disclose, the JAJB ditched the point system after a while and shifted instead to a system that looked for particular patterns of factors and then broke the files into three large groups – a "white" group that merited an automatic stamp of loyalty, a "black" group that merited an automatic stamp of disloyalty, and a "brown" or "tan" group that required case-by-case scrutiny of files. (Yes, that's right: the color between "black" and "white" was not "gray" but "brown.")
Using this system, the JAJB processed files for well over a year.
It ended up condemning more than one in every four American citizens of Japanese ancestry as disloyal.
This was not, however, the final word on Japanese Americans' loyalties in World War II. The JAJB was so wracked by conflict between its civilian member, the War Relocation Authority, and its military members, that its authority quickly slipped away. By the end of 1943, as a practical matter, the constituent agencies on the JAJB were quietly making their own loyalty judgments and disregarding the conclusions of the JAJB.
More on that later, or tomorrow.
Posted by Eric at 3:18 PM
October 16, 2007
You Gotta Love Solove
Check it out.
Posted by Eric at 1:49 PM
October 14, 2007
"American Inquisition": A New Study of the Inner Workings of the Japanese American Internment
I ground the book in extensive new archival research in the records of the civilian and military agencies that passed judgment on the loyalties of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. As historian Roger Daniels says, the book presents a new story of "bad news from the good war."
I'll be blogging about the book's claims here over the next several days. Today, I'll start things off by offering a very brief account of how the federal government ended up in the business of passing judgment on the loyalty of more than 40,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1943 and 1945.
If you've read Snow Falling on Cedars or seen The War, or have read or taught Korematsu v. United States, you know that a presumption of disloyalty forced the entire Japanese population of the West Coast – citizens and aliens alike – out of their homes and behind barbed wire in the late winter of 1942. The presumption was racial. "The Japanese race is an enemy race," said General John DeWitt of the Western Defense Command in explaining his decision to evict just the population of Japanese ancestry. "It was impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety. It was not there was insufficient time in which to make such a determination; it was simply a matter of facing the realities that a positive determination could not be made, that an exact separation of the 'sheep from the goats' was unfeasible."
Within a year, a set of pressures from both inside and outside the camps forced the government to reverse its position and try to separate the "sheep from the goats."
The pressures were complex. On the one hand, there were strong pressures to free some of the internees. Western farmers needed internees released to work their fields. The War Relocation Authority ("WRA"), which ran the camps, wanted to begin "relocating" internees into jobs in towns and cities across the central and eastern United States. And the military wanted to trawl the camps for volunteers into the segregated unit that would become the fabled 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
On the other hand, there were strong pressures to push some of the internees deeper into incarceration. The War Relocation Authority was running ten small cities and needed a mechanism for forcing those it viewed as "troublemakers" into segregation. The WRA was also setting up a courtroom defense to the pending habeas corpus case of Ex parte Endo, which challenged the detention of Japanese Americans, and needed evidence of disloyalty to bolster its legal theory supporting the detention program. In addition, occasional news articles in the national press alleging that the WRA was "coddling" the internees led to public demands for a crackdown. Finally, those within the military who had insisted at the outset that there was no way to tell a loyal from a disloyal Japanese American lobbied hard against release of internees and for the segregation of many internees into something approaching lockdown.
These pressures may have come from different places and pushed in different directions, but they shared one thing: a focus on "loyalty" and "disloyalty" as the deciding factor. All of the decisions about freedom and confinement would turn on an evaluation of the "loyalty" or "disloyalty" of the interned American citizens.
Later, or perhaps tomorrow, I'll continue this sorry tale with a quick look at how the government went about gathering the information on which it would rely for its loyalty inquests.
Questions? Comments? Please drop me a line.
Posted by Eric at 9:02 PM
September 13, 2007
Is This, Like, Gnarly, or What?
Posted by Eric at 4:59 PM
September 12, 2007
American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 3
The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. I'm periodically publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. The first excerpt was here and the second here. Now comes the third:
Q: What were the "point systems" used in the [loyalty] questionnaire?A: The "point systems" reflected the attempts of bureaucrats to take the internees' answers to the loyalty questionnaire and convert them to number values, so that each internee would have an ultimate loyalty "score." The point systems were absurdly oversimplified and dependent on cultural assumptions: practicing judo earned a negative score, while little-league baseball earned a positive; Buddhism was a negative and Christianity a positive.
Q: What penalties were invoked when a man or woman was considered to be disloyal?
A: A charge of disloyalty could force an internee's transfer to a special segregation camp where conditions were harsher and the atmosphere more turbulent. It could bar an internee from securing permission to leave a camp for a job in the country's interior. It could block an internee from obtaining a job that the government deemed too sensitive for the war effort in any way. And, as the war wound down and the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast ended, a finding of disloyalty meant that a Japanese American could not return home to the West Coast.
Posted by Eric at 9:04 AM
September 10, 2007
American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 2
The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. The first was here -- and here is the second:
Q: The Japanese loyalty questionnaire is central to your book. Can you explain what the form was and the significance it had for Japanese internees?A: The loyalty questionnaire was a twenty-eight-question form that the government forced all Japanese American internees to fill out while behind barbed wire in spring of 1943. It tried to probe each internee's work and education background, reading habits, and familiarity with Japanese and American cultural, religious, political, and linguistic traditions. It also asked each internee whether he was willing to serve in the U.S. military and to forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. These forms became a centerpiece of the government's administrative efforts to adjudicate the loyalty or disloyalty of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
For the internees, the loyalty questionnaires provoked intense anxiety and controversy. Already a year into captivity, many internees saw the questions as a series of vague traps that could only force them deeper into incarceration. Especially provocative was the question asking them to renounce loyalty to the Emperor—a loyalty that none of the American citizens in the camps had ever sworn or announced in the first place. The questionnaires were greeted with wariness, confusion, and even open hostility and resistance in the camps.
