Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life - Carol Sklenicka

Go back to the year 2000 with me, if you please.  I'm in Wilmette, IL at my parent's house, home on break from school out east, getting ready to apply to college, sitting in an armchair in the living room (designated "the library") leafing through an anthology of American literature.  I'm vaguely familiar with Raymond Carver from Roger Ebert's review of Short Cuts, which I read a few years earlier, and I see the story "Cathedral."  I decide to read it, and it's beautiful, a sketch of a blind man being helped to draw a cathedral from an image in his mind of which he can have no reference.  It's a pretty quick read, but enormously moving, and I decide this might be a writer worth checking out.

Fast forward a year and I'm at NYU in a Prose Composition class and our professor gives us a xeroxed copy of Carver's poem "Fear," a list poem about things he fears.  I've seen Short Cuts at least a time or two by now (even going so far as to call my favorite movie at the time (Magnolia) a rip-off), and I go to one of those used book tables in Greenwich Village and pick up a copy of Where I'm Calling From and I read the stories sporadically throughout the course of my freshman year, all the while hearing praise of Carver from anyone the least bit connected to any creative writing class.  I pick my oldest sister for Secret Santa for Christmas that year, and though she has never really expressed an interest in so-called literary fiction, give her a copy of Where I'm Calling From, asterisking all the stories in particular that I think she should read.

So yes, I love Raymond Carver, and this biography easily makes the list of the Best Books reviewed on Flying Houses.  It's not a perfect biography, but it's very close.  It's so painstakingly researched that a reader can almost observe Carver's movements on a day-to-day basis.

Also, Carver went to the same high school as Justice Douglas.  So two of the graduates of Yakima High School would go onto lives worthy of biographies listed as Best Books on FH.  Therefore I believe my friends Byron Johnson and Erin Ecklund will be moving on to live great lives (though I think they went to a different high school).  Boarding school was a waste of money.  Families should move to Yakima to go to this school.  Then again, it would be inadvisable to base one's child's future on a career in the arts, or the law...

***

The book is subtitled "A Writer's Life" and indeed the first half of the book lays out in excruciating detail all of the obstacles that Carver had to overcome to become an author worthy of publication in The Best American Short Stories series and The New Yorker.  He marries quite young to Maryann Burk and they have their first child before he turns twenty.  Even before then, he had developed enough of an interest in creating writing that he paid $25 to the Palmer Institute of Authorship in Hollywood at the age of 16.  Sklenicka cannily observes that some of the correspondence has a ring of destiny about it--the first lesson is aimed squarely at the short story and reads:

"In becoming a Palmer student you are taking an important step in establishing yourself in a profession that enjoys the respect and esteem of all classes of people, a profession you may be proud to claim as your own...This may be the vital turning point in the course of your life...." (39)

Later, Ray goes to the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, several times, in varying guises--never quite earning an MFA, but sometimes taking credit for it.  In the meanwhile, he works at sawmills and barely earns enough to support their family.  Their continual poverty is a constant theme of the biography.  However, what struck me most about their family was Maryann.  She just seems awesome.  This is a biography of Raymond Carver--but there is so much Maryann in here that it might as well be a biography of her, too.  And this was the surprisingly compelling aspect of the book to me: they have this beautiful relationship, but also an extremely difficult one, and they stick it out for so long.  He owed his early career to her.  He would not have accomplished what he accomplished without her.

His first stories were published in the late 1950's and early 1960's, but he seemed to hit his first stride in 1964 with "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" Eventually that would be the title story for his first collection, which would be released thirteen years later.  More than any other book I've read, this truly depicts the "writer's life" of living your life for your work and spending a considerable amount of time submitting to journals and magazines for publication.  The "second stride" probably came with the publication of "Neighbors" in Esquire, where Gordon Lish served as fiction editor.

There are several literary friendships depicted here.  First there is John Gardner as Carver's writing professor at Iowa (though he is only a few years older).  Second, there is Lish, who certainly comes across as one of the more entertaining (and ruthless) characters in the book.  Third, there is Tess Gallagher, and later Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford.  There is also an entertaining and sad section where a 61-year-old John Cheever drinks and teaches alongside Carver at Iowa in 1973 (Chapter 18 "Drowning," which is not quite rock bottom for Carver, but very close).

Alcoholism is another major theme of the book, and it is written about with such precision and empathy that I thought Sklenicka must have battled demons of her own on that score.  He would drink for three more years after the episodes with Cheever up until the publication of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?  Roughly a year after that was published he would become sober and remain sober.  It is quite harrowing to read about his plight during these times, all in the "Celebrated and Homeless" chapter.

One quick side note:  one of his earlier stories is called "Are These Actual Miles?"  This is just an awesome title for a story:

"One of those new stories configured the rock-bottom days of the Carvers' lives in Sacramento when they were forced to sell their convertible.  'Are These Actual Miles?' is about bankruptcy, suspections of infidelity, and suicidal depression.  Ray pushed into new territory with this story, and it proved to be exactly what Lish was waiting for.  Late in November, Lish telephoned to say that Gingrich and Hayes were 'wild' about the story.  Not only that, but Lish planned to include both 'Neighbors' and 'Miles' in an anthology of fiction from Esquire that he was editing for Doubleday."  (214)

But they change to the title to "What is It?"  Worst title change ever!  Ray is upset about it and Maryann calls him a "whore" for selling out, but Esquire gives them another boost in credibility and they accept it.

I really shouldn't give away the whole story--I'll speak in generalities.  It is an impressive story.  You know, people think that writer's lives are boring.  This is anything but a boring life, but I do not think anybody in their right mind would ever want to live it.  It is filled with so much uncertainty and chaos and desperation that no one should set their sights on a literary career unless they are willing to sacrifice almost everything in favor of that pursuit.

***

This is a really hard review to write because there's so much to say.  This is a big book--not quite as big as the Ernest Hemingway biography that holds the record for longest gestation time on FH--but at 496 pages a hefty read.  I tore through it.  It took me less than 2 months.  Maybe a month and a half.  It was a little slow going in the beginning, but within the first 100 pages Carver is publishing his first stories.  It seems that the period up until say, Cathedral, is very tightly documented, and that the last five years of Carver's life, when he finally began to taste the fruits of literary success, pass a bit more quickly.

It is worth telling how I found this book, because it is quite fortuitous.  I live in a very bad apartment building, but we do have a free washer and dryer in the basement.  The machines themselves leave something to be desired.  The room is disgusting.  No one ever cleans it, except for me the one time my landlord took $40 off my rent one month when I agreed to do it.  Despite this atmosphere, it also becomes a kind of dumping ground for unwanted items that could be used for other tenants passing through.  You see, my landlord does not rent out three, 3 BR apartments--he rents out 9 rooms.  Each of them is around $600, so he is making over $5000 per month off us.  But we live in relative squalor.  Some of this is the doing of my roommates, but it is mostly the doing of the 1st and 2nd floor tenants, over the years.

Sometimes though, a treasure appears.  I had noticed a very good book collection laying on the ground.  Sometimes I would flip through the Williams S. Burroughs compilation Word Virus while waiting a few extra minutes for a garment to be dried.  But this one particular day in late October or early November, I saw the Raymond Carver biography and I thought it was such a quirky book to have that I had to seize the opportunity and read it quickly and return it in case the person that owned it moved out.  Finally I talked to two of the basement neighbors and asked whose it was and they said somebody who had moved out had left it and I could keep it.  That took the pressure off, but I read it quickly regardless.  At a certain point I read "Fires" out of Fires (which is the only Carver collection I own) and a description of a scene in a laundromat stands out as imminently moving:

"The dark heart of 'Fires' is a two-page anecdote about doing his family's wash at a laundromat in Iowa City.  The laundromat was on the corner of Burlington and Gilbert, around the corner from the writers' favorite beer joints.  Canadian writer Clark Blaise sometimes chatted with Ray while their clothes spun at this laundromat, as Blaise and his wife, the novelist Bharati Mukherjee, struggled to keep up with their baby's diapers.  But Carver is alone in the laundromat epiphany he reports.  Maryann is at work, the kids are at a birthday party, and Ray is waiting for a dryer.  It's Saturday afternoon and crowded, so he is becoming frantic. Another dryer has stopped, and Carver is moving toward it, ready to replace the other clothes with his own, when the owner of the clothing decides to let it go for another cycle:

     ....I remember thinking at that moment....that nothing could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children.  And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.
     Like that it came to me.  Like a sharp breeze when the window is thrown open.  Up to that point in my life I'd gone along thinking...that things would work out somehow--that everything in my life I'd hoped for or wanted to do was possible.

Is Carver writing fiction here?  Could this one moment encompass so much?  The essay dramatizes a situation that had smoldered for years.  Carver admits in the essay that many writers have overcome 'far more serious impediments to their work, including imprisonment, blindness, the threat of torture or death...'" (96-97)

Later, Carver's children come to resent him for "Fires" and a few other stories and poems throughout the years.  Perhaps he should have kept his mouth shut, but you know, we all need little anecdotes about the petty frustrations involved with laundry.  Most strikingly though, Scklenicka adds that, in this scene, Carver is 25 and halfway through his life.

***

This review is getting long as it is.  There are just too many little details that I'd like to reference.  One of the cutest, for me, is Ray's favored non-alcoholic beverage:

Okay unfortunately that's not in the index so I can't find it, but at one point his children notice that he always drinks RC Cola.  He likes it because his initials are R.C.  The image of him sitting around drinking R.C. and presiding, like, "Yep, that's my cola," is hilarious.

