Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths ISBN: 9780814769461 Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / NYU Press Digital rights:Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter Subjects: Political Science ; Sociology;
Oxford and Harvard Law graduate Roberts offers spirited, and partly effective, critiques of the ``unstable dogmas'' of a disparate group of black neoconservatives. However, his continued reference to the term ``Negro crits'' to describe anticonservative thinkers like Derrick Bell is an odd tic. After briefly taking on Shelby Steele's rhetoric of individualism and Thomas Sowell's attacks on civil rights as a displacement of fact by belief, the author proceeds for a deeper-and more abstruse-look at law and lawyers usually considered liberal. He finds disingenuous Yale Law professor Stephen Carter's idea that judgeships are more private distinctions than sites of political power, and he tracks Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy's pre-tenure ``confirmation conversion'' from activist scholar to disinterested idealist. He also takes a thoughtful and sometimes tart look at Clarence Thomas's early Supreme Court opinions: ``justice is apparently someone else's work.'' He concludes with an attack on writer V.S. Naipaul's view of postcolonial politics: ``the form of his work entails the worth of human life, while the infused vision denies it.'' (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Roberts Ronald Suresh :
Ronald Suresh Roberts , a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, is currently on leave from the law firm of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, working with the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (NADEL) in Cape Town, South Africa, and to establish the Finance Literary Project at Funda Community College in Soweto, South Africa.