Posted by Eric at 10:37 AM
September 6, 2007
American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 1
The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. Here is the first:
Q: How does AMERICAN INQUISITION differ from other studies on Japanese internment during World War II?A: AMERICAN INQUISITION focuses on what you might call the "inner workings" of the Japanese American internment—the tribunals in the bowels of the wartime bureaucracy that tried to decide which Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States and which were disloyal. Even though these loyalty programs were an important engine of the internment program—the mechanism that continued to repress Japanese Americans long after the government made its initial decision to force Japanese Americans into camps—the literature on the Japanese American internment has paid scant attention to these tribunals.
Q: How did you become interested in writing about the Japanese American internment and about the government's loyalty tests for its supposed internal enemies?
A: The themes of racial incarceration and the persecution of internal enemies run strongly through my own family history. I am the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. My grandfather was incarcerated at the Buchenwald concentration camp after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938; this incarceration came after years in which my grandparents and all other German Jews were increasingly depicted as dangerous internal enemies to the German nation. For these personal reasons, I grew interested in how the United States racially identified and then incarcerated a supposed internal enemy during the same time period. Obviously, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment were different sorts of programs in crucial ways. Yet they shared a similar engine—the engine of racial scapegoating.
Posted by Eric at 2:48 PM
August 30, 2007
You've Got Questions? I've Got Answers.
Posted by Eric at 12:43 PM
June 12, 2007
American Inquisition
I like it!
Posted by Eric at 9:01 AM | Comments (7)
May 13, 2007
Live. Err. Forget. Repeat.
(From today's NYT review by Walter Isaacson of Cullen Murphy's book "Are We Rome?")
UPDATE, May 14: It turns out that this isn't plagiarism, but it's in the neighborhood. I bought "Are We Rome?" yesterday and started it at bedtime last night. And there on page 13 of the prologue I find this sentence: "The famous Santayana maxim about what happens to those who forget history is drilled into you by the sixth grade, and everyone who learns it is condemned to repeat it."
Surely it can't be kosher to steal the lede of a book review from the book you're reviewing.
Posted by Eric at 11:10 AM | Comments (3)
April 23, 2007
Blurbs
Tell me about blurbs. When you're thinking of buying a book, do blurbs matter at all to you? What matters more -- who the blurber is, or what the blurber says? Are you likelier to open up a book with a great blurb by somebody you've never heard of, or a book with a nondescript blurb by somebody famous?
Posted by Eric at 10:07 AM | Comments (7)
November 29, 2006
My New Book!
The book tells the story of the various government bureaucracies that judged (and misjudged) the loyalty of 40,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1943 and 1945. It's a sad tale of civilian and military officials searching for an enemy within and mostly finding their own fears and prejudices.
It'll be out in about a year.
Posted by Eric at 8:32 PM | Comments (8)
July 8, 2006
The Next Novel
But then the obvious solution came to me--set the book in the past. This would avoid any confidentiality problems, and also give me the opportunity to pick an interesting case as a backdrop. After thinking about juicy Supreme Court cases for a while, I decided to use the Japanese Internment cases--Hirabayashi, Yasui, Korematsu, and Endo. I liked these for a couple of reasons. First, I thought they'd give an interesting opportunity to reflect on themes of contemporary relevance. And second, I thought they'd give a good context in which to explore how well-meaning people do regrettable things. One of the most interesting and enjoyable aspects of writing In the Shadow of the Law was trying to figure out how things looked from the bad guys' perspective--what their internal logic was like. The Japanese Internment cases, I figured, would give me a great set of characters to do that with, because many of the important figures--Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Herbert Wechsler, Francis Biddle--are generally considered good guys in the larger narrative of American history. So exploring how they came to do the things they did is something I'm very much looking forward to. And the fact that this is my next fictional project is one of the reasons I'm so glad to be guest-blogging here on isthatlegal. I'm still in the early stages of my research, so any advice would be most welcome.
Posted by at 5:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 7, 2006
In the Shadow of the Law
In terms of how I came to write the book, the first point is that this is not actually my first novel. It’s my debut, in that it’s my first published novel, but I’ve actually been writing novel-length fiction for a while, and there are three others that never made it into print. The first of these I wrote in college; it was an autobiographical coming of age story about college students. I was trying to produce something like what you’d get if Milan Kundera had written This Side of Paradise—that is, combining a sort of bittersweet adolescent love story with various philosophical reflections. The second I wrote just after I graduated from college; it was a somewhat less autobiographical coming of age story about recent college graduates. And there I was trying to produce what you’d get if James Joyce had written The Great Gatsby—combining another bittersweet love story with a highly elevated formal style. The third one I wrote while I was in law school, and it was not autobiographical at all. It was my imagining what it might have been like had I gone to philosophy grad school instead of law school, and it was intended to be a darkly comic campus satire—something like what you’d get if Martin Amis had written Lucky Jim.
