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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ISBN 1-4107-0346-0
• Psychology
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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.
To order directly from the publisher
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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
Home Is Where
the Law Is
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
