Strengthening Congress
Lee H. Hamilton
Calling upon Americans to take more seriously their obligations and responsibilities as citizens and engage with the critical issues facing their communities and the nation, distinguished former congressman Lee H. Hamilton argues that America needs a stronger Congress and a more engaged citizenry in order to ensure responsive and effective democracy.
“A lively blueprint for restoring a risk-averse Congress to its rightful place in our democracy. This penetrating analysis by a pre-eminent Washington insider is a must read for anyone interested in politics and government.”—Martin Tolchin, Congressional Correspondent, The New York Times
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SCHIZOPHRENIA
The Bearded Lady Disease
by J. Michael Mahoney
Mankind has long searched for
the cause and meaning of madness.
The 639 quotations contained in
this book, each followed by an
explanatory comment, point
inexorably to the factor of
unconscious bisexual conflict/gender
confusion as forming the basic
etiological role in all functional
mental illness, including schizophrenia.
Madness has been the instigator of so much suffering and destruction in the world throughout the ages that it is vitally important to uncover its mechanisms, for without doing so it will never be possible to eradicate it.
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information brokers, leaving the communities responsible for their own protection.
Reached by phone in Florida, Logan had comments on the case involving Jaycee Dugard, who was recently reunited with her family after having been abducted in 1991. Dugard had been living in the backyard of her abductor, along with two daughters allegedly fathered by Phillip Garrido, her accused molester. In terms of sex-offender registries, Logan notes, the alleged molester might be considered a successful story of compliance. He was a registered sex-offender in California. But Logan points out that Garrido went outside his own community to find his victim. Today, with some 60,000 people on California’s registry, Logan says, no member of the public will be able to keep up. There is a saturation, a tipping point, he says. “Hypervigilance does not necessarily achieve the goal here.”
Continued From Preceding Page
ALSO TRACKING perhaps unin- tended consequences of legal reforms is Jeannie Suk. The scholar, an assistant professor of law at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Humanities Center, brings an earlier background in literary studies to legal musings in At Home in the Law:
How the Domestic
Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy (Yale University Press).
In the Anglo-American tradition, she says, with its “castle doctrine,” home is simultaneously a place of security and comfort, and a place of vulnerability and potential invasion. Home,
Suk writes, is where
“the most basic questions about the relation between individuals and state power arise.” She explores such issues as domestic violence, self-defense statutes, and the taking of property through eminent domain. Home is a “rich vein” for legal study, precisely because it is “the focus of such intensive imaginative human investment beyond law’s borders.”
Feminists, Suk says, “are now at home in the law.” Noting the need to correct “shameful past inaction” in the legal system, she describes feminists’ success particularly in the realm of domestic violence and the erosion of the home boundaries that protected domestic abusers.
She worries, however, about developments that she says are creating “a legal reality that seems in some ways untenable and incompatible with valuable au-
tonomy, privacy, and even security.” In particular she examines how procedures in domestic-violence cases are being used to reorder and control intimate relationships. This phenomenon, she argues, is “thoroughly class contingent,” making poor minorities bear the brunt of interventions “theorized and advocated largely by white upper-middle-class women.”
A central element of the book is Suk’s take on actions by police and prosecutors in New York County, aka the borough of Manhattan. Along with mandatory arrest and “no drop” rules in domestic-violence complaints, prosecutors have made the criminal-law version of no-contact or protection orders commonplace. That has resulted in what Suk calls “state-imposed de facto divorce,” a phenomenon “that is so routine in criminal court that it disappears in plain sight.” The scholar’s focus is on the orders’ role in what she says are the vast majority of domestic-violence cases:
misdemeanors in which serious injury
is not at issue. The orders have become
a mandatory protocol in such cases, she
writes. But what has not become a pro-
tocol is asking a victim if she wants the
order and desisting if she doesn’t. Often
the victim designated in the order may
not have even made the complaint. For
instance, a neighbor may overhear a
heated argument, call the cops, and set
in motion a process that the woman is
unable to reverse. If the parties wish
to maintain contact,
their attempts become
criminal.
De facto divorce is not de jure, Suk notes. A formal divorce includes discussion of custody, visitation, alimony, and the like. Criminal prosecutors have no obligation to entertain such realms of family law. Even the blow to a family of having a parent in prison is less restrictive, she says, since visits, letters, and phone calls are permitted. If
protection orders could be applied in a stepwise and controlled fashion, she observes, they might become a source of bargaining power and autonomy for women. In theory, “the protection order may be a strategic instrument, but under the existing legal regime it is a blunt one.”
Suk never denies or discounts the existence of cases that demand unilateral action by prosecutors. “State-imposed de facto divorce may well be appropriate for truly violent and abusive relationships,” she agrees. In such cases, “the state may readily conclude that a victim’s autonomy is already worn so thin that paternalism will best enhance it.” Yet, she argues, we must be wary of trends that threaten to make “de facto divorce a de facto solution” to domestic violence. —NINA C. AYOUB
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