None of these was published, as I said, and in retrospect I’m pretty glad they weren’t. In all of them I was self-consciously trying to write very literary fiction, that is I was trying to do something technically interesting in as many individual sentences as I could. I was under the influence of Joyce and Nabokov and also I suppose Evelyn Waugh, who once said that the measure of a book’s quality was the number of brilliant and original similes per page. But in fact that’s not a great measure of a book’s quality, or at least not one that many people use, and although I think I did succeed in writing some interesting sentences, the books didn’t hang together all that well at the level of the paragraph or the chapter. And the emphasis on formal style came at some cost in terms of plot and character. So those were probably books that people would not have liked, and it’s probably good for me that they didn’t get published, because reviewers would have said nasty things about them.
Eventually I realized that. After I graduated from law school and finished clerking for some federal judges, I started work at a law firm in Chicago. And I said to myself, it’s time to write a novel that will actually get published, not something that a small number of people will find clever and a large number of people precious or annoying, but something that a significant number of people will actually want to read. So I asked myself, what are people interested in that I know enough about to make into a novel? And the answer that came to me was, the legal system. There’s a lot of popular interest in the legal system, and at that point I had experienced the different perspectives of a non-lawyer, a law student, a clerk for federal judges, and I was just starting out as an associate in a law firm. So I decided to write something that showed how the law and the legal system looked from all those different perspectives. So I set out to write a legal thriller.
To do this, I bought a bunch of legal thrillers to read so that I could learn more about the genre. At about the same time, my mother gave me a book called The Writer’s Journey. That book is based on the work of Joseph Campbell, and it’s about the use of mythic structure in storytelling. And I thought, well, I’ll make Mom happy too, and I’ll use a mythic structure for my legal thriller. I’ll have a reluctant hero who is summoned away from the ordinary world and called on to do great things, and there will be archetypal figures who help or hinder him—an old wise man, a shapeshifting trickster, a dark shadow.
So I did that. I created the characters, and I gave them a plot, and that produced my first draft. The first draft was basically a generic legal thriller. It told the story of Mark Clayton, a young associate in the D.C. law firm of Morgan Siler, and how he and a couple of other associates at the firm dealt with two cases: a mass tort suit against a chemical company, and the pro bono representation of an inmate on Virginia’s death row. It tried to give a number of different perspectives on the legal system, so the point of view moved among associates and partners, and judges, nonlawyers, and prosecuting attorneys. And I chose those two cases because I thought it would also provide an interesting contrast—the way that the firm deals with a big corporation and an impoverished individual, the different sorts of resources they have in the legal system, and how the system works or doesn’t work for them.
So the underlying organizational principle of the first draft was supposed to be this archetypal mythic structure. Of course, that structure has been used by other people, perhaps most notably George Lucas, so one amusing consequence is that you can more or less map the characters from In the Shadow of the Law onto the characters of Star Wars. Mark, the hero, is of course Luke Skywalker. I tried to tinker with the conventions a little bit here in that Mark does not end up having the mysterious powers of a Jedi Knight. He’s an ordinary person—as one reviewer commented, he’s not even a particularly brilliant lawyer. The brilliant associate, the one who does have the power to make the law do his bidding, is named Walker Eliot—the name Walker is a Star Wars joke—and he in the end turns out not to be an especially admirable character. And my point there was that it’s not necessarily the brilliant lawyers who serve justice; doing good as a lawyer depends not on how smart you are but on how much you care about justice. For the rest of the characters, the correspondence is closer. Peter Morgan, the managing partner of the firm, is the Emperor, who turns the firm into a soulless profit-fixated place and tempts the other characters towards the dark side. Harold Fineman, a very talented lawyer who has sacrificed his life to the firm is Darth Vader—he’s given in to the dark side, though towards the end he tries to recover his lost humanity. Wallace Finn, an old partner who runs the pro bono program is either Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi—a sage with hidden powers of his own.
So that was my first draft: Star Wars in a law firm. My agent managed to sell that draft, and I sat down with Jonathan Galassi, my editor at Farrar Straus, to talk about how to go about revising it. The first thing he said to me was “Make it twice as long.” And he explained a little bit more, but not that much—so he was a little bit like Yoda himself. But what he did was to point me to some of the themes and characters that he thought were interesting and could be expanded. The ideas he suggested, I like to think, were implicit in the first draft; I put them there subconsciously because they were things that were on my mind. But he focused my conscious attention on them, and I started working to develop them more.
By this point I had started teaching at Penn, and I also started thinking about what I wanted to tell my students about the world of law-firm practice that most of them were going to enter, and in which many of them would spend their lives. I teach constitutional law, and I try to teach it in a way that makes the students see the Constitution not as an immutable document handed down from on high but something that each generation struggles over, something that is or should be theirs, and in whose meaning they have a say. I think this is more valuable than just teaching them a set of rules about how cases are decided. But that doesn’t give me much of an opportunity to say anything about legal ethics, or how to survive as a person while working as a lawyer. And this was something that I saw my friends in law firms struggling with, so I wanted to say something about that struggle, too.
