Legal System

To most conservatives, constitutional interpretation is straightforward.

Remember how, when you were a kid, the drawstrings on your jacket were constantly catching on the seesaw or the swing? How sometimes a passing car would snag the drawstrings of a friends hood, garroting him before your eyes? Neither do I. But someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission must, because drawstrings are on their way out.

The furor over the supposed racism of Texaco's management dramatizes, in miniature, the tragedy and danger of so-called civil-rights legislation. The Texaco story paints a vivid picture of what we've become: an economy distorted and abused by a racial spoils system, in which race is pitted against race, employees pitted against employers, and all power is held by federal bureaucrats and magistrates who "resolve" disputes by taking capitalists to the cleaners.

Professor Marshall De Rosa's excellent book calls attention to a paradox in recent constitutional law. 

Pizza deliverers have been robbed, assaulted, and killed. To protect their employees, and hold down liability losses, pizza chains like Domino's won't deliver pizzas in the highest crime areas. The company has cleverly developed computer software that allows its franchises to "flag" addresses that are unsafe. Some are noted as green (deliver), others as yellow (curbside only), and still others as red (no way).

Media personality Kathie Lee Gifford took quite a pounding when the National Labor Committee, a labor union organization, found that some of the clothes sold under her label in the U.S. were made by children in a Honduran "sweat shop."

Clint Bolick, it appears, does not suffer from the vice of false modesty. Mr. Bolick attracted considerable attention owing to his opposition to Lani Guiniers nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights;

Everyone talks about the Supreme Court, but no one ever does anything about it. Many Supreme Court decisions have aroused fierce controversy within the past fifty years:

As I write these lines, an American soldier, no doubt the first of many to come, has been killed while taking part in the American "peacekeeping" mission in Bosnia. Many in Congress, as well as most of the Republican candidates for President, 

This is a much more radical book than its title suggests. Criticism of quotas and affirmative action is hardly new. As the authors note, opinion polls show a vast majority of the public opposed to these programs;