Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that a happy glow at dinner might be the best way to start off a weekend. Gov. Edward J. King's election seemed to snarl that pattern, since King railroaded through the legislature the 20-year-old drinking age. However, most Harvard students found last spring that King's legal grip did not extend far into Harvard Houses. The ban on House happy hours decided by the House masters in April lasted for about a week--students and masters viewed each other with benign neglect...
...eventually took a more pragmatic view. If a local liquor merchant, upset with the Houses' flippant dismissal of the law, complained to authorities, or if a sodden teenager raising trouble mentioned he'd gotten the booze at Harvard, it would be the masters' heads rolling. Masters are not the legal guardians of college students, but the House system sets them up in loco parentis. The House masters could therefore not afford to let students run their own happy hours, no matter how discriminate in serving the students promised to be. The potential for a lawsuit is a powerful goad...
...Houses have reached an impasse. It may not be healthy--it's certainly not legal--to hold happy hours, but they are the one type of activity that will draw most House residents. To maintain House social life, students are searching for every loophole they can find to keep alcohol, and the masters, through creative enforcement of the ban on liquor, are coming as close to condoning the students as they can without defying the law. Ed King may be able to railroad the legislature; he has a long way to go before he can conquer Harvard...
Social analysis argues forcibly for the need for safe, legal and affordable abortions. Approximately 1 million women had abortions annually until the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and abortion had become the leading cause of maternal death and mutilation (40 deaths/100,000 abortions compared to 40 deaths/100,000 live births according to National Abortion Rights Action league.) An estimated 9000 rape victims become pregnant each year (FBI 1973); 100,000 cases of incest occur yearly (National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect, 1978). Two-thirds of teenage pregnancies are not planned, because many do not have adequate access to contraceptives (NARAL...
Justice appears to have been intended as a devastating satire of the U.S. legal system-a fine idea in principle. But by inflating their target to ridiculous proportions and then firing at it with cannons, the screenwriters have lost their subject completely. The true and complex inequities of American jurisprudence remain untouched; the white-collar scandals that have actually afflicted contemporary Baltimore are never even mentioned. This film would have us believe that the courts would be first-rate if only a few bad guys (played by John Forsythe and Jack Warden) were removed from the bench. Such simple-minded...