This came out in a couple of ways. The first is that I spent a lot of time working on developing the older characters and going into the history of the firm. I started with Peter Morgan’s father, Archibald Morgan, and I tried to show something of his view of the law, how that translated into the firm that he founded, and how Peter Morgan changed things. This basic story is something that lawyers and law school deans have been commenting on for a while. In one sense, it’s a transformation of the lawyer’s role. In the early twentieth century, and running up through the sixties and seventies, the ideal lawyer was considered to be a sort of counselor or statesman, someone who helped clients not just by giving them solutions to technical legal problems but also by giving them a broader range of advice—helping clients to see what was best for them, and doing so from a perspective that took broader considerations like justice and social welfare into account. This ideal fades in the eighties and nineties, and the paradigm of the lawyer becomes more the hired gun, someone the client calls in to solve a particular problem, who solves that problem in clever and creative ways, but does not think about how that solution relates to social justice.
In tandem with this change in the idea of the lawyer there’s a change in the nature of legal practice. Firms get bigger, for one thing. They also start having a very high ratio of associates to partners. That is, law firm associates used to be considered something like apprentices. The ratio of associates to partners was one to one, or even lower. It was expected that associates would eventually become partners. And the interaction between partners and associates was an educational process during which the associates learned the judgment necessary to be a lawyer-statesman. In the eighties and nineties, as the firms get bigger, you start getting a much higher associate to partner ratio. Now there are three or four associates for every partner. The higher ratio means a number of things. First, partners make more money. Firms sell associate work by the hour, and partners share the profits that associates bring to the firm—unlike the associates, who are paid fixed salaries, with bonuses that depend on how many hours they bill. So more associates means more money for the partners. It also means that not all the associates can make partner. Most of them will only stay three or four years. Given that, there’s less incentive to invest the partners’ time in training associates, much less trying to turn them into lawyer-statesmen. So the nature of the associate’s job changes, too. Instead of being an apprentice, tagging along with the partners and learning from them, associates become something much more like assembly-line workers.
This set of changes is interesting as an economic study. But it’s also interesting because of what it does to the practice of law in particular. The basic change in the nature of legal practice is what you could call the industrialization of law. There’s a real parallel to the industrial revolution. In pre-industrial society, you have an artisanal mode of production, where craftsmen make entire products. And of course they have control over the choices that go into the making of the product, and they have a set of skills and a degree of self-sufficiency because they can make the entire thing on their own. Industrialization changes that: suddenly you have assembly-line workers who don’t have unique skills. And they aren’t making an entire product; they’re doing something like making a door handle over and over and over again. What they’re making is valueless in itself. They have no choice in how they do it, or control over what it is.
This is a big shift in the world of manufacture, and it has some consequences. One of the main ones is that workers become more interchangeable, and they lose some of their bargaining power. Another, though, is a sense of alienation, and it’s the legal counterpart to that that provides the environment within which my book takes place. So in the past you had smaller firms, where individual lawyers handled entire cases. And now you have much larger firms, with associates who don’t handle a whole case but just do one particular task over and over again. And they have no opportunity to exercise control or make choices—in particular, they have no opportunity to exercise moral judgment. So what are the consequences of this shift in a justice-seeking profession? That’s the basic question that the book is trying to explore.
And when I was doing these revisions, I started trying to impose other structures on the book. The first was a set of parallels to Wagner’s Ring cycle. I can’t actually remember how this idea first came to me. I think what happened was that I was writing about Harold Fineman. Harold, I’ve mentioned already, is the Darth Vader character—a lawyer who’s given in to the dark side and renounced his humanity, renounced his independent moral judgment and become merely a servant of the firm. His professional identity has become his only identity. And as I was working on this character, I tried to develop the personal identity that he’d given up. Because I wanted something significant for him to abandon, I gave him a deeply religious background. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Borough Park Brooklyn. But he renounces this because he wants to create his own identity, and he ends up being sucked into the firm, which becomes his identity—the professional identity of the job becomes a sort of armor for him, an armor that he can’t live without. And there again you might see a similarity to Darth Vader. But one of the things that Harold finds he can do now that he couldn’t do before is listen to Wagner, which his parents wouldn’t have approved. So I have him listening to that, and understanding his life a little bit in terms of the plot of the Ring cycle, and I started doing some background reading on The Ring and I found that it fit my plot and themes pretty well.
Basically what I was working from here was a book by George Bernard Shaw called The Perfect Wagnerite. Shaw sees the Ring as about the struggle for authority between the higher law, represented by the gods of Valhalla, and the capitalists, represented by the greedy dwarf Alberic. And I thought that this fit very well with what I was describing as a struggle for the soul of the legal profession, between two ideas of what lawyers should be. These two ideas, I’ve said, are that of the lawyer-statesman, on the one hand, who measures success by his ability to guide clients to just and desirable solutions, and the lawyer-mercenary, on the other, who measures success simply by the amount of money he makes. Archibald Morgan, the founder of the firm, is a lawyer-statesman, and Peter Morgan, his son and the managing partner during my novel, is a lawyer-mercenary. In the Ring, Wotan’s plan to save Valhalla—to preserve the authority of law—depends on the free choice of mortals. In the book, these mortals are the associates, and the key question is whether they will choose the lawyer-statesman model or the lawyer-mercenary one.
A slightly different way of putting this, without the baggage of the Ring, is that associates face a difficult task in managing the tension between their professional identity and their personal identity. In particular, they face the problem of what to do when their profession seems to demand things that are in tension with what they think as individuals is morally right. And what I was trying to suggest was that the practice of law must be informed by moral judgment. If a lawyer gives up his or her independent moral agency, if he lets the job become her entire identity, then he dies as a person.
