John R. Vile

Revitalizing Undergraduate Programs through Intercollegiate Mock Trial Competition.

Chief Justices meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, endorsed mock trial competition as a means of promoting greater understanding of the legal system. Initially, the national collegiate tournament was sponsored by the Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa. Richard Calkins, then dean, was influential in establishing mock trial competition, and he has subsequently served as the guiding light of the American Mock Trial Association. AMTA has now become an independent corporation with an expanding board of directors made up of representatives from undergraduate institutions throughout the country. In addition to the national tournament, AMTA sponsored a variety of invitational tournaments and 11 regional mock trial competitions during the 1993-94 school year. These, in turn, qualified students to participate in one of three flights of national competition, two held in Des Moines, Iowa, and the third (primarily for new schools) held at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The activity is also growing at the high school level, providing colleges and universities with established mock trial programs an effective recruiting tool that is especially appealing to good students.

Presidents as Commenders in Chief: Recognitions of Citizen Heroes from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush

Presidents have long referred in their speeches to heroes of previous times. In 1982, President Reagan inaugurated the practice of inviting contemporary citizen heroes to attend his televised speeches to Congress and of recognizing them by name. Since then, Reagan and each of his three successors have continued this practice, which has evolved over time to include individuals who exemplify potential benefits of government programs and some foreign guests. In honoring citizen heroes, presidents point to the ideals that fellow Americans value, and inspire faith that Americans can meet modern crises. In addition, presidents seek to profit from the popularity of the individuals that they recognize. Despite these benefits, the practice also presents some potential pitfalls. Presidents must avoid seeming scripted or exploitative of others. Also, they can neither guarantee how honorees will respond nor guarantee their future behavior. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have generally used the mechanism ably, but George H.W. Bush was not as effective.

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty: Cash, Arthur H.: New Haven: Yale University Press, 482 pp., Publication Date: February 2006

This biography by a distinguished professor emeritus of the Department of English at SUNY–New Paltz, presents a remarkable portrait of the eighteenth-century Englishman (1726–97) whose name and likeness was virtually synonymous with liberty. Scholars of American constitutional thought probably know Wilkes as the individual whose experience in being kicked out of, and subsequently excluded from, Parliament for seditious libel against the king was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969), to explain why it regarded the constitutional qualifications for members of Congress as exclusive. Cash shows that Wilkes was a passionate defender of freedom of speech and of the press, a committed opponent of general warrants (writs of assistance), and an advocate of religious toleration. Wilkes had his personal foibles. He constantly spent beyond his means. A duelist and a libertine, he was something of a gentlemanly eighteenth-century version of Larry Flynt. Wilkes’s written critiques of the king arguably paled beside the pornographic verses (his Essay on Women, designed to mock Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man) that he printed for friends. Despite his bawdy humor and a short-lived relationship with his wife, Wilkes remained closely attached to his daughter, Polly, throughout his life, and used his considerable wit to form strong friendships, even with those with whom he disagreed politically. Although Benjamin Franklin did not like him, Wilkes was friends with Arthur Lee and corresponded with Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other American revolutionaries whose cause he championed when he was finally readmitted to Parliament. Cash wrote this book for general audiences and has appropriately placed endnotes before the bibliography at the back of the book. Despite Cash’s own background in literature, he carefully places Wilkes within the context of eighteenth-century politics and parades a virtual “Who’s Who” of eighteenth-century associates through his text. One of the book’s more engaging features is the way that Cash melds various images and their descriptions (he settles for verbal portraits of Wilkes’s pornographic writings) within the text to illumine Wilkes’s physical features (which included cross-eyes and a jutting jaw) and his views, and to show both the widespread admiration and offense that Wilkes engendered in his own day. Cash doubts that his fifteen years of research has either uncovered all the relevant primary sources or that his biography is “definitive.” Future biographies might prove longer, but they are unlikely to be any more engaging, any more sensitive to Wilkes’s times, or any more cognizant of his widespread influence.

The Creation of American Common Law, 1850–1880: Technology, Politics, and the Construction of Citizenship: Schweber, Howard: New York: Cambridge University Press 312 pp., Publication Date: January 2004

Dear readers, when you are hunting the new book collection to read this day, creation of american common law 185

A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution: Berkin, Carol: New York: Harcourt, Inc. 310 pp., Publication Date: September 2002

Moving iiettly between general and particular issues, Stephen R. Haynes’s incisive study of the use o f the Bible to support slavery offers readers i i iich store of insights concerning both biblical interpretation and the role of honor and order in the Southern ethos. Hayncs. :I professor of religious studies at Rhodes (’ollege, provides an overview of the history of interpretation of Genesis 9-1 I , demonstixi ing how Jewish and Christian readers uscd textual gaps or anomalies as springboxcis for detailed elaboration on the biblical t e x t . Such creative retelling lies behind the attribution of dark skin to Ham and the ccmiection of Nimrod the hunter with the namelezs builders of the Tower of Babel. Turning to Southern readings of Genesis 9-1 I , Hayiiea focuses on Benjamin Palmer, one of the m o s ~ influential Southern Presbyterian clcrgymen in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the writings of Palmer. Haynes shows that antebellum proslavery lexts construed the curse of Ham (Gen. 9 2 0 27) and his putative identity with modern Af’ricans as divine approval for slavery. Hain. i n shaming his father, was deserving of perpetual servitude, especially given the importance that Southern culture placed on honor. After the war, Southern attention shifted to Nimrod iGzn. 10512, 1 1 : 1-9), whose crime was understood to be the indiscriminate conglomeration of humankind and consequently a violation of divine order. God’s dispersal of peoples from the Tower of Babel was claimed to show thitt the separation of peoples was part of tiivrne providence. Federal efforts at integration, both during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement a century later, were identified with the sin of Nimrod and the tower‘\ builders. Thus, i n a neat hermeneutical move, the rebellious South cast itself as the defender of order against the true rebels who defy the plans of God. Hayne\’s own creedal commitment sees the Bible’s core message as one of redemption, unity. and liberation. Consequently, the last part i)l’ the book offers counter-readings of Genesis 9 in an attempt to rehabilitate the text from i t \ long history of misuse. Drawing