Thurgood Marshall is an authentic American hero: "Mr. Civil Rights;" point person for the NAACP's dismantling of segregation; Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (from 1961-1965); Solicitor General (1965-1967); and Justice of the Supreme Court (1967-1991). Mark Tushnet's Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions and Reminiscences is a welcome anthology of Marshall's professional writings as lawyer, judge, and storyteller.

Tushnet, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center, was Marshall's law clerk during the 1972-1973 term and has written authoritatively about the civil rights movement. He knows the man and material, and has selected the entries with care.

The book contains five parts. Part I contains two of Marshall's appeal briefs, including Brown v. Board of Education, and selected transcripts of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The briefs substantiate Marshall's "sure instinct for the facts that mattered and an ability to present his case in the way his audience . . . would understand." The oral arguments demonstrate his tenacity in urging his positions despite hard questioning. Marshall the lawyer was clearly a product of his mentor Charlie Houston, Dean of Howard Law School, who taught: "Men, you've got to be social engineers. We've got to turn this whole thing around. And the black man has got to do it; nobody's going to do it for you. . . . You've got to get out there and compete with the other man, and you've got to be better than he is. You might never get what you deserve, but you'll certainly not get what you don't deserve."

Marshall the lawyer was painstakingly thorough. One of his many anecdotes (it was said he could tell a story every day for twenty years and never repeat himself) reflects the pride he took in his legal craftsmanship: a Louisiana judge, not favorably disposed to Marshall or his case, still had to admit, "If Mr. Marshall puts his signature on it, you don't have to check [the citations]."

Part II contains speeches and articles by Marshall while he was a lawyer, for the NAACP's magazine and other periodicals. These are interesting glimpses into the fellowship and frustrations of the civil rights effort, as well as Marshall's methods of advocacy. In his testimonial remarks for Philadelphia lawyer Raymond Pace Alexander, Marshall defines true advocacy as "to put your client above everything else . . . in such a fashion as to get the respect of everyone else."

Part III, contains speeches by Marshall when he was a judge. The section includes Marshall's cautionary remarks during the 1987 bicentennial of the Constitution. Only a Constitution "defective from the start" would permit the Supreme Court to assert in 1857 that it provided blacks with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." It took "several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, that we hold as fundamental today." Also included are Marshall's annual talks at the Second Circuit Judicial Conference. Marshall speaks with great affection for the Second Circuit, with which he was closely affiliated for over a quarter-century, and candidly admits his disagreement with the direction of the Burger and Rehnquist courts.

Part IV, contains a sampling, edited for a general audience, of Justice Marshall's "322 majority opinions, 83 concurrences, and 363 dissents" during his twenty-four years on the Supreme Court. (An appendix catalogs the most significant opinions). The number of dissents is striking. "Maybe I am just a voice crying in the wilderness," Marshall said in 1988, "but as long as I have breath in me I am going to cry."

Randall Kennedy's lucid foreword acknowledges that Marshall's career as an attorney outshone his career as a judge, but only because Marshall's career as a lawyer was so extraordinary that what followed had to be anticlimactic. Another reason for Marshall's limited impact as a judge, at least to-date, is that the court turned rightward just as he became a part of it, and he spent the last part of his career decrying the diminution of principles he had struggled so hard to establish. Sometimes the Court seemed to him to be turning these principles upside down, as in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which Marshall commented: "[I]t must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution as interpreted by this Court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro. Now, when a State acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier." The supreme irony is that Marshall's final years on the Court were under Chief Justice Rehnquist, who wrote a memo to Justice Jackson concerning Brown arguing that the "separate but equal" doctrine was perfectly constitutional.

The final section, Reminiscences, is the Columbia Oral History Project interview of Marshall. It is a delightful collection of practiced anecdotes, reflecting Marshall's immense charm and humor. Marshall relates even the most harrowing of episodes, his near lynching, with humor. Arrested on pretext of driving while drunk, he narrowly escaped the lynch mob when a tee-totaling magistrate ordered his release. He called Attorney General Clark (later maneuvered by LBJ to resign his Supreme Court seat to Marshall), who asked, "Where you drunk?" Marshall replied, "Well, Mr. Attorney General, about five minutes after I hang up this phone, I'm going to be drunk."

