Fairness and Justice: Law in the Service...

Fairness and Justice: Law in the Service of Equality, Charles M. Haar and Daniel Wm. Fessler (Simon & Schuster: $9.95). This fascinating book doesn’t succeed in persuading us to accept its final recommendations in entirety, but through often brilliant discussion it gets us thinking about the most crucial issues underlying modern American law. Today’s federal courts, the authors convincingly argue, are so entangled in a legalistic mire that they no longer can be counted on to guarantee equal and adequate public services, such as education, health care and housing. For one, the federal courts won’t even consider substantive issues of discrimination until arduous tests of jurisdiction are met and then a host of other technical issues not directly related to “justice” or “injustice” are considered. Sidetracking ethical issues is, of course, precisely the point of “legal positivism,” a school of thought particularly prominent in the United States that tries to serve the cause of justice not by following vague, value-laden concepts like “good” or “bad,” but by understanding a logically interdependent system of laws, such as federal statutes.

But statute law is too convoluted to “serve justice,” the authors contend. As an alternative, they offer “common law”--based on custom and usage, common law is “the judicial distillation of collective experience.” In an interesting survey of common law decisions in the United States and Britain from 1400 AD to the present, the authors show an overwhelming consensus that equal, adequate and nondiscriminatory services must be provided to all. Statute law, the authors imply, is comparatively spineless. The authors are less successful in showing that common law can best be practiced in the state courts. Federal judges are appointed for life, after all, while state judges are elected and thus more vulnerable to overt public pressure.

Seminary: A Search, Paul Hendrickson (Summit: $6.95). Washington Post reporter Paul Hendrickson asks of his entry into a Catholic seminary: “Is it possible that nine years after an apparent and actual night of family death, now 13, now scared and inexplicably insomniac, . . . I should have completed a long-simmering decision to enter . . . an antiseptic and asexual sanctuary . . . for conflicts too large and jumbled to solve, conflicts about birth, death, intercourse? Is that it? It sounds right, and sometimes it also sounds a little like a late-night TV movie.” In his seminary memoir Hendrickson joins his own recollections to those of his classmates, most of whom are now returned to lay life. At all points he notices what an outsider would notice, asks what an outsider would ask about. But as Jack Miles wrote when the book first appeared in 1985, he notices “what only an insider could notice and answers, sometimes, like the searching semi-insider he remains.”

Traveling in the Family: Selected Poems, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, edited by Thomas Colchie and Mark Strand (Random House: $9.95). While Chilean writer Pablo Neruda is intensely social, speaking to and singing of the common man, Latin America’s other great modern poet, Carlos Drummond, is quieter, more rapturous and insular. These poems, written during the 1930s and ‘40s, the poet’s most fruitful period, start deep in the subconscious and then move slowly outward to reflect the surrounding culture. “Carlos, keep calm, love / is what you’re seeing now: / today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,” begins one poem, which then goes on to record images of a modern Brazil trying to rescue the spirituality of the past from the commercialism of the present: “prayers, / victrolas, / saints crossing themselves, / ads for a better soap, / a racket of which nobody knows the why or wherefore.” While Drummond’s poetic voice seems as simple and direct as a child’s, his style betrays an underlying complexity. Drummond is self-effacing and self-conscious, aware that style can be unctuous: “If I had been named Eugene / that would not be what I mean / but it would go into verse / faster.” Drummond is rebelling, in part, against the grip the European artistic tradition had on Brazilian writing: “I am fiction in revolt / against the one-sided mind / and I try to build myself.” After World War I helped transform Brazil from a tired agricultural aristocracy to a new industrial class, the nation’s writers began looking for their roots in pre-Columbian society--something, as Thomas Colchie points out in the introduction, that “Octavio Paz was to attempt later for Mexico.” (The question of how significant a role Tupi Indian customs should play in Brazilian culture led Oswald de Andrade to pun, “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question!”) But Drummond’s most determined rebellion, unacknowledged in the poems or the introduction, seems to be against his father, “the man behind the mustache” who frequently shows up in the background of these poems. Through poetry, Drummond is hoping to overcome his father’s “detachment from whatever in life is porous / and communicative.”

Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest: The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation, Robert J. Rosenbaum (University of Texas: $9.95); The United States and Mexico, Josefina Zoraida Vazquez and Lorenzo Meyer (University of Chicago: $9.95). Mud, American history textbooks tell us, was just about the only challenge facing American soldiers when they captured the capital of Mexico’s oldest northern province, the Department of New Mexico, in 1846. “Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest” is a rich, readable criticism of that account and the popular notion that Mexicans were passive and fatalistic while the United States was taking land in California, New Mexico and Texas. “The conquered,” contends Robert Rosenbaum, a researcher in the office of Texas’ attorney general, “did not really want to be conquered.” The American takeover at Santa Fe was speedy, Rosenbaum acknowledges, but it engendered violence (resulting in the death of the New Mexican governor in 1847) and helped nurture a deeply-rooted distrust among Mexican-Americans that persists to this day.

Rosenbaum’s most compelling argument is that Americans did more than plant the flag; they irrevocably altered the culture of the conquered territories. Mexican-Americans’ attachments to region, race, religion, language and custom were superseded by the Americans’ highly developed sense of nationalism. While Rosenbaum’s book offers a distinguished cultural and anthropological history, “The United States and Mexico” provides a drier historical overview of Mexico’s foreign relations. Both books, nevertheless, paint a picture of a behemoth United States and an often bitter, defensive Mexico.