Word: zinn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Confronted with this statement, Zinn devastatingly probes into some of the Court's recent decisions on draft protests and civil rights and finds Fortas' view of the Court as a balancer more than a little one-sided--in fact, hypocritical and patently untrue. The Court is not our stalwart friend and defender, as Fortas would have us believe. What the Court should be doing, Zinn then argues, is standing squarely on the side of the individual's rights, protecting him as best it can from the already stifling massiveness of the federal bureaucracy...
...this, and much more in the book, is fine. But what is troubling is a question that Zinn raises in the first chapter, but never answers. Left unanswered, it seems to haunt and make slightly unreal all of the emotional energy of Zinn's attack on the Court and American society. If we justify one act of civil disobedience, he asks...
...Zinn's line of reasoning, although rhetorically effective, is deceitful; for his method is to raise the question, one of the critical questions in the book, and follow it with the obviously true statement (which even Fortas would support) that there is a difference between the right of free speech and the right of free action. Zinn tries to pass off this truism as the answer to his question...
...book's thesis, insofar as it relates to this question, is not only that the individual citizen has a duty to act on moral grounds, even if his action is illegal, but that the Court must respect this duty and uphold it. The Court, Zinn says, must "stand for the law sometimes, for justice always." This is an exciting, romantic, beautiful idea: that we might order our society on morality and so live together in peace. But Zinn has not carried his theory to its logical end. If he wants the Court to recognize his right to oppose laws...
...Zinn's book, in this sense, is both beautfiul and terrifying. It is beautfiul, because it looks forward to the time when men will base their society upon morality, and justice will at last be united with the law. But it is terrifying as well, because the conditions of the 1960's are too angry, too hostile, too violent to let this work. Zinn is overreaching himself when he asks that the Court stand on his side when he breaks a law, no matter how immoral he may consider that law to be. As long as the law stands...