Today's approach to prostitution in the Netherlands reflects the currency of the concept of "agency" advocated by feminists since the 1980s. Yet while defining prostitution as "sex work" implies entitlements, it also glosses over gendered inequality, writes Petra de Vries. Can the abolitionist arguments of the nineteenth century provide the basis for an alternative?And here's a "road map" to the article, from the introduction:
Nineteenth century state policies on prostitution will be the subject of the first section of this article. The second and third sections will deal with the feminists' opposition to these policies and in the course of this process creating their own theories about sexuality, the state, and the "origins" of and the "solutions" to the prostitution question. The last section is devoted to a discussion of the feminist legacy from the past and the re-emergence of prostitution politics during the so-called second wave.The full text is here.
This is a paper about abortion in India. I am interested in examining whether anything useful can be learnt from narratives about abortion in India. Whose narratives of abortion are salient? In this age of instant communication, and online archival, what do we do now that we have all our narratives down? What does 'narrative' have to contribute to legal theory, especially feminist legal theory? This is also a paper, in a sense, about the futility of narratives, the dangers of over-narrativisation.
In this paper, I have attempted to demonstrate how a narrative focus on statistics of female foeticide has contributed to a particular framing of the issue. In these accounts, female foeticide emerges as lower class, rural, non-modern, religio-cultural, immutable and ageless which implicitly installs the opposing paired terms - elite, urban, modern, secular, dynamic and new – as ‘ideal’ others. Such a framing prevents a more meaningful understanding of the distinctly ‘modern’ history of rural immiseration and the patriarchal reconstitution of domestic relations that led to female foeticide becoming a generalized phenomenon. Modern medical technologies, rather than facilitating female reproductive sexual independence, have been co-opted as a factor in the operation of state-underwritten patriarchy. I have suggested, following Ashis Nandy, that a meaningful engagement with the issue would be one that is targeted at dissipating the concentrated force of patriarchy - for instance by attempting to valorize the conjugal relationship over the mother-son relationship.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a nice piece on Francis Fukuyama (Stanford University) and his latest project, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. The article, by Evan Goldstein, is part review, part interview.Francis Fukuyama has been accused of many things—triumphalism, utopianism, warmongering—but never a lack of ambition. True to form, his new book, The Origins of Political Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), doesn't limit itself to the whole of human history. Rather, it begins in prehuman times and concludes on the eve of the American and French Revolutions. Along the way, Fukuyama mines the fields of anthropology, archaeology, biology, evolutionary psychology, economics, and, of course, political science and international relations to establish a framework for understanding the evolution of political institutions. And that's just Volume One. The next installment, not due for several years, will bring the story up to the present. At the center of the project is a fundamental question: Why do some states succeed while others collapse?
And the interview:"I've been trying to move beyond The End of History ever since I wrote the book," Fukuyama says with weary patience. "But no matter what I write, everyone wants to ask me about it."The full article is here.
Small business is a sacred cow in America. In 1958, Congress created the Small Business Investment Company ("SBIC"), a unique public-private program that provides long-term capital to small entrepreneurs. From its inception, however, the SBIC has been plagued by inefficiency and failure. Yet, Congress continues to pour millions of dollars into the SBIC program, with no end in sight. What explains this failed policy course?
This article argues that the SBIC program exemplifies the pitfalls of legal and political institutional path dependency and should be replaced by private institutional lending systems. Pursuant to this account, past decisions can influence future legal developments even in the face of material social change.
Political institutions can entrench ineffective paths by sustaining dynamics of "increasing returns" through processes of "positive feedbacks" and "self-reinforcement." Increasing returns occur when the benefits of a choice augment simply because over time more people opt for that choice.
Our romantic ideal of small business as an economic and social catalyst has sprouted positive cultural feedbacks. Thereafter, the establishment of the House and Senate Small Business Committees and the Small Business Administration sustained this culture, self-reinforcing the SBIC program inefficient path where we remain invested to this day.
Both Justices and scholars have long debated whether the “freedom...of the press” was historically understood as securing special constitutional rights for the institutional press (newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters). This issue comes up in many fields: campaign finance law, libel law, the news gatherer’s privilege, access to government facilities for news gathering purposes, and more. Most recently, last year’s Citizens United v. FEC decision split 5-4 on this very question, and not just in relation to corporate speech rights.