There are several details about other writers, but the big gaping hole in this biography that we've left so far is Gordon Lish.  Lish's anecdote about J.D. Salinger is worth excerpting (as is almost any anecdote about that controversial legend).  I also wish Obama/whoever wins in 2016 cared more about people like us:

"No project Lish undertook was too humble to become a vehicle for his prodigious personality.  For the Job Corps, a Kennedy-era program for unemployed young men, he created a box set of reading folders called Why Work.  Instead of gathering already published materials, Lish sent telegrams to thirty writers he admired.  One of these telegrams went to J.D. Salinger, who had been in seclusion for more than a decade.  Lish followed his telegram with letters--numerous letters--to Salinger that show Lish inventing himself as a literary impresario.  A few months later, he received a telephone call at work from Salinger himself.  When he understood who was calling him, Lish reports, 'I was grinning so hard that my brain could not have had any room left over in it for one speck of business.'  As Lish tells it, Salinger said, 'I'm calling because I was worried about you.'  Salinger again refused to write for Why Work.  But Lish was not unhappy: 'I mean, forget that it was animating him all four months later, it worked! had worked!--because there he was, J.D. Salinger, the impeccably reclusive J.D. Salinger, calling me--.'" (151)

It is necessary to take a detour into Lish, and relate one final personal anecdote in two pieces.  First, on the day I finished this biography, the Winter 2016 edition of the The Paris Review (#215) arrived at our apartment (I don't subscribe to it; my roommate does--one of several reasons why I will be sad to see him go).  One of the interviews was of the now 82-year-old Gordon Lish, who is cantankerous as ever.  Lish donated his papers to Indiana University, and he encourages all Carver fanatics to visit this collection to see just how responsible he is for Carver's acclaim.  Now it is very true that Carver is widely imitated and extremely influential, and Lish's labors cannot be diminished.  However, Lish makes it seem like Carver is a stumbling drunk who can barely form a sentence, who spits out a couple dozen pages of gibberish, which Lish then cuts by more than 50% to emerge with a prize-winning story.  Lish is just a very heavy editor, and other writers, such as Barry Hannah, acknowledge how deeply he changed their work for the better.  Carver, on the other hand, was sheepish about this, and fought the accusations that he was really just Lish's puppet.

For Christmas, I got my mother a copy of Beginners, which is the manuscript Carver sent Lish of the stories that would comprise his second book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which is certainly one of the most famous short stories he wrote.  I haven't read it yet, but it's one of those gifts where you are really getting something for yourself--though I know my mother loves literature and I was just trying to turn her on to Carver.  Maybe it will be weak, though.  I am afraid.  I looked at the opening of "What Is It?" from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?  in the Barnes & Noble and it starts off like a rocket--"First thing, we have to sell the car," or some other such opening.  Lish would remove characters, remove names from characters, cut out whole scenes, remove neat conclusions and leave stories to end on an ambiguous or dark note.  Carver is often defined as a minimalist, but I think it is quite clear that Lish is responsible for that reputation.  Reading this biography reignited my interest in his work, and I hope to read the Lish-edited books and then perhaps Beginners once my mother is finished with it.  Really one would need to read them side-by-side--or at least focus on the story "Beginners" itself--to determine if that 2009 volume, positioned by Tess Gallagher as truer versions of the stories, is responsible in the least for Birdman, which I feel like put Carver back into the national consciousness.   To be sure, Birdman is an achievement all on its own--but would it really have been the kind of Best Picture type film it was without the Carver motif?  I'm sure plenty of people watching didn't know a thing about "WWTAWWTAL," but those that did understand why the film is such a powerful statement on artistry and fame.

Carver never became "famous" until he stopped drinking, though it was his many drunken misadventures that became the stories of "Bad Ray" which "Good Ray" would then write in his sober years.  There are so many little things in this book that are just hilarious; there are just as many that will break your heart.

A brief word on domestic violence: Ray beat Maryann, and Sklenicka does not shy away from describing it, though she does perhaps whitewash it a bit--but understandably so!  Because Maryann would beat him back, too, and often drank as much as he did.  There is one shocking incident though, where Maryann is nearly killed by a bottle of wine broken on her neck, which opens an artery.  They have a volatile, tempestuous relationship, and it nearly kills them.  One does not get the sense that Ray is the typical abuser and Maryann is the typical victim.  It never seems like she is "scared" of him, though she is remarkably loyal to him.  I will not spoil what happens when they finally divorce, and the alimony arrangement they reach, but let's just say, as I've intimated above already, that Carver owes his career to Maryann.  He owes a debt to Lish as well, but Maryann most of all--because she nourished and cared for him and supported him through the worst times most human beings are ever made to suffer.

Amidst all the messiness of life, Carver eventually succeeds.  Really, here we have someone--in the generation of the "post-Beats" or the New Journalism (or "the New Fiction" Lish curated)--who grew up wanting to be a writer, who did all the things that people still do nowadays (like go to Iowa, submit to journals, etc.) and who made it, but not without extreme difficulty.  It's just such a true story that it has to be one of the Best Books.  Even with a few weird moments--I admit that a few of Sklenicka's rare exclamation points are quirky--this is an incredibly valuable tome for anyone that wants to be a writer.  You cannot help but smile at certain passages.

Okay I had a good one to end with, but we have to keep Thomas alive, too:

"In Zurich, a friend secured them entry to Thomas Mann's archives and Mann's large study with its fine mahogany desk, parquet floor, couch, and easy chairs.  They opened Mann's books and handled his fountain pens and Asian figurines.  'Who couldn't work well with a study like this?' Ray wrote on a postcard, before grumbling that Zurich had 'more Japs than Swiss' and more gays than straight people.  Tess's journal indicates that Ray felt anxious about getting meals at specific times and taking a nap in the afternoon.  Those difficulties were somewhat offset for him by the availability of Swiss chocolate.  After making their third visit to the cemetery where James Joyce is buried and studying several funerary sculptures there, they dined at Kronenhalle, which Joyce had frequented.  Lectures and meetings with publishers in Rome and Milan closed the trip at the end of April.  Weary of media attention and foreign food and foreign languages, Ray gratefully returned to Port Angeles."  (456)

But it's a scene from Syracuse with his son, Vance, that may have touched me more than anything else:

"When Vance took Tobias Wolff's survey course in the short story, he said to Wolff, 'My dad's really good, isn't he?'  Wolff said, 'Vance, your dad is one of the greatest short story writers who ever lived!'  And that had some meaning for him because he was learning about this art form that his father pursued so single-mindedly.  He could see him in this landscape of art." (365-366)

Biographies can be tedious and disappointing.  They can also make you love their subject even more.  Raymond Carver was far from a perfect human being.  In fact, he is downright dastardly at times, but it's the humanity peaking through such moments that give this book its heart.  Not everyone will love it--it seems targeted at Carver's fans, of which there are many--and though there are many writers one might care to emulate if they hope to "make it" in short fiction (Joy Williams comes to mind as she pops up throughout the book as a sort of contemporary female counterpart to Carver), one ultimately must find greatness within themselves.  This book portrays that process beautifully.

Lawyer Boy: A Case Study on Growing Up - Rick Lax (2008)

"Write what you know."

That is the advice most writing teachers give.  Or at least that was the popular wisdom back in the late 90's/early 2000's.  Later on, there was a twist: you should write what you know, but also what you can learn and confidently write about as if you've experienced it yourself.  I do not think I will ever be able to do the latter, and for that reason I may never be a successful novelist--though that does not mean I will ever give up on my dream.  I know I wouldn't be able to write a law school memoir unless I went.

And it is a good idea, at this point in history, to publish a law school memoir.  Because the landscape has changed.  Rick Lax published Lawyer Boy in 2008, probably right around the moment the markets crashed.  Did he graduate in 2008?  I have no idea.  And one of my major complaints about Lawyer Boy is that it's only about the first year.

So it's basically very easy to sum up: One L but at a TTT turned TT set immediately before people started using those acronyms.

It could have been so much better.  As it is, it's pretty good.  It's definitely a page-turner.  But I don't think anybody who didn't go to law school or is planning on going to law school will find it very intriguing.  That is the problem with the law school memoir as a genre.  Still, I think Lax made better use out of his law degree than a lot of disappointed graduates nowadays.  At least it gave him good material for a book.

Then again, there is one non-nitpick critique I can make of this book: it loses steam in its second-half.  Lax seems to rush through the story of the spring semester.  Part of this is understandable: his school was not crazy and probably enrolled 1Ls in 3 credits of Constitutional Law and Contracts both semesters, instead of 5 credits in one semester.  So there's not a lot of new stuff to mention except Torts and Property.

But now we get to the fun part: comparing experiences.  Because it really is sad, how similar every law school is to every other one, regardless of ranking.  It's one of the reasons so many people criticize the proliferation of law schools today--because they are just so easy to plan.  There are too many of them and I have been saying for a couple years now that the ABA should limit the number of new graduates entering the workforce because that is the only way to prevent a highly-indebted unemployed glut of new graduates applying for the same few entry-level jobs that get posted.  The market will fix itself, some believe, and while overall enrollment has dropped, I think it's still way too high.  If it's unfair to close schools, then each should just be forced to reduce the size of their first-year class to a quota.  It might sound like a totalitarian regime, but it would be better for those choosing to enter the profession in the long run (it is really depressing to go through such hell for 3 years, take on a load of debt, jump through dozens of hoops, only to be laughed at because you're useless) and at the very least it would make for an interesting Supreme Court case.  I digress.

