Synopses & Reviews
With the specter of prosecution after his term is over and the possibility of disbarment in Arkansas hanging over President Clinton, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the events that have followed it show no sign of abating. The question has become what to do, and how to think, about those eight months. Did the President lie or was it plausible that he had truthfully testified to no sexual relationship? Was the job search for Monica just help for a friend or a sinister means of obtaining silence? Even if all the charges were true, did impeachment follow or was censure enough? And what are the lasting repercussions on the office of the Presidency?
Aftermath: The Clinton Impeachment and the Presidency in the Age of Political Spectacle takes a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze the Clinton impeachment from political perspectives across the spectrum. The authors attempt to tease out the meanings of the scandal from the vantage point of law, religion, public opinion, and politics, both public and personal. Further, the impeachment itself is situated broadly within the contemporary American liberal state and mined for the contradictory possibilities for reconciliation it reveals in our culture.
Contributors: David T. Canon, John Cooper, Drucilla Cornell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert W. Gordon, Lawrence Joseph, Leonard V. Kaplan, David Kennedy, Kenneth R. Mayer, Beverly I. Moran, Father Richard John Neuhaus, David Novak, Linda Denise Oakley, Elizabeth Rapaport, Lawrence Rosen, Eric Rothstein, Aviam Soifer, Lawrence M. Solan, Cass R. Sunstein, Stephen Toulmin, Leon Trakman, Frank Tuerkheimer, Mark V. Tushnet, Andrew D. Weiner, Robin L. West.
Review
"The first serious collection of academic reflections about the scandal, the essays in Aftermath offer citizens, students, lawyers, and historians fresh insights about American law and liberalism, about culture wars and family values, and about the politics of scandal in the late twentieth century."--, "History will be forever haunted by the 20th century's last, longest, legalistic right-wing coup attempt against a popular president. Limited to sleazy sex, political and policy differences were downplayed. The important, splendid, controversial essays collected in Aftermath provide learned context for this defining, though bizarre moment in American history and culture. Everyone interested in the individual and the law, politics and the future will want to read this book."
Review
“This eloquent and moving memoir raises profound questions about law, justice, tradition and community, the path to constructive social change, and not least, how to live a decent life. It is an inspiring story, with many valuable lessons to ponder.”
-Noam Chomsky ,
Review
“Jules Lobel looks back on a history of litigating an impressive number of lost cases on behalf of important political causes. In this brilliant book, against a moving background of spiritual heritage, family life, and such quintessentially American cultural references as baseball and Vietnam, Lobel ponders these losses. What might have been a dry documentary of cases is, instead, a living, gripping, revelation of real people, their motivations and passions. Books such as Success without Victory tell us the stories of the legally unsuccessful anti-slavery litigation, early women's suffrage cases, workers rights struggles, and challenges to illegal U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Cuba, Central America, and Kosovo, giving us the background we need to understand that, if we can build solid community, we need not despair even when faced with today's horrendous odds.”
-Margaret Randall,author of When I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror, and Resistance
Review
“Our culture in this country—including the subculture of radical lawyering—is too much influenced by a fast-food approach to social change. Jules Lobel carefully explains that the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and other monumental achievements of social protest movements in the United States came about because protesters, including lawyers, were long-distance runners. Law students and young lawyers in particular are likely to keep this book under their pillows.”
-Staughton Lynd,author of Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical's Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement
Review
“Success Without Victory is thoughtful and provocative, and I highly recommend it. It is highly readable, includes fascinating stories centered on powerful personalities and the sustained reflection on unilateral presidential war-making powers is timely.”
-Law and Politics Book Review,
Synopsis
Winners and losers. Success and failure. Victory and defeat. American culture places an extremely high premium on success, and firmly equates it with winning. In politics, sports, business, and the courtroom, we have a passion to win and are terrified of losing.
Instead of viewing success and failure through such a rigid lens, Jules Lobel suggests that we move past the winner-take-all model and learn valuable lessons from legal and political activists who have advocated causes destined to lose in court but have had important, progressive long term effects on American society. He leads us through dramatic battles in American legal history, describing attempts by abolitionist lawyers to free fugitive slaves through the courts, Susan B. Anthony's trial for voting illegally, the post-Civil War challenges to segregation that resulted in the courts affirmation of the separate but equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, and Lobels own challenges to United States foreign policy during the 1980s and 1990s.
Success Without Victory explores the political, social, and psychological contexts behind the cases themselves, as well as the eras from which they originated and the eras they subsequently influenced.
About the Author
Jules Lobel is Professor of International and Constitutional Law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. He is also Vice President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national civil and human rights organization. On behalf of the Center, he has been one of the foremost legal challengers of unilateral presidential war-making for the past two decades.