This article discusses what the “freedom of the press” has likely meant with regard to this question, during (1) the decades surrounding the ratification of the First Amendment, (2) the decades surrounding the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and (3) the modern First Amendment era. The article focuses solely on the history, and leaves the First Amendment theory questions to others. And, with regard to the history, it offers evidence that the “freedom...of the press” has long been understood as meaning freedom for all who used the printing press as technology - and, by extension, mass communication technology more broadly - and has generally not been limited to those who belonged to the institutional press as an industry.
Until the last quarter of the twentieth century it was a commonplace that the various expressions of economic substantive due process we associate with the so-called “Lochner Era” were animated by laissez-faire economics and Social Darwinism. More recent assessments have persuasively rejected this view, observing that the Court as a whole and the justices individually voted to uphold many more instances of government regulation of the economy than they voted to invalidate, and that the closest thing to a Social Darwinist that the Court had to offer was Justice Holmes, on whose polemical dissent in Lochner the conventional wisdom had been based. Since the 1970s, revisionist scholars have come instead to see these doctrines as expressions of what Professor Howard Gillman has called a “principle of neutrality.” That master principle was grounded in such antebellum ideological concerns as the aversion to factional politics and the Jacksonian revulsion against special privilege, and was best understood as prohibiting what was at the time called “class legislation” or “special legislation” or “partial legislation” – legislation that could not be deemed public-regarding because it singled out particular groups for unjustified special benefits or burdens.
On this view economic substantive due process was concerned primarily with formal equality; but a number of revisionists recognized, as the doctrine of “liberty of contract” would suggest, that such an explanation was incomplete. These scholars understood that the Court’s due process jurisprudence also was devoted to the protection of liberty, especially so in the context of employment; and they traced that feature of substantive due process to the anti-slavery free labor ideology of the antebellum Republican Party that informed such Reconstruction landmarks as the 13th and 14th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. At the center of that ideology lay the conviction that the essential characteristic distinguishing the free man from the slave was self-ownership, and particularly ownership of one’s own labor. Self-ownership entailed the right to dispose of one’s labor on the terms of one’s choosing, and regulations of that right that could not be justified as preventing fraud or protecting public health, safety, or morals were mere “meddlesome interferences” with a fundamental liberty of free men.
On this account, free labor ideology in the post-bellum period operated as a source of rights, restraining the state from interfering with individual liberty. Advocates of prison labor reform, by contrast, were more interested in exploring the implications of free labor ideology as a source of state power to restrict rights of property and contract. Throughout the 19th century, organized workers agitated for the reform of the system of convict labor, contending that goods manufactured with cheap prison labor competed unfairly with goods produced in the private economy and thereby depressed wages. They viewed convict labor as a species of slave labor that threatened to degrade free laborers, impeding their capacity to acquire capital and to enjoy the upward social mobility that free labor ideology promised to industrious, disciplined workmen. The State of New York became a national leader in this reform effort. The legislature abolished various objectionable forms of convict labor, and prohibited the sale of goods manufactured in its prisons on the private market.
Convict-made goods produced in other states and shipped into New York, however, continued to compete with products produced by free labor in New York, and the New York statutes regulating the sale of these out-of-state goods raised contentious issues under both the Dormant Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment. As Professor William E. Nelson has argued, late nineteenth century jurists viewed the inherent individual right to freedom of contract as embracing “the right to use and dispose of property.” “Every man...had a ‘natural right to sell or keep his commodities as best suit[ed] his own purpose.’” “The right to use and dispose of property was viewed as a necessary consequence of the right to acquire and hold it.” The question presented under the Fourteenth Amendment was whether New York’s efforts to protect its free laborers deprived the owner and seller of convict-made goods of property rights without due process or denied him equal protection of the laws. Put another way, the question was whether free labor ideology operated not only as a shield but also as a sword, underwriting police power regulation of private property. This essay, prepared in Professor Nelson’s honor, explores the manner in which the courts of his native New York struggled uneasily with that question for two decades, and the way in which it was ultimately resolved in favor of the free labor interest by United States Supreme Court Justices deeply invested in economic substantive due process.