Rick Lax went to DePaul Law School.  I almost went there.  Now that I have chosen to live in Chicago, I wish I had gone there.  But I did get in and I could appreciate some of the details.  The book starts out very strong, with Lax describing why he wanted to go to law school in the first place, what it was like to take the LSAT, and what it was like to choose his school:

"I realized that my full-time immaturity shtick would one day inevitably turn from cute and charming to sad and creepy.  I realized that I couldn't live with my parents forever, that I needed a place of my own, and that magic wouldn't pay the bills--the ones I'd presumably have if I had a place of my own.  I realized that I had to go to law school...because it's not like I was going to get a job or anything." (9)

Of course, plenty of people on the internet will laugh at that paragraph as a supreme exercise in irony.  But this was in 2006 (or so).  Lax wanted to go to University of Michigan, which is where he went for undergrad, where his father went, and which was closest to home.  But he couldn't get in.  I could say the same thing about myself and NYU:

"Getting into the University of Michigan's undergraduate program was tough--I'd needed to transfer in.  Getting into their law school, I recognized, would be almost impossible.  The Supreme Court made that much clear in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger.  The case's opinion begins: "The [University of Michigan] Law School ranks among the Nation's top law schools.  It receives more than 3,500 applications each year for a class of around 350 students."  In Grutter, the Supreme Court held that state universities have a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body, and that this interest justifies the use of race as a factor in admissions.  But even without affirmative action, plaintiff Barbara Grutter, who had a 3.8 GPA and 161 LSAT score, probably couldn't get into the University of Michigan Law School today.  In recent years, the average incoming University of Michigan Law School student has had a 3.7 GPA and a 168 LSAT score." (12-13)

Lax got the same score as me: 163 and we didn't get to go to our dream schools.  But this is pretty much where our stories diverge.  He also applied to UNLV, DePaul, University of Chicago, NYU and Columbia.  He got rejected everywhere except for the first two.  And it probably would have been better for him to go to UNLV in the long run since apparently he lives there now (I know this through Twitter and I will post this review @him and hope not to get trolled) and it is probably the best place to make a living as a magician--which is the "hook" of this book.

Because see--if I wanted to write a law school memoir, there wouldn't be a "hook."  It's that extra little something that makes a literary agent think that your book is going to be special or memorable or something.  And some of the magician anecdotes are funny, but sometimes it feels a bit like "padding."  First there's the appendix, which has a couple tricks that I am pretty sure you wouldn't be able to do just from reading it (I think with magic you need an in-person demonstration from someone willing to show the secrets).  Second there are the numerous jokes about how no self-respecting person chooses magic as a profession, which okay, was probably true in 2006, but in 2014 no self-respecting person chooses law as a profession, unless they are sure they're really, really smart and are going to be in the top 10% or going to one of the very best schools.  Sorry--must contain my cynicism.

But the details about DePaul are pretty priceless, and as a resident of Chicago, I can say the book is certainly true to life.  First, there is the t-shirt:

"As expected, the University of Las Vegas accepted me, and even threw in a $9,000 annual scholarship.  DePaul University College of Law in Chicago trumped that with an $18,000-a-year offer, accompanied by a 100 percent cotton XL school T-shirt."

I got the same one with a $20,000-a-year offer, four (?) years later.  So still, we're in the same boat.  However, there is a sad anecdote later on that I have trouble believing:

"On Monday, I wore my complimentary XL DePaul T-shirt to Con Law...as did Dan and two of the other serious students.  I figured we'd all run out of clean clothes at the same time.
'Lookin good, Rick,' said Dan.
'You, too.'  I turned to Nadeeka, who wasn't wearing a shirt, and said, 'It's DePaul T-shirt day.  You didn't get the memo?'
She hadn't.
'Congratulations,' Dan said.
'On what?'
'Your scholarship.  You got the shirt with the scholarship, right?'
The shirt went with the scholarship.  Ah.
'You mean they didn't make you pick between the two?'
At the start of the semester, everybody must have assumed a handful of Section 2 students just happened to buy the same ill-fitting DePaul law school T-shirt.  By the second week of class, most people had figured out what the T-shirts meant.  By that week, wearing the shirt was no longer considered just a fashion misstep; it was considered a statment about the wearer's refusal to hide or apologize for her intellectualism." (82-83)

I think it is just incredible that DePaul would be so callous as to give scholarship students T-shirts, and non-scholarship students nothing.  Perhaps the practice changed after a few years, but it just strikes me as a really cynical (maybe the wrong word?) thing to do.  I got mine, and I liked wearing it to class because it was sort of a message like "fuck you, I hate this place and wish I went to DePaul" but I don't think anybody got it (and truthfully I didn't hate my school--just my first year, and I hate myself for what happened after--I actually have ridiculously fond memories of my second and third years).

Which is why I felt like Lawyer Boy was missing something.  Of course, a lot of people say "1L is all that matters" and sure that's true for jobs--but I felt that the ending of the book was inaccurate.  Lax writes about people getting jobs at big firms as if they're working there the summer after their 1L year.  That's not the way it works!  It's misleading.  Maybe a couple of his friends got to do that, but I know basically no one that worked at firms during their 1L summer.  Then again our school gave out a (fairly generous, at the time) public service grant so maybe most people did that because it was close to a livable wage.  Basically this book ends like 1L is the end of law school and that's just not true--there's two more years of crap, and at least in my experience, the social aspect gets really interesting at that point because people stop spending 90% of their free time studying (maybe 90% is inaccurate but it felt like that for me) and start having social lives.

Still, it was funny to read about how similar our experiences were.  One notable example was this introductory exercise, a welcoming speech from the Dean:

"Head Dean Glen Weissenberger spoke last: 'You've heard a lot about us, the faculty, and you've heard a lot about DePaul, but now I'd like to talk to you about something else: you.  All two hundred and forty of you.  Some of you came here from state college; some of you came here from Harvard.  One of you has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, another of you has one in materials engineering.  One of you even designed spacecraft parts for Boeing.
'One of you is the president of a gospel choir.  One taught English in Ghana.  One survived testicular cancer.  One lost over one hundred pounds in two years.  One was attached by sharks.  One worked for NATO in Kosovo as a counterintelligence agent with the U.S. Army.
'One of you is a professional magician, and that particularly excites me because I used to be a professional magician, too.'" (52)

Any of my classmates will recognize this ritual.  It is almost as if the law schools feel obligated to perform this tradition--just like the obligation to retain the same first year courses, though some of them (*cough*property) are basically niche areas filled with arcane nonsense.

Weissenberger was later dismissed from the law school in 2009, so apparently Lax used real names.  I'm not so sure about the other professors.  While most of the professors are generally treated quite well in the book, the Legal Writing professor seems like one of the biggest jerks on the planet.  I wouldn't be too surprised if this was an accurate portrait, but I'd be surprised if Lax didn't use a pseudonym.  While Legal Writing assignments are graded anonymously, there is a fair amount of discussion of how the professor knew which assignments Lax had turned in, and so maybe it wouldn't make a difference if Lax used a pseudonym or not: the professor obviously must have known it was written about him/her.  But apparently Devenpeck is a pseudonym.  This is only interesting to me because Turow used pseudonyms for his professors, and as I toy with the idea of writing a law school memoir, I tend to wonder about the "libel" aspect.  I wouldn't write anything bad about any of my professors, but I still feel weird writing about them, period, whether using pseudonyms or not, in a memoir.  But if you don't use pseudonyms, you're pretty much obligated to only say nice things.  Whatever.

The only other aspect I want to mention is that Lax seems to exhibit what a good percentage of my law school classmates also did: complete disregard for fiscal responsibility.  This is mainly due to where he chooses to live, and how his parents are able to pay for it.  Also I don't think he mentions taking out any loans.  So a very important part of the puzzle is also missing for aspiring law students.  This is also why I wish the 2L and 3L years were also included in this book.

One other thing I like about this book is that Lax provides snapshots of some of the cases he studied, and generally he picks out interesting ones (while also including a fairly concise summary of Marbury v. Madison, though I think someone else probably did a better job).

Finally, Justice Scalia is not mentioned until page 206.  At least he gets mentioned.  But any law school memoir in the late 20th or early 21st century has to say something about Scalia.  The thing I like most about him is that most law students hate his philosophy, but still love him because he can be a very witty writer.  Justice Douglas is not mentioned at all, and I will still persist in calling him my favorite.  He may not be the wittiest (though there is usually a humorous sentence or two in each of his opinions), but I still think he's one of the few who lived his life according to his judicial philosophy, and so he is automatically interesting.  

In the end, I can only give a lukewarm recommendation for this book.  I don't want to say "not recommended" because I think it does about as good a job as can be expected, and I shouldn't judge it because I wanted to see it do something differently.  However, I would be curious to know why Lax didn't want to include the 2L and 3L years.  Maybe that is a blessing, because perhaps the law school memoir that is an exhaustive account of the entire thing has yet to be written.  Perhaps I haven't really been looking for it, or just wouldn't want to read it, but I have to believe that a law school memoir published in 2010 or later from a non-T14 student/graduate could be a contender for the Pulitzer Prize due to tragic content.  I pray for all of us--that we make something of our lives, and that they are not cut short by psychosomatic tragedy.

How Judges Think - Richard A. Posner (2007)

Oeuvre rule: I have read dozens of judicial opinions by Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit and almost every one of them has been a good read.  I even remember reading one obscure bankruptcy decision which was very entertaining because he went out of his way to highlight the frivolity of the litigant's claims.  He has been a federal judge for more than 30 years.  He has written a formidable number of books and law review articles.  His name is synonymous with "economic analysis" and "law."  He was made to serve on the Supreme Court, but was never nominated because he could not be counted on to "vote along party lines."  He also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School and blogs at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/.

