A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values

by Robert H. Bork

Book Overview

During the past forty years, activists have repeatedly used the court system to accomplish substantive policy results that could not otherwise be obtained through the ordinary political processes of government, both in the United States and abroad. In five insightful essays, the contributors to this volume show how these legal decisions have undermined America's sovereignty and values. They reveal how international law challenges American beliefs...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0817946020
• ISBN13: 9780817946029
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Mystery of the Mystery Passage

Of all the manifold aspects of cultural decay, one of the most difficult to recognize is the corruption of constitutional law. When one thinks of the Supreme Court, or even of the judiciary overall, the image that comes to mind is a procession of old, graying men in black robes, blowing their noses into crusty handkerchiefs as they read dusty legal tomes. They sit on their lofty benches, refusing to budge from ancient precedent and the letter of the law. Humorless curmudgeons, they are capable of mercy only if the accused implores them, crying his eyes out in the process. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The persistence of this myth is one of the reasons why so much of the population is unaware that the Supreme Court has systematically raped the Anglo-American legal tradition as expressed in the Constitution. The Court, along with its enablers in the government, the media, and the law schools, has helped pave the way for the politically-correct, socialist nightmare that is now staring us in the face. If anyone understands this phenomenon down to its minutest details, it is Robert Bork, one of the world's most eminent and erudite legal scholars. In 2005, Bork assembled half a dozen articles on the subject from various authors (including himself) and published them in "A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values." The title of the book is taken from a dissenting opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia in 1996: "What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court, that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?...Day by day, case by case, [the Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize." The crux of the matter, from a strictly legal point of view, is the invention by the Court of rights that do not exist in the Constitution. Emblematic is the "right to privacy," which has been used to disqualify virtually any governmental limits on individual behavior. A watershed was the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, involving that state's limitations on public birth-control clinics. The statute in question offended the justices' progressive spirit, but they were faced with the annoying fact that it was the product of the democratic process. After all, the law was enacted by the people of Connecticut, in the body of their state legislature. The Court invalidated the state law by inventing a "right to privacy." As the legal scholar Lino Graglia writes in his article: "The inconvenient fact that there was no relevant constitutional right [Justice William] Douglas overcame by imagining and enacting a new one, the right of 'privacy'. Although this right could not be found in the Bill of Rights itself, it could be found, Douglas explained, in the 'penumbras, formed by emanations'

A sound cultural critique of the legal assault on American values...

~A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values~ is a trenchant critique of a legal culture gone awry. Nine learned jurists including Lino Graglia, Gary McDowell, Terry Eastland, David Davenport, Lee Casey, and David Rivkin Jr. have taken to the task of surmising the legal assault on tradition and our basic American values. Likewise, this scholarly work addresses the internationalization of law, and the threat posed to American national sovereignty by the New Diplomacy and nebulous notions of universal jurisdiction. Former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork writes the introduction to this erudite anthology of prescient cultural criticism on a legal system run amok. The Constitution, the objective moral norms of civil society, and the rule of law have been subverted. For the past half-century, activists have aggressively used the court system and to a lesser degree the emerging world government to achieve considerable social, cultural and political change. They have been largely successful and have achieved public policy goals that would not likely be possible through legislative processes. We the American people, now have constitutional law without the Constitution, and are subjected to barrage of policies advanced by judicial fiat. First Amendment jurisprudence in the last century alone has placed innumerable impediments upon any efforts to regulate obscenity, protect national security or ensure public safety. The Court has remade libel law virtually eliminating any sense of fair play in allowing one to protect their reputation. At the height of the Cold War, the High Court ruled against the exclusion of Communist Party members from sensitive jobs in defense plants. The High Court has zealously defended the profane, the obscene, and invalidated state and local standards of decency. With the advent of mass media, the result has been the proliferation of vile forms of pornography. Relativism has been enshrined by the high court. Community standards of decency are increasingly being marginalized. Also, the erection of judicially-contrived notion of privacy has been used to subvert collective moral judgment made by the people. In our time, we have been subjected to the rule of judicial oligarchy where basic decision making on issues of social policy have been removed from the hands of the American people. All of this occurs despite the fact that "[t]he American people favor capital punishment, restrictions on abortion, prayer in the schools, suppression of pornography, strict enforcement of criminal law, neighborhood schools, and so on, all anathema to the cultural elite." We have regrettably traded the rule of law for the rule of men-and republican self-government has been rendered obsolete. Likewise, the courts have usurped the Constitution-and the edifices of federalism established by its framers. Thus separation of powers, the decentralized character of government, and states' rights has been whittled away. Increasingly

Good for a law review

I must confess that I purchased the book without realizing that it was merely edited by Robert Bork. The book does have a lengthy introduction from Bork that is compelling as always. But the book is a collection of articles written by various legal scholars. I didn't mind this since their works were all well written and were thoughtfully delivered. This book is a refreshing look at how different aspects of the legal system have been taken over by the left. Refreshing, because it provides a scholarly analysis -- as opposed to a Bill O'Reily type analysis -- of the legal system and its flaws. It provides a sobering view of the consequences of the deterioration of the legal principles upon which this country was founded. That said, this book is as lengthy as a volume from a law review. I don't mind the format too much, but since they are charging me for a book, I expect more than a couple hundred pages. For this I subtract a star. Also, much of the material is a retread of themes that have been touched upon elsewhere. With the glut of legal writing extant, a book should have something new to add. Notwithstanding this criticism, Lino Graglia's article is indeed fresh and new (at least to my eyes). He advocates the repeal of judicial review with remarkable cogency. Overall, it's a good book, though slightly overpriced.