I found that my initial idea of giving different perspectives on the legal system also allowed me to explore this idea. So the different perspectives on the legal system turned out also to be different perspectives on the duties of lawyers. Walker Eliot views the purity and coherence of law as an end in itself, who sees his primary duty as an obligation to the law as an abstraction. Peter Morgan and Harold Fineman see the law instrumentally, as a means to serve their clients’ interests, and think of their duties in terms of zealous advocacy. And there’s also a character, Ryan Grady, who really doesn’t care about the law at all, or the clients, and is just putting in time at the firm because it’s a high-paying and relatively prestigious job, whose duty is only to himself.
Some of these perspectives are better than others. I was trying to suggest, generally speaking, that it’s important to understand that there’s a moral dimension to legal practice, that neither an abstract devotion to the law, nor a particularized devotion to clients, is complete. But none of the perspectives is complete by itself, and another theme of the book is that it’s important to be able to understand different perspectives and to be able to change your own. So the hero Mark Clayton is more or less dragooned into working on the pro bono death penalty case by another associate. But as the case progresses is he starts understanding his duty in different terms. First he’s thinking of himself as an employee of the firm, required to work on this case as part of his duty to his employer. Then he starts thinking of the case as imposing an obligation on him to try to make sure that the justice system is functioning properly. And last he comes to understand his duty as a more personal one, a duty to his client. In the end, whether the characters meet a happy or a sad fate depends basically on whether they have the ability to evolve like this, to see things in different terms.
Along with these different perspectives come different notions of reality, of what’s real or important. One of the things that law does, one of the things law students have difficulty adjusting to, is that it separates things we might intuitively believe should not be distinct. It separates legal guilt from factual guilt. It separates legal correctness from moral correctness. I talk about these separations, and then I try to give them more concrete forms. So persistently through the book there are contrasts between some thing and its legal representation. There is, for instance, the outside world, in which one runs errands and goes to the gym. But the managing partner of my fictional firm has realized that it’s inefficient to allow associates out into this world, because it distracts them from billing hours. So the firm creates a counterpart world within itself: it has a gym, it has people to do your shopping for you, to walk your dog and so on. Those are the legal shadows of the outside world, the reflections of reality. And the ultimate separation, the ultimate twinning, is the separation between the lawyer and the self—the creation of a professional role that is not you, but comes to have a life of its own, that comes to be as important as the authentic self.
This is a bad thing, of course. Harold Fineman is a character whose authentic self is overcome and swallowed up by his professional identity. He realizes this eventually, but he realizes it too late, and needless to say he comes to a bad end. So what I was trying to do with this theme of competing realities, of replication and separation, was to suggest that it’s important for lawyers to lead their professional lives in a way that doesn’t force them to see the professional identity as a separate self. They need to be able to invest their professional roles with the crucial attributes of their person. And one of those crucial attributes, perhaps the most important one, is independent moral judgment. It does not work, I suggest, for a lawyer to let the job tell him what is right and wrong, or to suppose that he can have a professional identity that follows a moral code that is not really his own. Law does separate legal guilt from factual guilt and so on; it separates the legally correct outcome from the morally correct one. But to say these things are separate does not mean that they are unrelated. The legal and the moral world pass information back and forth like the particles of quantum physics: what happens in one world changes the other. What a lawyer does as a professional affects her as a person.
Many of the separations I’ve been talking about are like the distinction between form and substance. Law recognizes this distinction, and sometimes it looks through form to underlying substance, or sometimes it invokes equity to overcome form. But one of the compelling illustrations of the form/substance distinction is a financing technique called securitization. I thought securitization was so fascinating that I made it one of the governing metaphors of the book. I also made it a crucial aspect of one of the plots. That’s perhaps an indication that I wasn’t actually being all that self-critical in terms of thinking of what people would actually want to read about, because in fact not so many members of the general public think securitization is interesting. This is probably the most technical legal material in the book, but the basic point isn't all that complicated.
You could say that the basic idea behind securitization is contracting around bankruptcy. The point is to separate the risks associated with a particular asset from the risks associated with its owner. So consider a pool of self-liquidating assets such as mortgage loans. These will provide a fairly regular stream of payments. Those payments could be used to service a debt, and the assets themselves could be used as collateral. So the corporation that holds those mortgage loans could borrow money based on the loans. Two things will determine the terms on which credit will be extended. First, the lender will evaluate the risks associated with the mortgage loans. But there’s another risk—there’s the risk that the parent company will go bankrupt. If that happens, even a secured creditor is likely not to get a full recovery, and will in any event likely to have to wait and endure the inefficiencies of bankruptcy. So the terms of the loan will be less favorable than they would be if the lender did not have to worry about the risk of bankruptcy.
And that’s where securitization comes in. It eliminates that risk. What the borrower does is to transfer the assets to a special-purpose vehicle. The SPV now gets the loan, and transfers it to the borrower as payment for the assets. Then it services the debt itself using the payment stream from the assets. Because the assets are now owned by the SPV rather than the borrower, the borrower’s creditors will not have a claim against them if the borrower goes into bankruptcy. And therefore the lender does not have to worry about the bankruptcy risk.
Now, you can probably see why this structure appealed to me given what I’ve said about the concerns of the book. It is a triumph of form over substance. It divides the borrower from itself by means of law. It creates a shadow self. And it does so in order to avoid risk, in order to prevent the assertion of certain claims. It mirrors, I suggest, what happens to lawyers when they suppose that they can abdicate their own moral judgment, that they can create a professional identity distinct from the actual self, and unencumbered by any claims that morality may make on the actual person.
But isn’t everyone better off? If you’re dealing with the borrower, you should know that it’s securitized its assets. You know that certain assets won’t be available to satisfy claims you might have and you bargain accordingly. So who is harmed by this? The answer in the securitization context is involuntary creditors. People who haven’t negotiated their claims against the borrower. Tort plaintiffs, for instance. And the role that securitization plays in the plot is that it’s being used to shield the chemical company from tort liability.
In the world of legal practice, of course, there’s a parallel. The separation of the professional identity from the actual self allows clients access to legal services without worrying about the risk of moral judgment on the part of the lawyer. The people who are harmed are those who have claims that this suspended moral judgment might satisfy. They’re the ones who suffer in a moral bankruptcy.
There’s a particular danger of this in large firms, because those firms offer such a complete substitute identity. And the identity they give the associates, the work they give them, is not something that requires or even allows moral judgment. Associates might find it very easy to suspend their moral judgment because not only do they have the professional role of lawyer available, they have an identity as an associate for that firm, and they can easily suppose that their duty is simply to perform the tasks that partners assign, letting the partners worry about the moral issues.
But this is not meant, and the book is not meant, as a condemnation of big firms generally. There are better and worse firms, just as there are better and worse lawyers. It’s meant as a warning, or an invitation to think about this possibility. We should be worried about the involuntary creditors of the legal system. In the book I suggest that criminal defendants are these involuntary creditors, because they’re the paradigm example of people caught up in the system against their will. And I suggest that pro bono practice is a way to undo some of the harmful effects. And that idea is what connects the plot line about the tort suit to the one about the death row inmate.
But the point can be broader. Very few people, if any, fully negotiate the terms on which they’re going to interact with the legal system. Everyone involved, really, is in that way an involuntary creditor. Everyone has a claim to justice, to law practiced in a morally reflective manner. This is not just something for lawyers to think about; it’s something that society should pay attention to. It is, I want to say, what we owe ourselves.
Posted by at 2:51 PM | TrackBack
June 30, 2006
Next Week's Guest-Blogger
I'll have a post up on Sunday night introducing him more properly, but I thought I'd mention it today. He's an accomplished young legal scholar, and a novelist to boot. His first novel, "In the Shadow of the Law," comes out in paperback next week. Just in time to take to the beach!
Posted by Eric at 11:21 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 13, 2006
"An Inconvenient Truth" (and its inauspicious start)
Be advised, though, that the book is not just about global warming. It's also very much about Al Gore. He intersperses his scientific material, diagrams, photographs, and big-font explanations with family snapshots and small-font autobiography. Coming from a lifelong politician, this material really can be seen as nothing other than campaign literature.
I myself didn't mind the personal stuff too much, because I admire much of what Gore has done with his life, and I learned some things about his family that I didn't know. But I do think it would have been smarter for him to leave this material out; including it just makes the job of those who wish to discredit the science he's advancing that much easier.
I'll confess, though, to one moment of eye-rolling. And it came early -- in the very first column on the very first page. Gore alludes to his son's near-fatal accident in 1989, and then says this: "[D]uring that traumatic period ... I made at least two enduring changes. I vowed always to put my family first, and I also vowed to make the climate crisis the top priority of my professional life."
I recognize that "putting one's family first" can mean lots of different things to lots of different families. But I'll go out on a limb and say that one thing "putting your family first" just can't mean is being President of the United States.
This opening passage of the book rang false to me -- a politician's platitude. Not a good start for a book about truth.
(cross-posted from Concurring Opinions, where I'm guest-blogging for a while.)
Posted by Eric at 9:33 PM | TrackBack
May 2, 2006
Name Some Books.
Posted by Eric at 8:45 PM | Comments (24)
March 28, 2006
Dear Miss Breed: A New Book For Young Audiences About the Japanese American Internment
It is fantastic. Check it out.
Posted by Eric at 8:30 AM
December 4, 2005
Announcing the Winner of the IsThatLegal "Name My Book" Contest
Now I have to announce a winner, which is a mighty tough thing to do. The one title that I keep coming back to, over and over again, is this one:
"I Judge Allegiance to the Flag: The Government Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty during World War II" (submitted by a reader who goes by the name "StarFiend")
Yes, there is a problem with it: starting with "I" doesn't quite work. But I love it anyway.
Will it end up as the title to the book? I really can't say for sure. Time will tell. But it's a remarkably good and catchy suggestion. Thanks to StarFiend, and to everyone else who made suggestions. I am deeply appreciative.
Incidentally, StarFiend did not leave an email address. So StarFiend, I owe you a Barnes & Noble gift certifiicate. Be in touch.
Posted by Eric at 7:28 PM | Comments (8)
November 28, 2005
Just Two Days Left to Name My New Book.
Posted by Eric at 1:41 PM | Comments (1)
November 22, 2005
Announcing the IsThatLegal "Name My Book" Contest!
This creates an opportunity for you, dear reader.
It's the IsThatLegal Name-My-Book Contest!
I will award a $20 Barnes & Noble gift certificate to the person who, before 5:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, November 30, 2005, submits what is, in my sole estimation, the best proposed title for my new book.
All you need to do is download and read this very short draft introductory chapter and then leave a comment here with your proposed title. Be sure to leave your email address too. On Friday, December 2, 2005, I'll announce the winner and send along the gift certificate via email (unless the below-stated condition of pervasive suckiness obtains).
If the winning proposal actually ends up as the book's real title (that is, if neither I nor the book's publisher ends up coming up with anything better), I'll acknowledge the winner in the book's "acknowledgements" section too. On the other hand, if I think all of the submitted proposals suck about as badly as anything I could come up with on my own, then nobody gets a damn thing.
Offer void where prohibited. Tax, title, license, dealer fees, and optional equipment extra. Special Low APR financing available on approved credit. Any dispute arising under this offer shall be governed by laws that I make up. Past performance is not a guide to future performance and no representation or warranty is made as to future performance of any of the investments mentioned on the Site.
UPDATE: Out for a bike ride, where I seem to do my best thinking, I came up with a passable idea. I'll put it below the fold so that those of you who wish to enter the contest won't be tainted by my ideas unless you want to be.
FURTHER UPDATE: I'll be traveling much of the rest of the day (Tuesday), and won't be able to screen comments until late tonight. So if you post a suggestion and it doesn't appear; don't despair. I'll post 'em late tonight.
FURTHEST UPDATE: Back online, I find dozens of incredible suggestions. Some of them leave me speechless. Some of them make me laugh. Just amazing. Thanks to everyone who has submitted a suggestion ... and keep 'em coming!
Spy Hunting and Bean Counting: The Government and Japanese American Loyalty in World War II (posted 1:15 p.m., 11/22/05)
Check back here in this space for other ideas that occur to me from now until the end of the contest.
Posted by Eric at 12:28 AM | Comments (253) | TrackBack
October 9, 2005
Why Multiple Reviews of the Same Book at the NYT?
Mary Roach's "Spook" (W.W. Norton) seems like a clever idea, amusingly written. Nutty quasi-scientists doing bizarre experiments about the afterlife. Fine. Give it one of those little one-paragraph jobbies in the middle of the Book Review Section and move on.
Yet Janet Maslin reviewed it at length three days ago, and Kate Zernike reviews it again today in the Book Review section.
This happens not infrequently at the Times. I understand that the Book Review Section operates with a good deal of autonomy from the editorial process of the "regular" paper, but honestly ... would it be that hard to coordinate a policy of just one Times review for a new book?
UPDATE: Another example -- far more extreme -- is the Times's fixation with Joan Didion's new book about her reaction to her husband's sudden and unexpected death. It's here. And here (lengthy excerpt from the book itself). And here. And here. And here. And here. Didion's obviously a major figure in American literature, so we can cut the Times a little slack. But all of this attention, over and over again? Come on.
Posted by Eric at 1:25 PM | Comments (2)
August 29, 2005
IsThatLegal: Where Famous Authors Come to See and Be Seen
C'mon, Danielle Steele. The gig's up. I know you're out there.
Posted by Eric at 7:26 PM
Hamas Is Not Waging A "Freedom Struggle."
I continue to disagree with Tim about the merits of columnist D.G. Martin's analogy of an arson against a tobacco warehouse by blacks in North Carolina in 1970 to Palestinian terrorism.
Tim says they're usefully compared because they are both instances of "political violence." On the subject of the utility of comparison, Tim also says this: "A comparison of the role of violence in the African American freedom struggle and in the Middle East does not strike me as inappropriate." I read Tim as implying another important point of analogy here: African Americans in North Carolina in 1970 and Palestinians today are both engaged in forms of "freedom struggle." It is not entirely clear that Tim means this; he does not repeat the term "freedom struggle" in the part of the sentence that concerns the Middle East. But I think this implicit in the sentence, and more importantly, in Tim's (and D.G. Martin's) defense of the comparison of Palestinians to Southern blacks and Israelis to Southern whites.
This is precisely where I part company with Tim and D.G. Martin. The comparison reflects a basic mistake we Americans make over and over again: we "Americanize" the rest of the world's conflicts, seeing them through the lens of our own national experience. We look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and see two groups of people divided by ethnicity, race, and religion. We see one of them as historically powerful and the other as historically powerless. We see one of them as oppressor and the other as victim. And, most crucially, we explain this dynamic by reasons that are familiar to us from our own experience: the powerful group oppresses because of a historical commitment to sustaining what it imagines to be its own superiority and to reinforcing what it imagines to be the inferiority of the victim group. The "freedom struggle" is the fight of the group labeled as inferior to establish its inherent human dignity and equality, and to secure the rights and advantages that belong to dignified and equal human beings.
This, I think, is how D.G. Martin intended to provoke us with the original analogy—to wake up us complacent whites to the controversy that Martin thinks ought to be (but is not) swirling around discussion of "Blood Done Sign My Name" at a Southern university. "Don't you see?" Martin seems to ask. "We have drained the intensity from our racial history, and we tell ourselves a happy story of slow-but-sure accommodation to a nonviolent freedom struggle. But think about it this way: We were the Israelis in a racial-political struggle—perhaps we still are—and African-Americans were (and perhaps still are) the Palestinians. Does that rouse you from your slumber? Now do you understand the intensity that lies beneath our seemingly tranquil surface?"
