Word: berger
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Four years ago, a retired lawyer named Raoul Berger was catapulted from obscurity to national prominence by providing an important part of the constitutional interpretations leading to Richard Nixon's downfall. His book Impeachment, begun in 1969 with only the problem of bad federal judges in mind, happened to roll off the presses during the Ervin committee hearings in 1973; it forcefully argued that proof of a criminal violation was not required to remove a federal official. A year later the Harvard-based Berger published Executive Privilege, which demolished the President's cited historical precedents for withholding evidence...
...Berger is not, however, a liberal Ivy League don. In fact, he is a maverick outsider who emigrated from the Ukraine as a child and worked his way through school, a gadfly who enjoys riling the old-boy professors at Harvard. Berger's taste for legal jousting is all too plain in his latest book, Government by Judiciary (Harvard University Press; $15), an elaborate study of the 1866 drafting of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and its subsequent application. Berger's conclusion: virtually every major judicial advance of the past quarter-century, from desegregation to reapportionment...
...Berger's rigid interpretation, the post-Civil War Congress was dominated by "Negrophobia"; it was willing to extend to blacks rudimentary civil rights, such as equal punishment for crimes and the right to own property, but did not intend the 14th Amendment to grant them equal access to voting booths, schools, juries or jobs. Thus in Berger's accounting, when Congress enacted the provision including blacks as full citizens in apportioning House seats, it did not mean to compel the former Confederacy actually to give blacks the vote. Quite the opposite, he says: the provision meant to reduce...
This is heresy to Berger. "I've been a lifelong liberal. But protection from dictatorship lies in laws, and laws should be interpreted in light of what the men who wrote them meant to signify," he says...
...weight of legal scholarship opposes that inflexible view. Harvard's Derrick A. Bell Jr. scoffs that Berger "is always very certain about matters that others have been in the dark on for years...