Mandatory Reading

About a week or so ago I finished reading a book entitled The Dirty Dozen by Robert A. Levy and William Mellor. The byline: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom.

I’m a bit of a libertarian and a constructionist so this book was right up my alley. I loved it. One of the things I’ve never quite understood is how our government and our society has ended up where it is if the Constitution of the United States was written specifically to prohibit some of the things our government is doing.

The book examines twelve critical U.S. Supreme Court cases and explains how the decisions that came down from these cases had far reaching and, in my opinion, detrimental impact to the Constitution. More importantly, though, it explains how we have arrived where we are in terms of our government and society.

The authors are clearly libertarians and this is fairly evident as your read the book. Let that be a warning to you if you are a liberal pussy or right-wing wacko – you won’t like this book. There is an afterward in which they break down the main ideologies of how to read and interpret the U.S. Constitution. I think that this should have been just after the forward, prior to getting into reading the cases.

This book should practically be mandatory reading in any late high-school or college government course. That’s not to say I agreed with everything that the authors wrote. Again, it was an enlightening reading even if at times I was too exhausted to spend the mental energy to read it. The authors did a good job of breaking down things that we non-lawyers can understand, but it still gets a bit tedious in spots.

Supposedly there is another book out there called The_something_ Thirteen and is supposed to be a rebuttal to this book. I’d like to read it, too.