November 2003
Letters to the Editor
Correction
Dear Friends:
In September's Letters section, Michael Hanbey was incorrectly identified as president of the Christian Legal Society when in fact he is president of the board of Columbia Legal Services. Although I am still scratching my head trying to figure out how I got it wrong, the responsibility is mine and I apologize to Mr. Hanbey and all others concerned.
Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor
Seattle
It all adds up
David Shayne's article on our treatment of Japanese-Americans in World War II ("It Can't Happen Here? A Look Back at a Sad Chapter in the Law," August 2003) raises the question of whether internment camps can happen again in America. The answer of course is yes; it's happening right now.
To be a Muslim or of Arabic ancestry today is to live in constant fear of being labeled an enemy alien. The charity you supported might be construed as giving material aid to a terrorist organization.
Today no one really knows what the parameters of privacy entail or how the broad concept of terrorism and the national interests it threatens may impinge on formerly protected zones. The very separation of powers may be in doubt.
Witness the following: a President whose legitimacy rests on votes that the Supreme Court forbade us to count; suspects held in indefinite detention without publication of their names or normal due process; prisoners of war held in an off-shore base that denies them the protection of the Geneva treaty; two wars fought—with many civilian dead—with no capture of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein; use of at-best faulty intelligence to mislead the American public into war in Iraq to prevent potential imminent attacks on the U.S. or Israel; open-ended, no-bid contracts to Halliburton, Vice President's Cheney's former employer; huge tax breaks to the wealthy during a recession; underfunded schools, bankrupt states, and spiraling unemployment; the Patriot Act passed unread by many in Congress only to meet opposition by citizens themselves at the local level; an administration that insults the United Nations and its allies while bribing countries like Poland and India to lend soldiers to the daily slaughter of peacekeeping troops; and a general secrecy of government and contempt for public inquiry.
Amid all of this, where is the dissent? Where are the mass demonstrations? Where are we attorneys when such injustice is the order of the day? With so little opposition, can general internment camps be far behind?
Thomas Mengert
Keyport
Washington's own Supreme Court justice deserves better biography
I looked forward to Professor Bruce Allen Murphy's biography of William O. Douglas (Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas, Random House, 2003) with great anticipation. It has been 23 years since Professor James Simon wrote his balanced work, Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas, and Murphy's having devoted 15 years to his project surely would, I thought, produce additional, valuable analyses of the life of Yakima's former "favorite son." Long before one finishes the 500-page biography, the suspicion arises that Professor Murphy's story is an odd combination of too little of WOD's contributions to the law and to conservation projects, and too much to the so-called "legends" or exaggerations WOD made about aspects of his life, especially his early years. By the end, the reader has been repeatedly hammered with the themes that WOD exaggerated a childhood illness ("polio"?), overstated his early "poverty" in Yakima, lied about his serving in the U.S. "Army," and elevated his actual class-rank at Columbia Law School. The reader also has been titillated with a good many of the details of WOD's often disastrous personal life, especially his already well-known womanizing and his callous treatment of his court clerks.
But to build an entire biography on such exaggerations and failings, while sandwiching in dense chapters on WOD's legal work, is to leave the reader with a smirk rather than a deeper understanding of a man who was a law professor sought by major universities, a bold chairman of the SEC, a champion of nature-preservation, and a Supreme Court justice whose hundreds of decisions include sometimes controversial and often bold interpretations of the Constitution, especially of the Bill of Rights. His Griswold opinion grafted the right of privacy onto the Constitution, with continuing important effects on American society.
Murphy has certainly detailed the human frailties of the often-insecure Douglas. If the author had not obscured the more important facets of WOD's life or, at least, given them the same emphasis as WOD's eccentric failings, this new work would be of more significance. As it is, James Simon's earlier biography, with its better writing and analysis, remains a nice counterbalance to Murphy's, which repeatedly meanders into the unprofitable realm of psycho-history. William O. Douglas was more than a spoiled mamma's-boy who never outgrew his insecurities. He was a figure of some national importance. The reader of this new biography should have had this more clearly presented.
James G. Newbill
History Department
Yakima Valley Community College
Yakima
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