Last year I applied to be his law clerk.  I applied to about 100 other judges.  Almost all of them sent rejection letters.  A couple actually sent invitations to interview.  Judge Easterbrook (Posner's colleague on the 7th Circuit) sent a postcard rejection.  Posner was the only judge who failed to respond.

And who could blame him?  After all, I sent him my rejected 40 page note on the plight of temporary workers in the wake of the Great Recession, and added, at the end of my mail-merged cover letter, that I was a huge fan of his.  I've heard he likes to have clerks with backgrounds in engineering and science.  So I completely understand.  And I would not be so petty as to criticize How Judges Think based on the mere failure of a response.

But this is not going to make the "best books of Flying Houses" list for one reason and one reason only: it has very limited appeal for a mass audience.  This book is made for law students, professors, law school administrators, judges, lawyers, and anyone who has been faced with the thankless task of poring over law review articles.  Occasionally, it is interesting enough for lay readers, but the proof is in the acknowledgments:

"I have incorporated material from the following articles of mine, though with much revision and amplification: "The Role of the Judge in the Twenty-First Century," 86 Boston University Law Review 1049 (2006) (chapters 3 and 4); "Judicial Behavior and Performance: An Economic Approach," 32 Florida State University Law Review 1259 (2005) (chapter 5); "Reasoning by Analogy," 91 Cornell Law Review 761 (2005) (chapter 7)...." (379)

And six other articles.  So while yes, Judge Posner is an extremely hard worker and probably one the most (if not the most) prolific writers in the history of American law, it appears that he writes his articles with an eye towards incorporating them into a book (though I did read one funny article by him called "Goodbye to the Blue Book" that may not have found its way into a book).  As one recent law graduate told me when I was a 1L, "Posner writes with an eye to being published in casebooks."

Posner begins the book by discussing 9 theories of judicial behavior (attitudinal, strategic, sociological, psychological, economic, organizational, pragmatic, phenomenological, and legalist) and whether judges's decisions are best explained by the political preferences they bring to their cases, largely focusing on the idea that "liberal" judges are appointed by Democrats and "conservative" judges are appointed by Republicans.  Some of this is confusing because it may be difficult to say what separates a "liberal" decision from a "conservative" one.  Of course there are easy cases like Goldberg v. Kelly (a Justice Brennan-authored decision requiring evidentiary hearings prior to the termination of public assistance benefits) and Citizens United (a Justice Kennedy-authored decision allowing corporations to make virtually unlimited expenditures in the area of campaign finance), but as noted in my previous review, certain areas such as criminal procedure do not always allow for such neat "left/right" categorization.

Posner then goes on to discuss the judge as a labor-market participant.  While Posner's reasoning on the matter is sound, it underscores how esoteric this book can get:

"Each bit of information the judge received that bore on that truthfulness [of a witness] would be likely to alter his prior probability [a pre-inquiry estimate of a witness's truthfulness], but not erase it; the prior probability would affect the posterior probability [a post-inquiry assessment of a witness's truthfulness], as in Ω(H/x) = p(x/H)/p(x/~H) x Ω(H), the simplest version of Bayes's theorem.
Ω is odds; the left-hand side of the equation is the posterior odds that some hypothesis, H, is true; the last term on the right-hand side of the equation, Ω(H), is the prior odds; x is the new information obtained in the course of the inquiry; p is probability, and p(x/H)/p(x/~H), the first term on the right-hand side of the equation, is the ratio of the probability that x would have been observed even if H was false (~H). (So if those two probabilities were the same, the new information would not alter the odds; it would be a case of multiplication by 1.)" (66) (brackets mine)

While I may have made that more confusing with my bracketing, it was the simplest way I could sum up what is unquestionably the most unreadable portion of the book.  Thankfully, Posner does bring it down to a more human level:

"Suppose the hypothesis is that the witness--let us say the plaintiff in a sex discrimination suit--is testifying truthfully, and that before she begins to testify the judge sets (almost certainly, unconsciously) the odds that she will be telling the truth at 1 to 3, which is equivalent to a probability of 25 percent (1 out [1+3]).  She testifies, producing new information, x.  Suppose the probability that x would be observed if she was telling the truth is .6, that while the probability that it would be observed if she was not telling the truth is .3, so that the ratio of the two probabilities is 2.  When this "likelihood" ratio is multiplied by the prior odds of 1 to 3, the result is posterior odds of 2 to 3 (1:3 x 2 = 2:3), which is equivalent to a 40 percent probability (2 out of 5) that the witness is telling the truth." (66)

I will not comment any further on Bayesian theory.

I could go through the rest of the chapters and summarize what each one is about, but that would be boring and a needless waste of time.  You may read the Introduction or the Conclusion to the book if you would like a bite-sized morsel of it.  Like any good law review article, it is systematically and structurally precise.  Posner does not exactly come out and say, "I am a pragmatist," but it seems clear that he favors the "pragmatic" behavioral model of the judge over the others.

Sadly, as I often mention when discussing Vladimir Nabokov's thoughts on Thomas Mann, Posner does not have kind words for my favorite Supreme Court Justice:

"Law is a methodologically conservative profession, and 'bad boy' rhetoric such as [Jerome] Frank's advocacy of psychotherapy for judges or Fred Rodell's proposal that the practice of law be made a crime and courts be replaced with administrative agencies including a 'Killing Commission to apply its laws about what are now called murder and manslaughter,' like the antics of the 'crits,' ensured that these scholars would not receive a fair hearing.  That the only avowed legal realist to become a Supreme Court Justice--William O. Douglas--flouted perfectly sensible norms of judging (FN 46) also helped to give realism a bad name." (112-113)
("Here is a sampling of criticisms of Douglas--none by conservatives.  'His [Douglas's] opinions were not models; they appear to be hastily written; and they are easy to ignore.'  L.A. Powe, Jr., 'Justice Douglas after Fifty Years: The First Amendment, McCarthyism and Rights,' 6 Constitutional Commentary 267, 269 (1989).  The carelessness of Douglas's opinions was rooted in his 'indifference to the texture of legal analysis, which arises from an exclusively political conception of the judicial role.' Yosal Rogat, 'Mr. Justice Pangloss,' New York Review of Books, Oct. 22, 1964, p.5.  'Douglas was the foremost anti-judge of his time.' G. Edward White, 'The Anti-Judge: William O. Douglas and the Ambiguities of Individuality,' 74 Virginia Law Review 17, 80 (1988).  Douglas 'refus[ed] to judge in tax cases.'  Bernard Wolfman, Jonathan L.F. Silver, and Marjorie A. Silver, 'The Behavior of Justice Douglas in Federal Tax Cases,' 122 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 235, 330 (1973))." (FN 46)

Posner is generally a very witty writer, but it can be difficult at times to mine through the seeming intellectual elitism of his prose to realize that what he is writing is actually funny.  But other times, he frames the law in a way that laypersons will understand:

"Versions of judicial modesty include [James Bradley] Thayer's principle that statutes should be invalidated only if they are contrary to any reasonable understanding of the constitutional text and Holmes's 'can't helps' or 'puke' test: a statute is unconstitutional only if it makes you want to throw up." (288)

I will make one final point about How Judges Think: while it is probably going to attract little interest from those outside of the "profession," it is good reading for law students, and it will probably be slightly more interesting than your average law review article or casebook reading assignment.  Most law students will probably find the final section of the book, where Posner discusses the political nature of the Supreme Court, to be most entertaining.  He gives brief (but always intriguing, given the level at which his mind is operating) remarks on most of the Justices then sitting in 2007, and delivers a pretty thorough review of Justice Breyer's book Active Liberty.  He also criticizes Justice Kennedy's constitutional philosophy:

"Justice Kennedy's opinions in Lawrence v. Texas (the homosexual sodomy case) and Roper v. Simmons [the juvenile death penalty case] make only limited efforts to ground decision in conventional legal materials.  They could not do more, operating with nondirective constitutional provisions and in the teeth of adverse precedent.  They are appeals to moral principles that a great many Americans either disagree with or think inapplicable to homosexuals or juvenile murderers.  The approach is consistent, however, with the judicial philosophy that Justice Kennedy expressed in the interview from which I quoted in chapter 9, when he said that 'all of us have an instinctive judgment that we make...You make these quick judgments...Judges do the same thing...But after you make a judgment, you then...have to see if that...accords with your own sense of ethics and morality.  And...[you have to understand] that you have the opportunity to shape the destiny of this country.  The framers wanted you to shape the destiny of the country.  They didn't want to frame it for you.'  This is the most powerful judge in America speaking, and, if we may judge from his decisions, meaning what he says--that the framers of the Constitution wanted Anthony Kennedy to shape the destiny of the country in accordance with his own sense of ethics and morality, though it strikes many as quirky." (310-311) (first brackets mine)

While the book reads fairly well from beginning to end, its genre likely falls into "legal theory," and so most readers may pass a chuckle when Posner goes off for five pages about Chief Justice Roberts's "umpire analogy" to judging, but few will stick it through to the end.  Through no fault of its own is the book dated (there are at least four major cases, involving Anna Nicole Smith, the Affordable Care Act, Campaign Finance, and gay marriage, on which Posner likely has something to say), but it is one that is a prime candidate for a "new edition." 