Solinger, an independent scholar, is the author of a number of books on women, welfare, reproduction, and the law, including Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (Routledge, 1992) and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (Hill & Wang, 2002).King v. Smith, the first welfare case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned the Alabama substitute father law. Such laws directed or allowed welfare officials to use the sexual behavior and reproductive capacity of poor African American women to alienate this population from “cash-money”; to reassert political and bureaucratic control over the intimate relationships of African Americans, demonstrating that this population was unprepared for civil rights and full citizenship; and to shore up white supremacy in the civil rights era. The context for this case which originated in Selma, Alabama in 1966 illustrates that even if poor African American women had had access to contraception and legal abortion at that time, they would still have lacked reproductive autonomy and dignity as the state surveilled their sexual behavior and enforced laws making sex, itself, as well as reproduction, and the right to define their own intimate relationships and families, a race and class privilege.Full content is available to subscribers of the journal.
Over the course of the past few years, I've increasingly emphasized local examples of national themes, whether they be turn of the century remnants of the Progressive Era, concrete remains of the New Deal, or mid-century modernist ruins. St. Louis lends itself particularly well to such a project, as the 1904 World's Fair illustrates. Oft-remembered for its celebration of progress, the Fair also became embroiled in a battle between Anglo-elites on the city's western frontier and German immigrants downtown. Immigrants demanded that portions of the Fair be held in their neighborhoods, a position that elites rejected because they didn't want visitors strolling through immigrant tenements, beer gardens, and vice districts. Instead, they opted for a sterile park-like setting near the exclusive, gated, Central West End, an ironic counterpoint to the Progressive fascination with assimilating immigrant communities. For students who drive by the park all the time, the local story helps bring home the lesson. Further, local archives possess incredible reserves of digitized photographs, obviating the need to employ tired images that students have seen in textbooks since high school.
Argument from the “anticanon,” the set of cases whose central propositions all legitimate decisions must refute, has become a persistent but curious feature of American constitutional law. These cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York, and Korematsu v. United States, are consistently cited in Supreme Court opinions, in constitutional law casebooks, and at confirmation hearings as prime examples of weak constitutional analysis. Upon reflection, however, anticanonical cases do not involve unusually bad reasoning, nor are they uniquely morally repugnant. Rather, these cases are held out as examples for reasons external to conventional constitutional argument. This Article substantiates that claim and explores those reasons. I argue that anticanonical cases achieve their status through historical happenstance, and that their status is reaffirmed as subsequent interpretive communities avail themselves of the rhetorical resource the anticanon represents. That use is enabled by at least three features of anticanonical cases: their incomplete theorization, their amenability to traditional forms of legal argumentation, and their resonance with constitutive ethical propositions that have achieved consensus. I argue that it is vital for law professors in particular to be conscious of the various ways in which the anticanon is used – for example, to dispel dissensus about or sanitize the Constitution – that we may better decide if and when that use is justified.
And the blurbs:In this timely reevaluation of an infamous Supreme Court decision, David E. Bernstein provides a compelling survey of the history and background of Lochner v. New York. This 1905 decision invalidated state laws limiting work hours and became the leading case contending that novel economic regulations were unconstitutional. Sure to be controversial, Rehabilitating Lochner argues that the decision was well grounded in precedent—and that modern constitutional jurisprudence owes at least as much to the limited-government ideas of Lochner proponents as to the more expansive vision of its Progressive opponents.
Tracing the influence of this decision through subsequent battles over segregation laws, sex discrimination, civil liberties, and more, Rehabilitating Lochner argues not only that the court acted reasonably in Lochner, but that Lochner and like-minded cases have been widely misunderstood and unfairly maligned ever since.
