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Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age
A renowned legal authority and crusader for civil liberties presents a thought-provoking collection of his best writings on rights, covering a vast array of civil liberties issues, from the right to choice to the separation between church and state, and provides his own revolutionary and controversial philosophy of rights that has taken nearly four decades to perfect. 75,000 first printing.
- GenresLaw
512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 9, 2002
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81 people want to read
About the author
Alan M. Dershowitz
146 books317 followersAlan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is known for his career as an attorney in several high-profile law cases and commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
He has spent most of his career at Harvard, where, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor in its history, until Noam Elkies took the record. Dershowitz still holds the record as the youngest person to become a professor of law there.
As a criminal appellate lawyer, Dershowitz has won thirteen out of the fifteen murder and attempted murder cases he has handled. He successfully argued to overturn the conviction of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of Bülow's wife, Sunny. Dershowitz was the appellate advisor for the defense in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
He has spent most of his career at Harvard, where, at the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor in its history, until Noam Elkies took the record. Dershowitz still holds the record as the youngest person to become a professor of law there.
As a criminal appellate lawyer, Dershowitz has won thirteen out of the fifteen murder and attempted murder cases he has handled. He successfully argued to overturn the conviction of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of Bülow's wife, Sunny. Dershowitz was the appellate advisor for the defense in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2009
Dershowitz's 2002 title offers useful perspectives on rights from a legal philosophical perspective, which is to say it's not deeply philosophical at all. On the other hand, it remains rooted in practical, contemporary (and often hot-button) issues which aid its accessibility and makes the case to the layman for why a theory of rights is needed, even if Dershowitz offers little in the way of answers.
Marring this book but illustrative of this gap in the author's thinking is his straight-faced advocacy of "torture warrants". This major departure for a public figure so renowned (or, to the political Right, notorious) for his expansive views of personal liberty is not puzzling in light of Dershowitz's bellicose pro-Israel hawkishness. Published in the wake of the September 11th attacks, this portion of the book appears to represent an experiment undertaken by Dershowitz and a few other figures in American punditocracy to import Israeli-style antiterrorism measures. The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld approach differed in that it was more furtive. While I would not suppose that Mossad sends daily dispatches of its activities to Ha'aretz, the fumbling mendacity of Bush Administration anti-terrorism must come off as amateurish to Dershowitz and the Israeli Right. There are those who celebrate the persecution of Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, I suppose, and those who don't. I reckon Dershowitz falls into the latter camp unless he's so hawkish he wants Israel to perform above-ground nuclear tests in the Negev simply as a gesture of phallic potency.
If all of this seems like a digression from the nominal subject matter of the book, you're right. So it is. A new edition of this title should cut the apoplectic vengefulness and torture-warrant bullshit out, as a failed experiment in rhetoric that reflects poorly on the author. Moreover, such revision would vastly improve the coherence of Dershowitz's thesis.
The unifying principle of Dershowitz's book, and the useful mental razor it provides, is "rights come from wrongs". That is, any effort to prepare an exhaustive list of rights is doomed to fail, and yet we can frequently identify offenses against a person's life, liberty, or dignity without having to undertake an analytic process. Why is that? How is it that we can have a visceral reaction to a manifest injustice we witness when it is not one that we have considered a priori?
For many American conservatives, the only rights that exist are those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, even though the 9th and 10th amendments directly refute this reasoning. Educated conservatives are aware of this and will acknowledge it, even while loudly bewailing any state or judicial action that manifestly recognizes it*, such as in Brown v. Board of Education or Griswold v. Connecticut.
This ability of humans to recognize violations of rights in retrospect, and reach consensus on moral wrongs suggests that recent work in evolutionary psychology is far from misguided. Consensus is seldom perfect, however, and is strongly informed by cultural norms. I believe it is telling that the first and easiest claim typically proferred against a right is a (feigned?) ignorance of the documented wrongs that provoke moral repugnance. Swiftly following upon that is an assertion that the mistreated person somehow "deserved" his or her fate. Notice how frequently this tactic is deployed even in admitted ignorance of circumstantial particulars--in any such argument, note in your interlocutor the willingness or refusal to locate moral worth in the person whose case is being considered.