Posner opens up the book with an exclamation point--one of the few in the text--and closes on a powerful salvo, which nicely summarizes his raison d'être:

"For that recognition [that legalism is not the path to reform] to take hold, however, will require a change in the way in which law is taught in law schools.  Realism about judges is sorely lacking there.  Law is taught as if judges were second-class professors, professors manqué--legal analysts lacking the specialized knowledge of the law professor.  The motivations and constraints operating on judges, and the judicial mentality that results, are ignored, as if judges were computers rather than limited human intellects navigating seas of uncertainty.  As a result students are not taught how to present a case to a judge in a way that will strike a responsive chord.  The curious judicial passivity that results from judges' being accustomed to simply decide whatever is brought to them to decide, rather than to initiate anything, has made most judges shy about telling lawyers how they should be presenting cases to maximum effect, thus helping themselves by helping the judges.  The nation needs a better bridge between bench and bar, and its construction must be largely the work of the law schools." (377)

Ultimately that is who will get the most out of this book: law school administrators and practicing lawyers.  While it is highly doubtful that every judge possesses as masterful an intellect as Posner's, I am sure they would find many of his comments to be accurate.  I am sure that by reading this book, and taking out some of the "pro tips" he offers, one could become a better attorney.  Or you could at least learn how not to screw up an amicus curiae brief if you happen to teach at Yale.  

Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas - Bruce Allen Murphy

Justice Douglas is my favorite Supreme Court justice, ever.  Justice Stevens is #2, and Justice Brandeis might be #3.  (Brennan, Marshall, and Black might fill out a few other top slots.) That all 3 ran on the "same line" from 1916 - 2010 is noteworthy, and whatever reservations Douglas may have had about his likely successor, one hopes that Justice Stevens "made good" in the eyes of history (I believe that he has).

Wild Bill is a long book--511 pages to be exact.  It was published in 2003 and took 15 years to research and write.  Mr. Murphy did a fine job with his research and his prose, but one tends to wonder about editing.  While Wild Bill will certainly make the "best books" list on Flying Houses, I fear that it did not capture a wide audience.  Murphy states that he had a 2,700 page manuscript at one point, so boiling this down to 1/5 of that length must have involved some serious editorial wrangling.  He had good help:

"My gratitude is extended to agent Robert Gottlieb, then at William Morris, for arranging the original book contract and for encouraging me to stick with the plan of doing a one-volume biography." (515)

Gottlieb is a legend in his own right, but it is quite apparent to me that few people in 2003 were still interested in reading multi-volume biographies.  However I will not use this review as a sword against the modern world of literary agents.  This is a book that deserved to be published (of course) and deserves to be called one of the greatest biographies in American history--primarily because its subject is one of the greatest heroes in American history, and the treatment of that subject is well considered.

For those that are unaware of Justice Douglas (or who did not read my review of his excellent work Points of Rebellion) there are a number of "sound bites" that people in law school tend to know:

(1) He was married four times.

(2) He was an impassioned environmentalist.

(3) He holds the record for the longest term of service on the Court.

(4) He was fucking crazy.

Of course I am only kidding about the last one.  If he was crazy at any point, it was near the end of his life, and I intend "crazy" in its most endearing form: good crazy; not bad crazy.

His life story is not easily told in a review of a book, but I would like to comment on one thing first:

Whitman College.

Now, few people may know this, but Whitman College was on my "shortlist" of undergraduate institutions to attend back in 2001.  It did not win out, but I am sure that had I gone there, I would have been aware of Justice Douglas much earlier in my life, and would have modeled the years past accordingly.  Therefore, I blame the admissions outreach office of Whitman College for its failure to highlight this esteemed alumnus's humble roots.  Perhaps I was not interested in law when I was 18, but I am sure that, had I gone to Whitman College, I would have gone to law school immediately, would probably have graduated at one of the most terrible times in history, and might not be sitting in the Napping Room of the Brooklyn Law School library, typing out this post.  

I suppose the best place to begin is with his time in law school (at Columbia):

"As his classmates got to know Douglas, they became aware that he was different from them.  'The thing that really set him apart from the rest of us,' remembered classmate Herman Benjamin. 'was not his brilliance--we were all pretty smart--and it was not his poverty--we were all pretty poor...No, what set him apart from the rest of us was his age.  He was a full two years older than the rest of us.'  Indeed, in an entering class of 264 people, nearly all twenty-one or twenty-two years old, Douglas was one of only two who were about to turn twenty-four.  Embarrassed by this difference, Douglas made up a story to explain it...." (44)

That story involves distinguished service in World War I, which later serves to get him a place at Arlington National Cemetery.  This is apocryphal, like some other stories Douglas liked to tell, but true enough to make people shut up.  

Douglas did well in law school, but not as well as most modern Supreme Court justices:

"This combination of intellectual challenges took its toll on Bill Douglas's scholarly performance.  At the end of the first year's exams, when the top several students were acknowledged by being named James Kent Scholars, Douglas was not among them.  Douglas's friends believed that his lack of academic success was due to causes beyond any intellectual weakness on his part. 'Douglas was not well-off in law school,' explained Herman Benjamin.  'He was the only one of our class who absolutely had to work...The rest of us worked to get spare money, but Douglas had to work to live.  I think it's quite possible that his financial straits may have affected his scholarship." (45)

Later, he improved in his second year, due in no small part to the efforts of his first wife, Mildred, who taught school in New Jersey and supported him for his last two years in school.  However, it was not without its disappointments.  He didn't make the Columbia Law Review (at first) and he "lost a clerkship."  Furthermore:

"The real truth, they all knew, was that the Yakima Apple Knocker had been nowhere close to graduating second in his class or, for that matter, to the law clerkship.  Herman Benjamin, a Law Review compatriot who is acknowledged as the class's historian, remembered, 'Not only can I assure you that Al McCormack was the universal and obvious choice for the clerkship [with Harlan Fiske Stone], but...if Douglas was competing with McCormack, it was for no better than fifth in the class....Douglas's memory on this matter is never very precise.  I have concluded that he is always a little general about the facts.'" (474)

This is not a far cry from my laments about Justice Stevens being the only recent Justice not to graduate from Harvard or Yale, but that being okay because he graduated #1 in his class at Northwestern.  Once again, I lament that only the most intellectually superior will ever have a chance to sit on the Supreme Court.  It is particularly ironic, in this day and age of anti-intellectualism, that the President has never felt compelled to place a "more ordinary" mind on the Court.  I digress.

Justice Douglas was raised in large part by his mother, with whom he had a stormy relationship.  His father was a Reverend, and sometimes Murphy invokes that image when writing of Douglas as a "preacher from the pulpit of the Court."  He was very ill as a boy, but recovered, and eventually was a very powerful hiker.  At one point he challenges a bunch of people to hike a 161 mile trail:

"The Washington Post endorsed a plan to build the C&O Parkway from Cumberland, Maryland, to the nation's capital along an old 185-mile, 230-foot-wide towpath beside the historic Chesapeake and Ohio Canal....Douglas sent a letter to the editor protesting that this highway would destroy the canal that his predecessor Justice Louis D. Brandeis used to travel by canoe to Cumberland.  Even now, he said, 'it is a refuge, a place of retreat, a long stretch of quiet and peace at the Capitol's [sic] back door--a wilderness area where man can be alone with his thoughts, a sanctuary where he can commune with God and with nature, a place not yet marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns.'" (330)

Of course he makes good on his challenge, and the editors at the Post decide that they were wrong, that the trail is indeed beautiful, and that they no longer endorsed the project.  

Oh, also he did this (in his mid-50's) after a horse fell on top of him about five years earlier, crushing 23 out of 24 of his ribs.  

There is also plenty of gossip regarding his womanizing and drinking.  No less than five wives/long-term girlfriends (while married to someone else) were sprinkled throughout his life.  And there were more:

"'We never knew what Dad did in Goose Prairie,' recalled his daughter Millie.  'He would just be gone for long periods of time [during the summer].'  And he took advantage of his privacy, especially in his relationships with women.  'Bill was the biggest whorer around,' recalled Isabelle Lynn, an early guest and later Kershaw's partner at the Double K, 'but we still loved him, though.'  Kay Kershaw had built a one-room, tine-roofed outbuilding, complete with a fireplace and a half bath, where a guest could live in total seclusion even from the main ranch.  This very quickly became Douglas's home away from home.  'Bill came here when he had a girlfriend, or when he didn't have a girlfriend and was writing one of his books,' recalled Kershaw, adding with a knowing smile, 'and he was here a lot.'  His female guests were arranged by an old friend.  'Douglas would just see what he liked in Yakima, and Elon Gilbert would ask the girl up,' explained Kershaw.  'I was always seeing girls come by saying, "Is Bill around?"   There were all types and all ages, and they came all the time...Poor Bill,' Kershaw concluded, 'he was no family man.  His personal life was all fouled up.'" (270-271)

As for drinking, Douglas could do it with the best of them.  But his paranoia, while oftentimes reasonable in certain respects (this was the J. Edgar Hoover era after all), sometimes took a toll on his staff:

"After a day of hard work with Douglas, everyone would wait until he departed before leaving themselves--sometimes it was at 6:00 and sometimes as late as 8:00 P.M.  When Douglas found out about this practice, he began leaving and then returning ten minutes later to see if the work was still under way.  If he saw no one, Douglas asked his secretary the next day, 'Where was everyone last night?  I came back, and no one was in the office.'
On days when they did not all scramble for the door after he had departed, the bottle of vodka in the bottom of Fay Aull's desk might be brought out to celebrate the survival of another day in the Justice's service.  One time, the Justice walked in a few minutes later to find a party well under way, said nothing, and went into his office.  The next morning, he buzzed for his secretaries and told them, 'Somebody is stealing my booze.'  Knowing that no one would dare touch the ample supply of liquor that he kept in his office, this was merely intended to put them on notice that what he saw should not happen again.  All it did, though, was convince them all to wait an extra five minutes before beginning the end-of-day festivities." (407-408)

There is also a great account of a pseudo-nervous breakdown he suffers while on a hiking trip:

"Everyone looked forward to dinner and the conversation that followed around the campfire, where Douglas would often sit cross-legged on the wooden supply boxes or on a log by the fire and tell his stories.  Looking past the roaring embers, with sparks filling the air around him, he would mesmerize the travelers with his tales of how he had 'cleaned up the Street,' how he had told Felix [Frankfurter] to 'go to hell,' or how close he had come to being vice president and then president instead of that haberdasher from Missouri.
But as the pack train moved along on this August day, it soon became clear to everyone that something was dreadfully wrong with their famous friend...'I'm gonna get good and drunk tonight,' he hissed at Cragg Gilbert.  Normally, that would not be an unusual statement, except this time Gilbert could see that Douglas would be drinking out of anger rather than to amuse himself.
As soon as the procession reached Blankenship Meadow, nearly everyone sprang into action--pitching their tents, getting their water, scouring the woods for kindling, arranging the food and cooking utensils for dinner, and building a campfire.  But Bill Douglas did none of that.  Instead, reaching into one of his saddlebags, he took out a liquor bottle and just sat down, drinking as fast as his body would allow.  With each swig, a deepening anger set in.  When the bottle was finished, he simply tossed it aside, returned to the saddlebag, and picked out another one.....Douglas started mumbling, but it wasn't to anyone around him, it was only to himself and in a language only he seemed to understand....'They bought it! They bought the goddamned nomination!'...Douglas's mumbling eventually ceased, and he began yelling at no one in particular...."(348-349)

So on the personal side of things, Murphy does a good job of summarizing Douglas's life.  Murphy's writing on the law could be compared to Jeffrey Toobin's (in The Oath or The Nine), though it lacks the same kind of immediacy that present-day reportage on the Court entails.  It seems clear that Murphy is "liberal," but he is more nuanced in his treatment of "conservative" justices.  In any case, this book has some overlap with The Brethren, but an unrelenting attack on Justice Burger is not undertaken. And it is to Murphy's credit that he must have known the existing literature on his subject, and that he didn't want to needlessly repeat some episodes already noted in other books.  Thus, there is some discussion of Douglas's treatment of his law clerks, but none of the stories from The Brethren are repeated.  Generally, Murphy is great at summarizing the Court's decisions in concise and well-chosen language.  See for example, his two sentence summary of Roe v. Wade:

"In Roe, the Court had overturned Texas's ban on abortions by creating a trimester system regulating the ability to secure abortions based on the differing interests of the three parties involved in the dispute: the mother, the unborn fetus, and the state.  While the mother had an unlimited right to get an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy, and the state had the right to prevent an abortion in the last three months to protect the fetus, in the middle trimester a state could only regulate the decision to get an abortion based on the need to protect the health and life of the mother." (458)

So, again, this book will be useful for students studying Constitutional Law.  Here is a brief list of cases that the book touches upon, and may be useful in supplementing one's studies:

Adderley v. Florida (1966)
Dennis v. United States (1951)
Feiner v. New York (1950)
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Korematsu v. United States (1944)
Minersville School Dist. v. Gobitis (1940)
New York Times Co. v. United States (1971)
Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972)
Poe v. Ullman (1961)
Rosenberg v. United States (1953)
Roth v. United States (1957)
Sierra Club v. Morton (1972)
Terminiello v. Chicago (1949)
United States v. Nixon (1974)
United Stats v. O'Brien (1968)

Sadly, the book does not pass the 420 test--but it comes pretty close:

"By this time [1970] he was especially suspicious of the FBI.  Upon noticing men in dark suits loitering around his summer house, Douglas began to investigate their mission.  'I wrote you last fall or winter that federal agents were in Yakima and Goose Prairie looking me over at Goose Prairie.  I thought they were merely counting fence posts,'  Douglas wrote his friends at the Double K ranch in the spring of 1970.  'But I learned in New York City yesterday that they were planting marijuana with the prospect of a nice big TV-covered raid in July or August.  I forgot to tell you that this gang in power is not in search of truth.  They are "search and destroy" people...It would be ironic if they planted it over in Ira [Ford]'s yard, not mine!'  But no such marijuana raid was ever staged." (444-445)

Douglas's career looks like this: (1) humble beginnings in Yakima, WA; (2) Whitman College years; (3) One year spent teaching high school; (4) Columbia Law School years; (5) Time spent working at Cravath, the work making him sick, weighing his other options; (6) Time spent teaching at Columbia and Yale Law Schools; (7) Offers dangled from the University of Chicago, playing law schools against one another to have him on their faculty; (8) elected Chairman of the SEC and prosecutes Richard Whitney; (9) Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939; (10) Potential Vice-Presidential Candidate for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman; (11) Potential presidential candidate--until he gets divorced; (12) Several wives, stultifying alimony responsibilities, and general disarray of personal financial affairs; (13) Discovery that he could be paid handsomely for writing books on the various travels he took; (14) Last surviving New Dealer on the Court, facing five Nixon appointees; (15) Greatly diminished old man who refuses to accept that he can no longer handle the work on the Court after suffering a stroke.

While the book does not discuss the Bakke case (that was decided in 1977, two years after Douglas retired), it does mention a similar case that came before it, and Douglas's opinions on the matter would turn out to be quite prophetic:

"The 1973-1974 term offered Douglas the opportunity to deal with the growing number of programs offering preference based on race to law-school applicants.  Marco DeFunis Jr., a Caucasian, was suing the University of Washington Law School for denying him admission while admitting under its 'affirmative action' program minority applicants with lesser qualifications...'I don't know about these tests,' said Douglas, referring to the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), which is used to test the aptitude of prospective law-school applicants.  Three days later, after the Court decided not to hear the case because DeFunis was about to graduate, Douglas decided to write a dissent to the denial.  The reason, he explained to his clerk, was simple: 'I might not be around next time this issue comes up.'
After considerable back and forth with his clerk in writing the opinion, Douglas's arguments against affirmative-action programs were instructive.  First, he vigorously attacked the LSAT, even without evidence to prove his point, as being so racially biased that on occasion there must be reverse bias by a law school to correct it.  The only requirement for him was that 'the consideration of each application [be done] in a racially neutral way.  Since [the] LSAT reflects questions touching on cultural backgrounds, the Admissions Committee acted properly in my view in setting minority applications apart for separate processing...The melting pot is not designed to homogenize people, making them uniform in consistency.  The melting pot as I understand it is a figure of speech that depicts the wide diversities tolerated by the First Amendment under one flag.'.......
Douglas made very clear, however, that he had no tolerance for a quota system, by which a certain number of the seats for the incoming class were reserved for certain minorities: 'The reservation of a proportion of the law school class for members of selected minority groups is fraught with similar dangers, for one must immediately determine which groups are to receive favored treatment and which are to be excluded, the proportions of the class that are to be allocated to each, and even the criteria by which to determine whether an individual is a member of a favored group.'  Only a policy of admissions based on racial neutrality was the answer: 'The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish.  It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone...A segregated admissions process creates suggestions of stigma and caste no less than a segregated classroom, and in the end it may produce that result despite its contrary intentions.'  For Douglas, who had once been denied access to the undergraduate portion of this very school because of his family's finances, the programs of affirmative action, which diminished the use of merit as an admissions criterion, were not permissible: 'All races can compete fairly at all professional levels.  So far as race is concerned, any state-sponsored preference to one race over another in that competition is in my view "invidious" and violative of the Equal Protection Clause.'  He was prepared to send this case back to the lower court to determine both the impact of the LSAT and this application process on various groups." (467-468)

These concerns would arise 40 years later in the Grutter and Gratz (University of Michigan) cases, and are still being decided as I write this today (University of Texas).

The lesson is that anyone interested in a progressive future for America should read this book and try to follow Douglas's lead.  To be sure, Murphy does not hold up Douglas as a god, and details his personal indiscretions as greatly as his contributions to American society at large.  So maybe, it is not okay on a moral level for a Supreme Court justice to use his or her position in order to constantly get laid.  But the point is Douglas lived by what he preached.  He believed in the freedom of the individual to express themselves in whatever ways they sought fit, and he certainly expressed himself without worrying what others would think of him.

Murphy sums up Douglas's importance in the history of 20th century America nicely near the end:

"He celebrated his 74th birthday, on October 16, 1972, by objecting to twenty-six denials of writs of certiorari, offering full dissents in ten of them.  Douglas was objecting to the Court's unwillingness to hear all manner of cases: antimonopoly laws, airport zoning statutes, state support for parochial-school education, employment liability, destruction of war materials, the constitutionality of chain gangs, and the rights of the poor in filing for criminal-trial transcripts.  By this time, Douglas was so anxious to show his displeasure with his colleagues that when four members of the Court voted to accept a case, he objected to that as well.  But with four Nixon appointees now dominating the Burger Court, it was all to no avail." (458)

His retirement announcement is described in rather moving terms as well:

"After they heard the news, one by one each member of the Court walked over to shake their senior colleague's hand and wish him well.  Then, as Douglas was quietly wheeled to the door, he raised his good arm, and, with some difficulty, expressed to his colleagues what had become his mantra in his waning years: 'Keep the Faith!'  With Douglas's record-making legacy of 1,164 full opinions, including 486 full dissents (not to mention thirty-two books and hundreds upon hundreds of public speeches), now complete, for the first time in more than thirty-six years the guardianship of the Constitution was in others' hands." (495)

At times this book may drag (I found it a bit slow through the several chapters dealing with Douglas's Presidential ambitions) but at other times it reads like an adventure story ("Trouble in the Woods" may be the strongest chapter in the book, as Murphy does an excellent job of recreating the horror of Douglas's horseback-riding accident).  Generally, the book is about as "quick" a read as you can expect for a 500+ page volume.  It is excellent reading for law students and those interested in the law, but I fear most people will forget about Justice Douglas.  That would be unfortunate because his influence remains relevant even in these technologically-advanced times.  Douglas could see where the future of America was heading, and more often than not, his opinions articulated that view.  He was an extraordinary human being, and this book is likely the most authoritative text on his life.