This book was helpful in seeing how conservative institutions have influenced numerous issues, but it did have several flaws. I would recommend it, as there are few books on the topic, and due to the quality of the research, but with these disclaimers:

1. The authors come from a decidedly left-of-center perspective, which tilts how they view the world. Hence a moderate group may be described as a mildly conservative one. This is not a major flaw obviously. 2. Much of the material is rather dry, as in most real research. This isn't pleasure reading, and shouldn't be bought as such. 3. Satire is used way too much in title headings - it's not as bad as in some books, but pretty blatant, and it distracts from the quality of the work. 4. The opinion that liberals and others on the left should be an equal part of the debate so that we get a balanced picture is good, but the idea that those groups should rely more on think tanks and foundations is silly. The book's major point that I got is how those vehicles remove thought from the process in favor of ideology, and encourage close-mindedness. If liberals copy think tank stratagems, it's their loss. I personally would hope all ideologies abandon these inherently systems.

Anyhow, I'd recommend buying this or borrowing it from the library, but with these reservations and the caveat that you shouldn't expect too much.

"Follow The Money", deep throat told Woodward and Burnstein. No Mercy does exactly that. It traces the spider web of think tanks, endowments, and conservative politics from group to group. The authors provide an excellent path from the eugenics and racist Pioneer fund in the early '30s and how it, and other groups, intermingle. The details on the ultrasecret Council on Foriegn Policy, the Landmark legal foundation, and many, many others.

In fairness to the reader, this book is not a light read. The story is not fluid. It's a book for the serious political researcher, journalist, or political scientist.

This book is a decisive history of Thurgood Marshall's actions and the effects that he had on the civil rights of African-Americans while he worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His successes, failures, and discussions of his effects make it a very informative book. It is quite obvious that the author spent a great amount of time researching his topic of choice. The book is absolutely full of quotes from people of the time and very detailed factual accounts of events. Unfortunately, the content is not written in an extremely appealing matter. It tends to drone on and on about various cases and actions which have no major significance in history nor in the life of Marshall. If you can read through the dry spots, though, its a great book. You can really get a felling for the social climate of the era as well as the thoughts and feelings of Marshall himself. As a research tool, this was definitely the most valuable book I came across. If I was rating this book based on its information it would be an easy five. Ultimately, it is a good book for pleasure reading but not the best. I would have to say that Juan Williams' Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary is the best. If you are interested in Marshall's career, though, you want to look at Tushnet's other book Making Constitutional Law : Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991.

Fascinated by constitutional law, I approached Tushnet's book interested in a stand against the notion of judicial review, a central tenet of American jurisprudence. Tushnet's approach, although fleshed out, is not particularly useful to those interested in the theoretical underpinnings of judicial review.

Instead, the book maintains a fairly consistent position that is dubiously supported throughout. Through inconsistent use of caselaw, and little analysis of the legal reasoning of the cases he cites, Tushnet does create an comprehensible position against judicial review, but it is not particularly well argued. Just the fact of being against judicial review does not make for a usable book. The exercise of judicial power does not alone invalidate judicial review as a doctrine. The serious constitutional, historical, logical, and even utilitarian analysis necessary for developing a persuasive opinion is absent from the work.

He typically falls on attempting to undermine the pro-judicial review position as a method of making his case, but it is untenable. Criticizing extreme contemporary positions and labelling them as liberal (read: 'elitist'), does not make the case. By taking quotes out of context, he is moderately successful at creating the image of a sustainable position, but the grand scheme fails. He arduously quotes Madison, after severely paring the quotes to fit his point, but it is not enough. The index does not even cite Alexander Hamilton once; there is no rigorous treatment of the 'Federalist Papers,' the most succint and thorough exploration of US Constitutional theory; there is no sustained theoretical analysis of the powers of government and the utility of republicanism, and the nature of separated and mixed powers.

