Word: commoners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other sacrifices, common stockholders will have to wait a long time for dividend payments to resume. Top managers could well announce token salary cuts* and the sale of the company's three corporate jets. Bankers may have to accept deferred payment and lower interest. A committee representing Chrysler dealers has offered to lend the company $50 for every car they receive-a deal that ultimately could amount to an interest-free credit totaling $120 million. lacocca has already confirmed that certain suppliers have agreed to extend terms of payment. Chrysler has also asked some to cut prices...
...bench is obviously the worst possible place to encounter that kind of prejudice. Nothing is so damaging to the stature of the judiciary as the common perception that punishment depends less on what a criminal did than on the biases or whims of the judge...
...Plea bargaining. This is the most common solution to delay in the criminal courts. It is frequently denounced. In theory, criminal courts determine guilt or innocence only by the most thoroughgoing "due process." In reality, justice is usually done by way of a deal: a guilty plea in return for a lighter sentence or reduced charges. The accused's "day in court" lasts only a minute or two. In one such case in California, a defendant pronounced guilty of assault with a deadly weapon exclaimed in bewilderment: "What? You mean I've been tried...
Selection committees generally keep out the clearly unqualified. But they also will settle for what Senator Adlai Stevenson calls "the lowest common denominator." Says Stevenson: "I fear the Brandeises and Carswells alike will be screened out and a high level of mediocrity will be enshrined in the judiciary." Some desirable candidates have refused to be considered by selection committees; they did not want to go through the public-screening process and face possible rejection...
Didion's novels (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer) are less interesting than her collections of magazine pieces; paradoxically, the novels do not exert the dramatic force of her journalistic essays. Didion is best when the literary transaction is personal and direct, when she is a live character reporting her own wanderings through the splendidly strange California of the late '60s and the '70s, a California that elaborately belongs to her because it is in part her own invention, like the persona that describes...