“An exhilarating book full of interesting new perspectives. Rehabilitating Lochner will change the way people think about the transition from the late nineteenth century to the modern New Deal and Civil Rights regime. It does what good revisionist history should do: see what is familiar in new ways.”—Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School
“David Bernstein drives home powerfully and convincingly the fact that the supporters of Lochner were the biggest proponents of protecting the personal rights of African Americans, Roman Catholics, and other minorities. Rehabilitating Lochner will have a profound impact on constitutional law scholarship.”—William E. Nelson, New York University“A terrific work of historical revisionism, Rehabilitating Lochner brings out some attractive resonances in libertarian themes associated with the widely disparaged constitutional jurisprudence of the period from 1905 to 1937, and some discordant undertones to the Progressive themes sounded during that period. It should induce some changes in the way many students and scholars read the cases from that period.”—Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School
H-Law has posted this review, by Ann Short Chirhart (Indiana State University), of Harvard Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America (University of Kentucky, 2010).Toward Freedom Land provides a rare opportunity to read Harvard Sitkoff’s key works, his comments on that scholarship, and his description of how he redirected a commitment for social justice to the historical profession. The collection does more than remind us of Sitkoff’s remarkable contributions to American history. Sitkoff, an activist in the 1960s, urges scholars to “acknowledge our own biases” while noting perfect objectivity is impossible (p. 8). Sitkoff’s work represents his own effort “to defy classification” and avoid writing history “to vindicate a preconceived judgment about the past or express a conclusion determined by today’s political considerations” (pp. 7-8). This collection, then, represents his scholarship and commentary on the historiography about race and the civil rights movement as he welcomes continuing debates about the long freedom struggle.The full review is here.
by Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Review of Books. Desai notes that "this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it....Lelyveld’s argument is that it was South Africa that made him the visionary and leader of legend." Read the rest here.
With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War coming up, in the Los Angeles Times recommends "two excellent anthologies [that] commend themselves to readers who want to hear and feel the immediacy of the Civil War as experienced by its participants." The books are Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" edited by Harold Holzer, and The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It edited by Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears and Aaron Sheehan-Dean.
Image creditThis essay was written for “Supreme Mistakes: Exploring the Most Maligned Decisions in Supreme Court History.” A symposium on the worst Supreme Court decision of all time risks becoming an exercise best described by Claude Rains’s memorable line in Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” Two things saved this symposium from that fate. First, each of the usual suspects was appointed defense counsel, which made things more interesting. Second, a new face found its way into the line-up: Erie Railroad v. Tompkins. My goal in this essay is to explain why Erie is in fact guiltier than all of the usual suspects.
I begin, in Part I, by setting out the three criteria that I believe must be satisfied for a decision to qualify as the worst of all time. I also explain briefly why each of the usual suspects fails to meet one or more of those criteria. The heart of the essay is Part II, examining in detail how Erie satisfies each of the three criteria. I close with some concluding thoughts on the surprising relationship between Erie’s flaws and those of the other suspects.
Here's an excerpt from the review, by Michael Boucai (UCLA Law):
The full text of the review is available here.Between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s, the gay movement in the United States achieved a number of successes. More than thirty municipalities and over a dozen large corporations banned discrimination against gay people; the first openly gay politicians were elected to public office; and the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders. Rut it was a resounding defeat of gay rights that marked the movement's coming-of-age.
In 1977, singer and horn-again Christian Anita Bryant successfully led a campaign in Dade County, Florida, to repeal an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of "sexual preference." Fixating on a single context--classrooms--Bryant's organization, called "Save Our Children," framed the law as an endorsement of immorality and a license for homosexual "recruitment." Dade County's gay activists, divided between the sexual-liberationist Miami Victory Campaign and the liberal Coalition for Human Rights, proved no match for Save Our Children, whose rhetoric capitalized on the public's deep antipathy to homosexuality and its profound ignorance of actual homosexuals.
Other than Bryant's own memoir, rushed to publication months after her victory, (1) Fred Fejes' Gay Rights and Moral Panic (2008) is the first book devoted primarily to this pivotal moment in American history. Let us hope that it is not the last.
Since the post-Civil War cases arising out of conflicts over the proper location of the amnesty power, it has generally been thought that pardon and amnesty are synonymous and that the capacity to effect both is vested in the President under Article II. The history of the English version of amnesty – oblivion – within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the colonial and state oblivions that were legislatively enacted from 1650 through the period of the Second Continental Congress suggest otherwise. Oblivion was distinct from pardoning because it erased the underlying events rather than remitting punishment and often arose as a response to civil unrest. More than pardoning, oblivion served the function of settling property rights and restoring those included to full citizenship. In addition, acts of oblivion were passed by colonial legislatures even in some colonies whose charters explicitly granted the pardon power to the Lord Proprietor.