I suspect this also explains why history is (mis-)taught as it is in American secondary schools--see James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me .
Bottom line: Flawed but worthwhile.
* Exceptions are always made when the ox being gored doesn't belong to the powerful. For example, it is easier for conservatives to locate a right to dump pollutants into the air and water as a corollary of the (also unenumerated) right to pursue windfall profits and ignore economic externalities. But when it comes to a right to work at something above starvation wages, a right to medical care even when one is destitute, a right to produce and consume recreational drugs, a right to terminate one's pregnancy, or a right to attend school with the white kids, conservative rights theory snaps back to its rigid form.
Marring this book but illustrative of this gap in the author's thinking is his straight-faced advocacy of "torture warrants". This major departure for a public figure so renowned (or, to the political Right, notorious) for his expansive views of personal liberty is not puzzling in light of Dershowitz's bellicose pro-Israel hawkishness. Published in the wake of the September 11th attacks, this portion of the book appears to represent an experiment undertaken by Dershowitz and a few other figures in American punditocracy to import Israeli-style antiterrorism measures. The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld approach differed in that it was more furtive. While I would not suppose that Mossad sends daily dispatches of its activities to Ha'aretz, the fumbling mendacity of Bush Administration anti-terrorism must come off as amateurish to Dershowitz and the Israeli Right. There are those who celebrate the persecution of Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, I suppose, and those who don't. I reckon Dershowitz falls into the latter camp unless he's so hawkish he wants Israel to perform above-ground nuclear tests in the Negev simply as a gesture of phallic potency.
If all of this seems like a digression from the nominal subject matter of the book, you're right. So it is. A new edition of this title should cut the apoplectic vengefulness and torture-warrant bullshit out, as a failed experiment in rhetoric that reflects poorly on the author. Moreover, such revision would vastly improve the coherence of Dershowitz's thesis.
The unifying principle of Dershowitz's book, and the useful mental razor it provides, is "rights come from wrongs". That is, any effort to prepare an exhaustive list of rights is doomed to fail, and yet we can frequently identify offenses against a person's life, liberty, or dignity without having to undertake an analytic process. Why is that? How is it that we can have a visceral reaction to a manifest injustice we witness when it is not one that we have considered a priori?
For many American conservatives, the only rights that exist are those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, even though the 9th and 10th amendments directly refute this reasoning. Educated conservatives are aware of this and will acknowledge it, even while loudly bewailing any state or judicial action that manifestly recognizes it*, such as in Brown v. Board of Education or Griswold v. Connecticut.
This ability of humans to recognize violations of rights in retrospect, and reach consensus on moral wrongs suggests that recent work in evolutionary psychology is far from misguided. Consensus is seldom perfect, however, and is strongly informed by cultural norms. I believe it is telling that the first and easiest claim typically proferred against a right is a (feigned?) ignorance of the documented wrongs that provoke moral repugnance. Swiftly following upon that is an assertion that the mistreated person somehow "deserved" his or her fate. Notice how frequently this tactic is deployed even in admitted ignorance of circumstantial particulars--in any such argument, note in your interlocutor the willingness or refusal to locate moral worth in the person whose case is being considered.
I suspect this also explains why history is (mis-)taught as it is in American secondary schools--see James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me .
Bottom line: Flawed but worthwhile.
* Exceptions are always made when the ox being gored doesn't belong to the powerful. For example, it is easier for conservatives to locate a right to dump pollutants into the air and water as a corollary of the (also unenumerated) right to pursue windfall profits and ignore economic externalities. But when it comes to a right to work at something above starvation wages, a right to medical care even when one is destitute, a right to produce and consume recreational drugs, a right to terminate one's pregnancy, or a right to attend school with the white kids, conservative rights theory snaps back to its rigid form.
January 1, 2012
A book on various legal aspects of civil rights and the first amendment. It consists of essays and newspaper columns by a legal scholar. Some mildly interesting discussion of some famous court cases. Most of the material is way out of date, some even from the '60s and '70s.
July 22, 2007
Alan Dershowitz is brilliant, so anything he writes is also brilliant. This book is a must-read for anyone who wonders how we, as Americans, can balance our civil rights against those of others.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews