Less than the Least

"The Political Heart of Criminal Procedure: Essays on Themes of William J. Stuntz" has just been published by Cambridge University Press: here.  The book is based on the papers written by a number of the country's top criminal justice scholars for the conference at Harvard Law School in honor of Bill in 2010.  The essays are terrific.  (The hardback is pricey; if folks who interested in purchasing a copy email me privately, it's possible I can get a bit of a discount.)

I've been meaning for weeks to link to a very thoughtful review by Orin Kerr of Bill's book on the Volokh Conspiracy blog: here.  Orin gives an excellent summary of the book and its importance, then concludes by asking, among other things, whether Bill's account of criminal justice in earlier eras is too "rosy."  It's well-worth reading.

A friend sent an interesting email offering a less sympathetic view of bankruptcies like the American bankruptcy. With his permission, I thought I would quote it in full here:

"David: I read your post.  But it seemed to me that AA filing was, essentially, just another in the long line of U.S. board decisions over the last twenty-five years or so to use our liberal bankruptcy laws as a strategic restructuring tool to get rid of debt and contracts and employee obligations that they felt held back profitability and the stock price.  Chapter 11 is a wonderful tool for people who are essentially amoral, as many people in business and most lawyers are."

The former CEO of American thought so.  He's seems like an admirable leader, but I think he's wrong about bankruptcy.  Here's a little blog post elaborating on that theme.

Richard Posner's review in the current New Republic is here.  More on this and the other reviews soon.

There are a number of new reviews of Bill's book, in addition to Justice Stevens' review in the New York Review of Books and Lincoln Caplan's review in Democracy mentioned in earlier posts.  I'll start adding them to this post. 

As Bill's colleague Carol Steiker noted at the wonderful Harvard Law School celebration for the book last week, Bill put an enormous amount of energy into the book in his last couple of years (so much so that she often urged him to take it easier).   It shows, and is reflected in the reviews' repeated use of terms like "magisterial."  ("Magisterial" comes up so often, and is so obviously accurate, that I'm trying to come up with some other word.)

The Wall Street Journal review is here. 

The review in Chroncle Review is here.

A very belated post to note that there will be a book event for The Collapse of American Criminal Justice at Harvard Law School at 3pm today for those who are in the area. It should be wonderful.  (Check the Harvard Law website).

There is a terrific review of the book by Justice Stevens in the current issue of New York Review of Books.  Although review defends some of the Supreme Court's handiwork during the Warren Court era of the 1960s (which Bill criticises in the book as having had bad unintended consequences), Justice Stevens makes clear just how compelling and important The Collapse of American Criminal Justice is.  It's linked here.

Earlier this week, I wrote an op-ed on the Eurozone crisis that was inspired by a wonderful conference in Iceland two weeks ago, and follows up on thoughts from an earlier blog post.  The op-ed is here.

My favorite piece on the Occupy Wall Street movement thus far is a commentary by John Gapper in last Thursday’s Financial Times. (In good capitalist fashion, FT puts articles behind a paywall, so I can’t link to the commentary here).  For Gapper, there’s nothing wrong with the movement’s confused messages—the mostly young protesters are angry at Wall Street and worried about the future, and appropriately so. He would be much more disappointed if the movement devolved into violence, as has occurred in Greece and London.

My first reaction to the reviews of Ron Suskind’s new book about the Obama administration’s handling of the economic crisis was that it mostly seemed to confirm widely held views, such as the perception that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner are both comfortable with big banks, and resisted to efforts to scale them down. (The one big exception was the President’s temporary decision to break up Citigroup, which was, according to Suskind’s sources, stymied by Geithner).