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In his latest book, Unfinished Business: A Civil Rights Strategy for America’s Third Century (Pacific Research Institute, 149 pp., $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper), Clint Bolick traces the philosophical ascendancy and decline of the American civil-rights movement with a specific goal in mind. Mr. Bolick believes the path to equal opportunity has become a quagmire, with group civil rights overwhelming individual rights. His goal is to examine “the natural-law principles of civil rights accompanied by a practical framework from which to apply those principles to contemporary civil-rights issues,” emphasizing what Martin Luther King said 25 years ago: “that there are certain rights neither conferred nor derived from the state.”

Mr. Bolick, director of the Landmark Legal Foundation Center for Civil Rights, believes that individual empowerment provides the means for social and economic ascent for minorities [see “Betting on Bush,” NR, Aug. 6]. That social engineering, group consciousness, and collective guilt have failed to guarantee equal opportunity in a “color blind” America is overwhelmingly evident, he contends. And to combat the growing disparity that he sees as resulting from this failure, he proposes a radical change in approach—a change that will depend on chipping away at the basis of current civil-rights theory, as enshrined in Supreme Court decisions.

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Allen Randolph

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In his latest book, Unfinished Business: A Civil Rights Strategy for America’s Third Century (Pacific Research Institute, 149 pp., $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper), Clint Bolick traces the philosophical ascendancy and decline of the American civil-rights movement with a specific goal in mind. Mr. Bolick believes the path to equal opportunity has become a quagmire, with group civil rights overwhelming individual rights. His goal is to examine “the natural-law principles of civil rights accompanied by a practical framework from which to apply those principles to contemporary civil-rights issues,” emphasizing what Martin Luther King said 25 years ago: “that there are certain rights neither conferred nor derived from the state.”

Mr. Bolick, director of the Landmark Legal Foundation Center for Civil Rights, believes that individual empowerment provides the means for social and economic ascent for minorities [see “Betting on Bush,” NR, Aug. 6]. That social engineering, group consciousness, and collective guilt have failed to guarantee equal opportunity in a “color blind” America is overwhelmingly evident, he contends. And to combat the growing disparity that he sees as resulting from this failure, he proposes a radical change in approach—a change that will depend on chipping away at the basis of current civil-rights theory, as enshrined in Supreme Court decisions.