Customer Reviews

Legal Memories And Amnesias In America's Rhetorical Culture (Polemics Series)

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This book now seven years old should be required reading for each and every citizen of a democratic society, and ours too.

The author Dr. Hasian, with an additional doctorate in the Law, demystifies legal rhetoric and demands transparency for every citizen. He brilliantly reviews the history of law in America, including the Rosewood incident, Leo Frank, Holocaust trials, Typhoid Mary and quarantine, and John Brown declaring Natural Law at Harper's Ferry. He uncovers a "deep chasm between the principles of law and their dissemination in the public sphere" and protests the "Artificial boundaries . . . created between "principles" and mere opinion, judicial and "extrajudicial claims, the "rule of Law" and politics."

Interestingly this important polemical work was published in the year 2000, just before the interventionist Scalia-OConnor-Thomas-Rhenquist court threw our national elections, and before the invention of the legal issues surrounding Guantanamo, the suspension of Habeus Corpus, Abu Graibh, the violations of the War Powers Act, and the suspension of the United States Consitution by the current self-imposed administration. This book could be written to address each of these issues, unimaginable then. Or, rather, this book, and this author, would no longer find a publisher.

This courageous and insightful author guides us through this well footnoted book to become "skeptical of the claims of empowered decision makers who argue that they alone understand the "rule of law" while others misinterpret jurisprudental standards." He demands in our common and democratic social contract that all citizens be heard in the making and enforcing of the law, as our founders require of us. He supports his insights with equally brilliant quotations, including this from Peter Goodrich:

"Law is a literature which denies its literary qualities. It is a play on words which asserts an absolute seriousness; it is a genre of rhetoric which represses its moments of intention or fiction; it is a language that hides its indeterminacy in the justificatory discourse of judgment; it is a procedure based upon analogy, metaphor and repetition, and yet it claims to being a cold or disembodied prose. . . . It is in short, a speech or writing which forgets the violence of the word and the terror or jurisdiction of the text."

In short there is only one eternal, universal and infallible law for all peoples at all times, one of whose very simple clauses reads:
Thou shalt not kill.

I look forward to and pray for the good Doctor's update of this excellent and correct assessment of man's arbitrary and politicized law and its unjust application in our times. The situation has only become much worse.