This is an effective strategy for stirring up feeling, but it just doesn't reach a minimum threshold of accuracy. The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is a remarkably poor analogy to the conflict between American blacks and whites. There is no reasonably comparable history of racial/ethnic/religious oppression between Jews and Arab Muslims, in the Middle East or elsewhere, in either direction across the divide. Through much—indeed, most—of their history, Jews and Arab Muslims have lived together in peace. There was no pervasive and ongoing sense—among either Jews or Muslims—of racial, ethnic, or religious superiority or inferiority.
What has emerged over the last 60 years in and around Israel is not a "freedom struggle" in anything like the sense of the struggle of American blacks for freedom from slavery, from Jim Crow, and from their vicious and oppressive legacy. What has emerged instead is a struggle over the ownership of disputed land after the demise of Western colonialism in the region. The Palestinian terrorism whose efficacy D.G. Martin wants us to reflect on has been violence not to establish a principle of equality and dignity, but violence to extinguish the fact and idea of a Jewish state in the region, and to turn "every inch" of the current State of Israel into a Muslim theocracy. Any doubt about this is resolved by even a quick glance at the founding covenant of Hamas. (I recognize that many Palestinians do not deny Israel's right to exist, that some Palestinians are not Muslim, and that some Palestinians would not want a theocratic Palestinian state. These Palestinians, however, are by and large not the people practicing the terrorist methods that Martin invites us to consider.)
Of course, the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle has led some people on both sides of the divide to demonize those on the other, and to speak of them, and treat them, as less than fully human. This vocabulary and these actions can, at times, revive echoes and images of American white supremacy in our American ears and eyes.
But Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem of today are decidedly not the Oxford, North Carolina of 1970—or, for that matter, of 1770 or 1870.
So it's not just that torching an uninhabited tobacco warehouse in Oxford in 1970 is different from blowing up a Passover Seder in an Israeli hotel in Netanya in March of 2002 in the sense that one was property destruction and the other cold-blooded murder. That's true, but it misses the much more important point that the two incidents can only be grouped together as "political violence" in aid of a "freedom struggle" in the same way that (to use my earlier example) the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania can be grouped together as "unexpected incidents at sea" that led to "shipping disasters."
We Americans too often make the mistake of "Americanizing" the disputes, and the lives, of people in other countries and cultures. Historians will probably see this as the core mistake made by President Bush and his advisers in their "planning" (and I use that term loosely) for post-war Iraq. We would be greeted as liberators; "Iraqis" (as if there even really were such an identity, as opposed to Shi'a, Sunnis, and Kurds living there, and sub-groups within them) would revel in the overthrow of a dictator; democracy would take root among these "Iraqis"; "federalism" would solve any problems of managing rival regional powers. And on and on. All of it is lovely; all of it resonates with a history we can understand: our own. And none of it has a damn thing to do with the actual history of the place we invaded.
D.G. Martin and – I think – Tim Tyson, are making the same mistake in comparing American civil rights history to the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Except insofar as they generically involve "struggles" between one people and another, one conflict has essentially nothing to do with the other.
We will do best, I think, if we work hard to understand our own civil rights history by focusing our attention on our history's own horrors and complexities. They are all around us, even today, as Tim's book so powerfully shows us. We ought not confuse ourselves by imagining that the rest of the world's horrors and complexities mirror our own.
Posted by Eric at 12:30 PM | Comments (8)
August 28, 2005
A Question for Tim Tyson on the Eve of UNC's Summer Reading Program
Martin evidently thinks the suicide bombing of a Passover Seder in a hotel restaurant is sufficiently analogous to the burning of an uninhabited tobacco warehouse to make us stop and think--about something or other.
Tim Tyson, the book's author, left a comment to my post, in which he said this:
"I don't think that D.G. Martin's analogy of Oxford, North Carolina 1970 and the Middle East 2005 holds up that well. But it does push us to the far end of our logic, asking us what the roles of both violence and moral suasion might be in our politics and pointing toward the difficult and imprecise nature of these judgements."This strikes me as dangerously loose thinking. If the analogy doesn't "hold up that well," how does it "push us to the far end of our logic?" How does it engage our "logic" at all?
The sinking of the Titanic might be compared to the sinking of the Lusitania: both did involve ships that went to the bottom. But I don't think the analogy would "hold up very well" in a debate about the safety of ships, and it would hardly push a reasonable debater to the end of anything but his or her patience.
How, Tim, does a comparison of African American property damage in 1970 and the Palestinian terrorism of recent years "push us to the end of our logic" about the comparative roles of violence and moral suasion? Does it not instead push us well past the end of our logic?
Posted by Eric at 6:28 PM | Comments (3)
August 18, 2005
The Book-of-the-Dunce Club
Now it's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).
Before you go dashing out to pick up your copy, though, you might want to note that this is the author's view about his subject:
"Although there are undoubtedly millions of virtuous Muslims, Islam itself is an incomplete, misleading, and often downright false revelation which, in many ways, directly contradicts what God has revealed through the prophets of the Old Testament and through His Son Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh." Daniel Ali & Robert Spencer, Inside Islam (Westchester, Pa.: Ascension Press 2003), pages 15-16.So you can just be sure that the "Politically Incorrect Guide" will present an even-handed assessment of Islam!
We await with bated breath the release of Regnery's next title in this series, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Holocaust," by noted scholar David Irving.
Posted by Eric at 1:40 PM | Comments (5)