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"Sweeping and important.... Provides a fascinating vision of justice and history." --The Washington Post Book World From the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission comes a landmark study of the ways in which prejudice has shaped American justice from the Civil War era to the present. With an ear tuned to the social subtext of every judicial decision, Mary Frances Berry examines a century's worth of appellate cases,nbsp;nbsp;ranging from a nineteenth-century Alabama case in which a white woman was denied her divorce petition because an affair between a white man (her husband) and a black woman (his lover) was "of no consequence," to such recent, high-profile cases as the William Kennedy Smith and O.J. Simpson trials. By turns shocking, moving, ironic, and tragic, each tale ends in the laying down of law. And because the law perpetuates myths of race, gender, and class, they are stories that affect the lives of us all.… (more)
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Berry reviews trends in criminal and appellate court decisions -- when is the law interpreted narrowly? When is it interpreted broadly? Which decisions are overturned "on procedural grounds", and which decisions are allowed to stand despite procedural errors? Which cases are or are not brought to the court system? How do these outcomes change with the race or class of the victims and defendants? Berry is forthright and thorough, reviewing the legal history of extramarital sex, homosexual sex, prostitution, child support, abortion, infanticide, incest and rape. (The only missed subjects I would have liked to have seen her cover were birth control and forced sterilization.)
Berry's voice is dispassionate, simply recounting the trends, but there were some chapters that I could barely read -- I can not cope with the rape of a six year old being a property crime against the child's father. (With the corollary that when the father is the rapist, there is no crime.) Other stories got to me as well, such as lower-class immigrant men lynching black men in order to "whiten" themselves and "their" women, or unmarried women being by definition unfit mothers, or worse, being considered medically insane if they tried to keep their infants. Also, not so keen on rape being the "violation of virtue", and thus, again by definition, it being impossible to rape poor women or African-American women. But I shall stop: because if I were to continue to list the outrageous elements of American social history, I'd be typing for a very long time.
However, even though The Pig-Farmer's Daughter is not a particularly pleasant read, it is definitely worthwhile. Like any good work of history, not only did it teach me a number of new things, but it also did quite a bit to explain many of the current ingrained inequities of the American justice system, as well as to suggest what rectifying them might require.