Books in Brief: By What Right?

By What Right?, by Louis Lusky, (Michie, 446 pp., $15). Already in its second printing, this jurisprudential blockbuster is a triple-dip irony. For one thing, the author is a certified liberal who thoroughly approves many of the results the Supreme Court Justices have brought to pass and asks only that they obey the law in the process. For another, the book began as a defense of the Warren Court, and shifted gears only when the Nixon appointees showed themselves, in the abortion case, to be as opportunistic, sophistical, and unprincipled in deviously amending the Constitution as their predecessors had ever been. The author denies that he is engaged in a polemical attack on the Supreme Court and judicial review, institutions he obviously reveres; in a compelling analogy (for his dissection of the content and consequences of recent decisions is scalpel-sharp), Lusky compares his own work to exploratory surgery. (He is obviously bracing himself for the counterattack.) But he accepts the risk that his observations may be used destructively, and that he will be seen as the coadjutor of those who might wish to do so.

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Gerald T. Dunne

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By What Right?, by Louis Lusky, (Michie, 446 pp., $15). Already in its second printing, this jurisprudential blockbuster is a triple-dip irony. For one thing, the author is a certified liberal who thoroughly approves many of the results the Supreme Court Justices have brought to pass and asks only that they obey the law in the process. For another, the book began as a defense of the Warren Court, and shifted gears only when the Nixon appointees showed themselves, in the abortion case, to be as opportunistic, sophistical, and unprincipled in deviously amending the Constitution as their predecessors had ever been. The author denies that he is engaged in a polemical attack on the Supreme Court and judicial review, institutions he obviously reveres; in a compelling analogy (for his dissection of the content and consequences of recent decisions is scalpel-sharp), Lusky compares his own work to exploratory surgery. (He is obviously bracing himself for the counterattack.) But he accepts the risk that his observations may be used destructively, and that he will be seen as the coadjutor of those who might wish to do so.