Recovering the lost history of oblivion suggests that the decisions of the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century were not entirely correct in assimilating pardon with amnesty. Instead, a strong argument can be made that the tradition of oblivion within England and the colonies supports a broad congressional power to grant amnesty. Remembering oblivion can also allow us to revive a different form of pardoning than that dominant today, a form associated with transitional justice and the restoration of a community riven by civil strife. Oblivion presents an alternative model for moving forward, suggesting that certain kinds of conflicts would be better forgotten than remembered for the continued health of the polity.
we should beware of reducing the Middle Eastern revolution to local foreign policy spats—and therefore to our human rights. To find a parallel for what we see today, we have to go further back, to well before international human rights had been invented as a foreign policy conundrum.You can find the rest here.In fact, the Middle Eastern revolution seems to be most of all about an earlier idea that we have lost the ability to talk about—what used to be called the “rights of man,” not our more recent notion of human rights, along with the activities and institutions Westerners have devised around it.
From their first deployment in the French Revolution through the century of liberal nationalism that climaxed and seemingly disappeared in twentieth-century decolonization, the rights of man were the slogan of revolutionaries. The votaries of the rights of man threw off grizzled despots and sclerotic bureaucracies in the name of humanity and nationality together. And they faced the problem of constituting the “people” or “nation” that was now said to rule instead.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Progressive politicians and legal theorists advocated the creation and then the expansion of administrative agencies. These agencies, they argued, could address rapidly changing social circumstances more expeditiously than could courts and legislatures, and could deploy scientific expertise, rather than mere political preference, in solving the problems social change produced. The proliferation of administrative agencies in the New Deal—the SEC, the NLRB, and others—meant that defending administrative agencies from close judicial oversight became intertwined with defending the New Deal itself. In a series of contentious cases decided by the Hughes Court, Progressives believed that they had suffered loss after loss. And, counting only outcomes, they had. Yet by the end of the decade, the Court had moved administrative law closer to the position the Progressives had sought.
This Lecture examines developments in administrative law in the 1930s. Focusing on three major cases during that decade, this Lecture describes how far administrative law adapted to the vision articulated by Progressive scholars, most notably Felix Frankfurter and James Landis. In each case, Progressives believed that the Court had substantially eroded the accomplishments of administrative law; but in each, Progressives were mistaken. And whereas the Progressives failed to acknowledge how much they had gained from the Supreme Court during the 1930s, by the end of that decade, their opponents better understood what had occurred and mobilized political support to retrench. Only a presidential veto stood in the way of a substantial revision of administrative law. That veto, though, allowed modern administrative law to adapt to the changing place of administrative agencies in the modern administrative state.
Counterfactual history - the construction of imagined, fact-like scenarios arising from the alteration of antecedents and consequents in real past events - is a controversial business. Among supporters, counterfactualism is defended as serving a valuable heuristic function, and furnishing questions to drive research. But can the knowledge generated by counterfactual history have a real-world, functional application? Is it possible to use what we learn from counterfactualism, not just for future research, but to pre-empt or alter the future? Constitution-making provides us with one answer. This proposition is illustrated with a discussion of the use made of the American Civil War by the framers of Australia’s Constitution in the 1890s.
There are many ways for scholarship to have an impact on society. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of the Black Power Movement by Danielle McGuire, published in September, 2010, has had an important one.
McGuire told the story of Mrs. Recy Taylor in At the Dark End of the Street. In 1944, six white men kidnapped Mrs Taylor, a 24-year-old black woman, a married mother and a sharecropper. The men then gang raped Taylor at knife point.
The law did not come to Mrs. Taylor's aid. Two all-white, all-male grand juries in Abbeville, Alabama, where the attack took place, refused to indict the suspects.
Subsequently, some of the accused admitted guilt. Still, nothing happened.
Decades later, as a result of publicity surrounding McGuire's book, an African-American state legislator initiated an effort to apologize to Mrs. Taylor for the miscarriage of justice that occurred in 1944. His colleagues joined the effort. The Alabama House unanimously passed a resolution expressing its "deepest sympathies and solemn regrets" to Mrs. Recy Taylor. The resolution calls the fact that the suspects were not brought to trial "morally abhorrent and repugnant."
