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Rights Gone Wrong

How Law Ignores Common Sense and Undermines Social Justice
by Richard Thompson Ford
Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Ignores Common Sense and Undermines Social Justice. Farrar. Oct. 2011. c.288p. index. ISBN 9780374250355. $26. LAW
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Ford (law, Stanford; The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse) persuasively argues that while the Civil Rights Movement brought about great good in the United States, civil rights laws are now being applied to produce unjust and even perverse ends. He considers many issues, including how sex discrimination laws have come to be used to police employee conversations in the workplace, how age discrimination laws fail to help those who need protection, and how federal laws pertaining to education for the developmentally disabled have become weapons used by rich parents against school boards. Ford's discussion of the 1954 Brown v. Board decision and its negative consequences is particularly sharp and engaging.
VERDICT This subject tends to produce polemical writing on both sides, but Ford is consistently measured and thought-provoking. Recommended to anyone interested in public affairs.
Reviewed by Michael O. Eshleman, Kings Mills, OH , Aug 01, 2011
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