Bad law Ten popular laws that are ruining America

Elie Mystal

Book - 2025

"A legal commentator and former litigator's argument for repealing ten laws he believes are making life worse for Americans"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : The New Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Elie Mystal (author)
Physical Description
pages cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781620978580
  • Why Isn't Everyone Registered to Vote?
  • How Did Immigrants Become "Illegal"?
  • Who Gave Away the Skies to the Airlines?
  • Why Do We Incarcerate So Many People?
  • Why Do We Protect Arms Dealers?
  • How Can You Murder Someone If You Didn't Kill Anybody?
  • Why Do We Give White Guys a License to Kill Black People?
  • Interlude : Why Is the Second Amendment So Violent and Stupid?
  • How Did They Fit the Federal Budgets Inside People's Wombs?
  • Why Can't We Say Gay?
  • Who Died and Put God in Charge of Our Laws?
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A cheerfully profane assault on laws that, by constitutional scholar and commentator Mystal's account, need to be shredded. "We live in a dystopian fucking future where Amazon knows that I need to buy new underwear before I do, but we're supposed to pretend that it is difficult for the U.S. government to know if I'm eligible to vote?" So asks Mystal, opposing voter ID and other registration laws: Anything else, he insists, is an untoward effort on the part of the white majority-cum-minority to restrict voting rights on the part of anyone who's not them. Just so, he insists, immigration laws are overblown, assuming that immigrants are "as violent and depraved as Trump," though he harbors little hope of change: Whites will declare citizen Latinos to be white enough to help them close the border, and Latinos "will reward them by voting Republican" and repressing Latinos on the other side of the fence. Some of Mystal's examples wander into areas few readers will likely have thought about. His analysis of airline deregulation is richly detailed, but in the end it comes to a full-throated denunciation of a market system in which there are very few winners (and those who "vote with your wallet," he notes, need wallets thick enough to make their targets pay attention). Mystal mounts persuasive arguments against such things as laws that remove discretionary power from judges, school choice that allows conservative parents to dictate curricula that accommodates "their bigoted, unscientific, private predilections," and much else that is fundamentally antidemocratic. He concludes with the provocative--and promising--suggestion that apportionment of congressional seats be for every 580,000 persons, meaning Wyoming gets its representative but California gets a dozen more, which "would go a long way toward restoring basic representative democracy in this country." A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.