Of course this book won't be for everyone--but as I've mentioned on Flying Houses previously, parents should stop telling their children to "one day be President" and instead urge them to "one day be a justice."  Douglas may have wanted to be President (due in no small part to his mother's prediction that it was his destiny), but the lasting impact of his work as a justice easily outdoes that of the majority of 20th century American Presidents.  Future generations of law students will know his name, but more of the general American population should become acquainted with him.  This book should provide that requisite level of intimacy for all.      

Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts - Mark W. Smith (incomplete)

Note: This is Not the "Disrobed" Written by Judge Block, and I Would Much Rather Read that One

by Jack Knorps

Perhaps the problem with America is that we don't really give deference to the voices that speak in opposition to ours.  It pains me, greatly, to leave that scarlet word "incomplete" in the title of this post (I  have not had an "I" since Proust, je pense) but Mark W. Smith is no Mark E. Smith and I can hardly bear to waste anymore of my time reading this book.  I got through 33 pages.  I thought it would be a fun review to write, but I was wrong.

I have written at length on the "right" and the "left" swinging of the Court, but this book is a waste of my time because it is dated!  It was published in 2006.  If Smith did not get his wish then I'm sorry for him, but from his writing he appears to be an extremely radical conservative.

In the basement of the Brooklyn Law School library, there is some graffiti in the men's bathroom.  In the handicapped stall somebody wrote, "My s*** feels like: -a Scalia opinion (painful and offensive)."  I don't know who wrote that (it wasn't me--Scalia actually amuses me more often than not and I find him to be charmingly erudite, if politically "unattractive"), but if they are a terrorist then we should find him and torture him by forcing him to read this book.  That would be perfectly constitutional, actually. (I think.)

This book is dated because it opens up with Smith's Blackberry blowing up over Harriet Miers' failed appointment to the Court to replace Justice O'Connor (how charming to think, by the way, that there might have been a Justice Miers rather than a Justice Alito--Alito may be just about as conservative as you can get before entering lunatic land, but he is a much better writer than Smith--more respectable, at least).

This book has a chapter called "No More Souters."  I can guess what it says.  I didn't get that far, nor did I get to the titillatingly-titled fourteenth chapter, "Do You Sodomize Your Wife?" I made it to the first mention of Justice Douglas and Justice Brennan, and I stopped:

"Just look at how liberal justices decided when to use the power of the courts--and when not to.  In Williamson v. Lee Optical (1955), for example, the Supreme Court upheld an Oklahoma law preventing opticians, as opposed to licensed optometrists or ophthalmologists, from fitting lenses to eyeglasses.  In short, the Court rejected any suggestion that opticians or their patients had a right to enter into a voluntary economic transaction without the blessing of the state.  In his opinion, Justice William O. Douglas concluded, 'The day is gone when this Court uses the [Constitution] to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought...."For protection against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, not to the Courts."' (emphasis added).
Yet it was the very same Justice Douglas who a decade later wrote the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, striking down laws that restricted the sale of contraceptives.  Apparently, in the eyes of Justice Douglas, only economic conservatives needed to 'resort to the polls' when government regulators curtailed their liberties; social liberals could absolutely resort to the courts 'for protection against abuses by legislatures.'  Justice Douglas and the rest of his left-wing cronies on the high court obviously took to heart Emerson's line that 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'
Liberal justice William Brennan approved of the same double standard.  As constitutional scholar Bernard Schwarz explained, Brennan practiced 'judicial deference in the economic realm' but 'believed that the Bill of Rights provisions protecting personal liberties imposed more active obligations on the judges.  When a law infringed upon the personal rights the Bill of Rights guaranteed, Brennan refused to defer to the legislative judgment that the law was necessary.'
Why should Justice Brennan defer to government actions in the economic realm but not in the social or personal realm?  What about the constitutional guarantees to the right to keep the fruits of your own labor?  Did the Framers of the Constitution jettison the original Articles of Confederation to guarantee the 'fundamental' and 'unalienable' rights to abortion and buggery and the right to be free from hearing the words 'under God' uttered in the Pledge of Allegiance?" (31-32)

Actually Douglas used the words "the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," which, yes, is part of the Constitution, but does not comprise the entirety of its text.  And Smith perhaps does not seem to worry about rogue "eye doctors" that would create things like the Opti-Grab and make people go cock-eyed.  But plenty of people try to practice law without a license.  I am sure that Smith would not worry about rogue "baby doctors" that would perform "back-alley abortions with coat hangers"--no, we can have every baby carried to term, and if the mother is irresponsible, well she can put it up for adoption, I guess.  Shame on her--she should at least need to suffer for 9 months and we should DEFINITELY BRING MORE PEOPLE INTO THIS WORLD BECAUSE IT'S GREAT!

Writing this review is like shooting fish in a barrel.  The part about Romer v. Evans is priceless.  Jeffrey Toobin may write books about the Court that read like "Con Law for Dummies," but Disrobed is truly written for the lowest common denominator--that is, someone that does not consider the other side's position because they know they're right.

It is quite funny, however, to think of this book as dated though it was published just seven short years ago.  Smith probably blew his brains out when Obama won the election and put Sotomayor and Kagan on the Court.  Or at least he probably got really bad migraines for a while.

I am guessing, however, that Smith did not lose very much money in the Great Depression, Part Two (the first of which he asserts was drawn out--not ameliorated--by the New Deal), but he does believe that allowing banks to fail back in the day was a bad thing--not sure how he could get what he wants.  Reading this is like listening to Rush Limbaugh.  One is saddened that people who are obviously capable of publishing a book, or speaking for hours on end and entertaining millions of people, can have their voices heard so loudly, and can propagate such myths and fool the masses into believing whatever sounds good for their agenda

I love the part in Romer v. Evans where Scalia references the Chicago Cubs (I think I have written about this on Flying Houses several times before) and talks about how gay law schools are.  I had to skip ahead to "No More Souters" to make sure that Smith was not in fact gay because then he might actually be ridiculously clever--but I guess I am wrong:

"But now we know the kinds of judges we need to look for--principled conservatives who want to protect traditional American rights and values and who will focus on results rather than merely process--how do we find our Judicial Reagans?  As any of my ex-girlfriends can tell you (and certainly as any of Bill Clinton's can), a woman knowing what she wants in a man is a far cry from her actually finding one who meets those criteria.  It's the same with conservatives who are selecting judges: There's no guarantee we'll appoint Judicial Reagans just because we have certain qualities in mind." (124)

I have a serious problem with people that like drama for the sake of drama or fighting for the sake of fighting.  There is a book called "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" and Justice Douglas made a similar point in Points of Rebellion: let us keep fighting because we don't know what else we are supposed to do with ourselves.  There is a civil war going on in this country, but it is hidden, and for good reason: it would tear families apart.  Many of my friends are conservatives--or libertarians--which I believe is just code for "reputable Republican."  Smith repeatedly refers to the "loony left."  But writers like him give Republicans a bad name.  I can agree to disagree, but I am not going to write an entire book accusing my enemies of being insane and taking the Supreme Court to task.  It's a foolish endeavor.  It has been foolish for me to read this book and waste my time with it.

I will say that the book--while written extremely poorly--at least uses pretty decent grammar.  It is more than I could say for Pygmy, but I am sure that even the "terrorist kid" in that book (or whatever he is) is a nicer person than Smith seems to be.

"Do You Sodomize Your Wife?" was apparently asked to Justice Scalia at NYU Law.  Smith says that Scalia "does not argue that sodomy is good or bad, fun or unfun, moral or immoral, or anything of the kind.  He instead believes only that such questions should be resolved through the democratic process, not by a small cadre of unelected judges."  (210)

That may be so but Smith does not give Scalia's answer to that question, which was probably quite witty--instead, Smith just calls the question an "intellectually vapid query" and focuses on the question itself rather than the answer: which is that Congress does not equal Democracy--Congress may be called democracy but it should be clear to any high school student that the democratic process is controlled by moneyed interests and the Court is really our last resort to protect against tyranny--and moneyed interests do not always respond to the increasingly diverse needs of Americans.  I personally prefer a world where I have a choice between The Strand, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, but I guess I'll probably be able to find something decent at Barnes & Noble anyways....

I have said all I can about this book.  I regret checking it out because it forces me to make a terribly unattractive statement: it's okay to stop reading a book if you think it sucks (or if it just makes you so angry that you feel you have wasted your time).  Now I really have to go study Crim Pro, Sec Reg, Tax, the MPRE, and whatever other fun stuff I do.  Luckily I do not need to "take a side" in these activities.