And here's a glimpse of the review, by George Thomas (Department of Government, Claremont McKenna College):The Necessary and Proper Clause is one of the most important parts of the US Constitution. Today this short thirty-nine word paragraph is cited as the legal foundation for much of the modern federal government. Yet constitutional scholars have pronounced its origins and original meaning a mystery. Through three independent lines of research, the authors trace the lineage of the Necessary and Proper Clause to the everyday law of the Founding Era - the same law that American founders such as Madison, Hamilton, and Washington applied in their daily lives. Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause are found in law-governing agencies, public administration, and corporations. Moreover, all of those areas were undergirded by common principles of fiduciary responsibility - reflecting the Founders' view that a public office is truly a public trust. This explains the choice of language in the clause and provides clues about its meaning. This book thus serves as a reference source for scholars seeking to understand the intellectual foundations of one of the Constitution's most important clauses.
This is a curious book and, yet, a successful book. While the chapters that make up the book are written by different authors or sets of authors, and identified as such, the introduction makes a plea that this work be treated as a book and not an edited collection of essays. This plea gave me pause, but the three lines of research that began independently of one another do more or less come together to form a book. And the claim of Gary Lawson, Geoffrey P. Miller, Robert C. Natelson, and Guy I. Seidman is that the principle of fiduciary responsibility found in administrative law, the private law of agency, and corporate law can help us make sense of the “necessary and proper clause.”The full review is here.
As it happens, this is also a timely book. The necessary and proper clause has once again become central to debates about Congressional power – particularly with regard to health care reform. Indeed, if it was thought that Congress could easily reach health care under a broad reading of its power to regulate interstate commerce, scholars have show that many of the most expansive readings of Congress’s power under the commerce clause, such as WICKARD v. FILBURN and GONZALES v. RAICH, are in fact best understood as rooted in the necessary and proper clause. Just how this clause ought to be understood, then, has become a pressing constitutional question.
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The Federal Judicial Center in Washington, DC, seeks to hire a paid intern to work in the FJC’s Federal Judicial History Office during the summer of 2011. The position is available from mid-May through August. Responsibilities will include historical research and editorial work related to the Center’s compilation of judicial history reference works. Applicants must have completed an undergraduate degree, preferably in history, and enrollment in a graduate history program is desirable. Knowledge of federal history sources preferred.
A vacancy announcement is also available on the Federal Judicial Center Home Page at www.fjc.gov. Persons interested in the positions should send a cover letter referring to position #11-07T, with a resume and the names of three references attached, to Human Resources Office, Federal Judicial Center, Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, One Columbus Circle NE, Washington, DC 20002-8003.
The positions will remain open until filled. To insure full consideration for the opening, applications should reach the Federal Judicial Center by April 22, 2011. The Federal Judicial Center is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
The book challenges both popular and scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader, describing a man often subject to doubts about theology, politics and other matters, quite different from the figure of unswerving moral certitude that became an enduring symbol of African-American pride.
It is particularly critical of the celebrated “Autobiography of Malcolm X,” now a staple of college reading lists, which was written with Alex Haley and which Mr. Marable described as “fictive.” Drawing on diaries, private correspondence and surveillance records to a much greater extent than previous biographies, his book also suggests that the New York City Police Department and the F.B.I. had advance knowledge of Malcolm X’s assassination but allowed it to happen and then deliberately bungled the investigation.
The full article is available here. And for an unmediated experience of Marable's subject, see Malcolm X's famous commentary at the Oxford Union in 1964, here.
Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Henry Kissinger reviews Bismarck: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg (Oxford, 2011). Subscribers to the London Review of Books can get another perspective, from reviewer Christopher Clark, here.
"It is hard to imagine that the world needs another [Richard] Feynman biography, but here it is," writes reviewer George Johnson in the New York Times. Those who have read the physicist's often hilarious autobiography may disagree. In any case, coverage of Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science (Atlas & Company/W. W. Norton & Company, 2011) is available here. 
"The combination of technology and the insatiable archival hunger allows us more history than we could ever have hoped to retain, and much of this attention is directed at the two World Wars," observes Sean O'Brien in the Times Literary Supplement. "In the realm of fiction, . . . the pull of these now-distant events is as strong as ever." For those who enjoy historical fiction, read his round-up of recent work here.