Essentially, he is making an argument for populism using a populist technique: "the liberals support judicial review because they think you're too dumb to decide for yourself, therefore judicial review is bad." This is hardly sufficient for making a defensible argument with such radical overtones. Tushnet's approach is reminiscent of William Jennings Bryan's majoritarianism, and is certainly bryanesque in its idealistic appeals and its logical inadequacies.

With severely questionable positions on constitutional amendment, which he supports only by criticising the extremes of his opposition as arrogant, he ignores the whole theoretical underpinning of the amendment process of Article V. He then presents some appalingly idealistic support of the populist majority alteration of the Constitution. Any first-year political science student studying state and local politics knows what cumbersome bludgeons state constitutions are. Opinion is still out on popular referenda, and how effective they are at both serving the public good and representing the popular will. I suggest taking a look at the monstrously huge Indian constitution to appreciate the brevity of the American constitution and its demanding amendment process.

Residing somewhere between scholarly and demagoguery is the best address for this effort. The attempt to foster innovative thought is obvious, but the book does little more than that. More troubling is the tendency to quote Madison and Lincoln from context, asserting points that perplex the issue, without ever giving equal time to either voice that might help decide the issue. Deliberation may well benefit from this work but it spends enormous time dealing with unconstitutional remedies for constitutional issues. Certain assumptions advanced by Tushnet, tend to foster an apathy towards seperated tripartite government, if that apathy evoked an investigation of core republican (note the small 'r')principles the point of his book might be visible, lacking that it remains obscure. The book is affably written, and a good read, but an additional quote from Lincoln may have guided this hypothetical offering " Now, and here, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly whatever our fathers did. To do so would be to discard all the lights of current experience-to reject all progress-all improvement. What I do say is, that we should supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.."

The author states "We can take the Constitution away from the courts in several ways." He then lists those methods, suggests a move to "populist constitutional law" which is "a law oriented to realizing the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution's Preamble" and give scant clues about what any of the above really mean or how they can be carried out. He also says that his arguments for a populist constitutional law "is [not] the only, or even the best, interpretation of the Constitution." Reduced to simplicity then, the author is unhappy with the concept of judicial review and has nothing with which to replace it. I don't believe the author takes the arguments he propounds too seriously and neither should his readers.

I used this book for my Con Law I and II course, so I feel that I know this book pretty well. For Con Law I, the book was absolutely TERRIBLE. The cases are edited down so much that they are borderline incoherent, such as in Marbury v. Madison and McCullough v. Maryland. There is a great deal of "commentary" in between cases from the authors regarding the information they edited out within the cases, but the structure of learning what was in the case AFTER reading through the case is confusing and time consuming, forcing you to retrace a lot of your steps needlessly. The bottom line on this book for Con Law I is to buy the Legalines supplement for this book, and read it religiously after every case. Chemerinsky's supplement is a great deal of assistance as well, because Con Law I is much more confusing for students using this book (from inquiring through other classmates using different texts). For Con Law II, the subject matter gets 100 times more interesting, but the content of the book remains the same. As a reviewer previously stated, the editing of Brown v. Board of Education is absolutely unacceptable. Such a landmark case fit into four pages? Ridiculous! However, there will be a lot of stimulating class discussion to supplement the extremely edited-down cases presented in Con Law II. My best advice? Buy supplements and keep yourself on top of what you're reading before you get too lost, and make notecards to keep the tests for different circumstances (like justiciability, commerce clause, dormant commerce clause, etc.) straight.

A good starting Con Law book, however, as the title of this review states, it was too well edited. Crucial facts surrounding key cases like Marbery were not included. The omission makes it easier to read through the voluminous pages, but it's not enough. The reader will *have* to supplement the text with strong in-class notes or a commercial text/outline. There are some key cases simply 'missing' and the coverage of prominent cases like "Brown" is simply insufficient. Comparison and analysis of how one case indirectly may overrule another is also lacking. Overall, it is not a BAD book, the authors probably need to cut some dead weight so they have room to include the missing pieces. Also -- a word to the wise -- since the current Supreme Court is the most active, it is essential for the student to keep up with the latest decsions.