Points of Rebellion - William O. Douglas

Justice Douglas is my favorite Supreme Court justice.  Law school is extremely boring at times, but any class that features Supreme Court opinions from 1939-1975 holds the potential for excitement: Douglas is likely to dissent in many cases, and there is almost always a sentence or two of pure brilliance and disgust.  Points of Rebellion, then, is a 97 page dissent against America as she stood in 1969.  It is a fantastic book and I highly recommend it.

In college, I majored in Writing and Politics at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.  We were required to state our concentration and present a colloquium on the topic.  I chose "Political Rebellion in Literature."  My presentation (delivered to my academic adviser, as well as two other faculty members) was mostly a mess.  We had to talk about 30 books.  Some of my books were Utopia (Sir Thomas More), Hamlet, The Rebel (Albert Camus), The Flowers of Evil (Charles Baudelaire), The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt), One-Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse), White Noise (Don DeLillo), Something Happened (Joseph Heller), Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Richard Hofstadter), The Trial (Kafka), Discourse on Method (Descartes), Bend Sinister (Vladimir Nabokov), and others...

My basic argument was that the different forms of rebellion had been squashed by the majority in American society.  I could not make this argument anywhere nearly as well as I could today.

Points of Rebellion would have been THE PERFECT BOOK for this colloquium, and I am sorry that I did not know anything about the law, or the Court, when I was 21 and designing my project.

Were I to give this presentation today, the so-called "Occupy movement" would no doubt move heavily to the forefront of the conversation.  Last year when the police arrested protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge and raided Zuccotti Park, I wrote on Facebook that it had taken 7 years, but I had finally been proven wrong: the flowers of rebellion still bloom today.

But I would like you, one day, to look at Google Analytics (I find it from my finance page) and look at Domestic Trends and see the last ten years in various industries.  You will be able to see some remnants of the Great Recession, but more notable is the continued dominance of the credit card industry.

While the "Occupy movement" may have brought like-minded individuals together and fostered a stronger public consciousness of the ways in which the financial industry has siphoned off economic growth from 99% of the population, it is hard to say that they have made a serious impact.  Elizabeth Warren has made a much stronger impact in terms of formulating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she is but one person.  It is far too early to talk about 2016, but other people are already whispering that Hillary Clinton will be running on the Democratic ticket--but I am convinced that the only way we can enter into a "golden age" is with Warren as President.  Many people are saying that we will continue to live with high unemployment rates for the rest of our lives, but if more people read Points of Rebellion, one would realize that rapid and radical change is, in fact, possible.

To be sure, Douglas's vision of an American utopia is improbable.  It is quite easy to counter Douglas's statements or claim that he asks too much out of people.  Indeed, many of his statements ignore the psychological tendencies of people to organize themselves in "the Establishment" that Douglas faced in his lifetime, and that we still face today.

First, Points of Rebellion was written in 1970--but it might as well have been written yesterday because nothing has changed (excepting some of the statements about foreign affairs):

"The advances of technology present the problem of increasing disemployment in the private sector.  We brag about our present low unemployment.  But that is due to Vietnam.  Without Vietnam we would have 15 per cent or more unemployment.  Must we fight wars to have full employment?
Technology is in the saddle and displaces manpower.  The old problem of unemployment has become the new problem of disemployment.  How many of the present eighteen-year-old men and women will be permanently disemployed?  Thoughts such as these fill the hearts of the young with dismay." (66)

Douglas does, at one point, flex his literary experimentation to hilarious effect:

"A number of federal agencies also use personality tests.  One included the following choices:--my father was a good man, I am very seldom troubled by constipation, my sex life is satisfactory, evil spirits possess me at times, at times I feel like swearing, I have had very peculiar and strange experiences, I have never been in trouble because of my sex behavior, during one period when I was a youngster I engaged in petty thievery, my sleep is fitful and disturbed, I do not always tell the truth, as a youngster I was suspended from school one or more times for cutting up, everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would.
The experts are at odds about these personality tests.  These tests commonly grade a person by eight, nine, or ten traits while twenty-five thousand traits might approximate an accurate personality portrayal.  Moreover, the creator of the test fashions his own neurotic world as, for example, to daydream is neurotic--the thesis that is present in one personality test." (25)

Most people know nothing of Justice Douglas.  Law students may hear the gossip that he was married four times and that he was an early advocate of environmental protection.  His passion for the environment is present throughout Points of Rebellion.  Sometimes his love for it is so innocent and genuine that one cannot help but be moved:

"I remember an alpine meadow in Wyoming where willows lined a clear, cold brook.  Moose browsed the willow.  Beaver came and made a dam which in time created a lovely pond which produced eastern brook trout up to five pounds.  A cattle baron said that sagebrush was killing the grass.  So the Forest Service sprayed the entire area.  It killed the sagebrush and the willow too.  The moose disappeared and so did the beaver.  In time the dam washed out and the pond was drained.  Ten years later some of the willow was still killed out; the beaver never returned; nor did the moose." (83)

Notably, Justice Douglas does not write as you would expect a Supreme Court justice to write--and it is refreshing as hell:

"In April, 1968, only 3.5 per cent of the general population was unemployed, while for those in the slum areas it was 7 per cent, with 5.7 per cent for whites and 8.7 per cent for Negroes.
The national white unemployment rate has been about 3.1 per cent and the national Negro unemployment rate 6.7 per cent.
Police practices are anti-Negro.
Employment practices are anti-Negro.
Housing allocation is anti-Negro.
Education is anti-Negro.
The federal government, with its hundreds of federally-financed public road contracts, and its thousands of procurement contracts negotiated each year by the Pentagon and other agencies to purchase munitions, towels, stationery, pens, automobiles and the like, is admonished by Congress to make sure that the contractors for these goods make jobs available without discrimination.  President Johnson gave hardly more than lip service to that mandate." (45-46)

When a Supreme Court justice can write the way Douglas does, one feels more secure in their love for their country.  However, there have not been many like him.  Points of Rebellion predates the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and one supposes that Douglas would think that agency a step in the right direction.  However it is more likely that he would find much to hate about it too.  His distaste for the administrative state is eloquently stated in another passage that could be written yesterday:

"Corporate interests, as well as poor people--unemployed people as well as the average member of affluent society--are affected by these broad generalized grants of authority to administrative agencies.  The corporate interests have been largely taken care of by highly qualified lawyers acting in individual cases and by Bar Associations proposing procedural reforms that define, for example, the 'aggrieved' persons who have standing to object to agency orders or decisions. [One wishes Douglas was on the Court when Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation came down...] But the voices of the mass of people are not heard; and the administrative agencies largely have their own way.
Moreover, the Establishment controls those agencies.  That control does not come from corrupt practices or from venality.  It results from close alliances made out of working relations, from memberships in the same or similar clubs, from the warp and woof of social relations, and from the prospects offered the administrator for work in the ranks of the Establishment, if he is the right and proper man.  The administrative office is indeed the staging ground where men are trained and culled and finally chosen to the high salaried posts in the Establishment that carry many desirable fringe benefits.  The New Dealers mostly ended up there.  Under Lyndon Johnson there was lively competition for administrative men who would in two years have made a million working for the Establishment.  That is a powerful influence among many agencies; and it results in those who have agency discretion exercising it for the benefit of those who run the corporation state.  And those people are by and large the exploiters." (79-80)

Like a law review article, this book ends with suggestions for reform.  President Obama should read this book (or at least indicate to me that he has read this book) and so should Elizabeth Warren.  They are the only ones out there right now that can make any of this change happen.  Of course, Congress will likely stand in their way, but if lawmakers are truly servants of the public, then they must listen to reason rather than self-interest.  Douglas nicely summarizes his vision at the end:

"There are only two choices: A police state in which all dissent is suppressed or rigidly controlled; or a society where law is responsive to human needs.
If society is to be responsive to human needs, a vast restructuring of our laws is essential.
Realization of this need means adults must awaken to the urgency of the young people's unrest--in other words there must be created an adult unrest against the inequities and injustices in the present system.  If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations.  Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true.  The tools and the opportunity exist.  Only the moral imagination is missing.
If the budget of the Pentagon were reduced from 80 billion dollars to 20 billion it would still be over twice as large as that of any other agency of government.  Starting with vast reductions in its budget, we must make the Pentagon totally subordinate in our lives.
The poor and disadvantaged must have lawyers to represent them in normal civil problems that now haunt them.
Law must be revised so as to eliminate their present bias against the poor.  Neighborhood credit unions would be vastly superior to the finance companies with their record of anguished garnishments.
Hearings must be made available so that the important decisions of federal agencies may be exposed to public criticism before they are put into effect.
The food program must be drastically revised so that its primary purpose is to feed the hungry rather than to make the corporate farmer rich.
A public sector for employment must be created that extends to meaningful and valuable work.  It must include many arts and crafts, the theatre, industries; training of psychiatric and social workers, and specialists in the whole gamut of human interest." (92-94, emphasis mine)

Justice Douglas is most famous for introducing the word "penumbra" into the world of constitutional rights.  A lot of people criticize him for that.  People tend to forget that he was giving married couples the right to use contraceptives.

If Justice Douglas was mentioned in my U.S. History classes, I can't remember.  However, in my small and humble opinion, he was one of the greatest Americans to have lived.  Law school has been a long and painful process, but at the very least it allowed me to gain exposure to Douglas, and to find a view of the Constitution and American society at large with which I could agree and seek to propagate in my own life.

Points of Rebellion is an inspiration.  Some of the material may be dated, but those portions are at least entertaining.  It is a short little book.  If you care about radical politics, I highly recommend you check it out.  Then go out there, and try to build a more enlightened society.