Book Review: RICHARD COLLIER and SALLY SHELDON (eds) Fathers Rights' Activism and Law Reform in Comparative Perspective, Oxford: Hart, 2006, 173pp., ISBN 1841136298/ 9781841136295, £14.95 (pbk)
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639090180021006 |
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
contribute from the perspective of, what Hamilton in The Federalist Papers famously
termed, the ‘least dangerous’ branch of government. Among those commenting from
the bench, Harold See – Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama – explores mech-
anisms of appointment from the perspective of the judiciary as a constitutional check
on the executive and legislature. See asks – given that ‘the judiciary can command and
the legislative and executive be expected to comply only so long as the public demands
such compliance, and that will happen only if the people hold the voice of the judi-
ciary to be legitimate’ (p. 89) – whether appointment by elected officials or election
holds the key to the legitimacy of the judicial branch as a check and balance. Similar
issues are considered by John M. Walker Jr in the context of the recent confirmation
of John Roberts, as Chief Justice, and Samuel Alito, as Justice, of the US Supreme
Court. The confirmation process, and its reporting in the media, Walker finds, remain
crucial to shaping a realistic popular view of how ‘judges perform . . . their proper
role within the judiciary’s institutional limitations’ (p. 123). The difficulty of trans-
lating this aspiration into practice within the confines of a soundbite-driven news
media – ‘when journalists boil all substance out of the law before serving it to the
public’ (p. 154) – is, however, brought home in the following chapter, by Mark Obbie,
of the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. It is this,
and the following chapters – all ‘views from the media’ – which have most in common
with the concerns outlined in Lieve Gies’ book. Dahlia Lithwick explores the ability
of the internet to disseminate information and misinformation at a speed to which the
law is generally unaccustomed; while Tom Goldstein’s chapter reminds that the objec-
tives of journalist and judge are not co-existent and any attempt to examine relations
between the two should appreciate as much – a desire to uphold judicial independ-
ence and further the rule of law should not get in the way of a good story.
Judicial independence provides the backbone which holds this set of essays together,
and the threads of democratic accountability, free speech, constitutional propriety and
popular participation run clearly through the contributions. While the ‘views from
the media’ depart from the constitutional dimensions of independence examined in
the ‘views from the bench’, focusing instead on the role of the press, this is no
weakness, given the centrality of journalistic freedom to the appointments processes
– many of which are conducted ‘more like political campaigns’ (p. 200) – and to the
Constitution itself. With the increased emphasis on perceptions of judicial partiality
which has in part occurred as a result of the influence of Article 6 ECHR in the United
Kingdom, and considering recent and ongoing debates on the processes of judicial
appointments, this collection offers a number of enlightening perspectives on the
relationships between courts and the media which demonstrate just how similar, and
yet starkly different, our two jurisdictions are.
ROGER MASTERMAN
Durham Law School, UK
RICHARD COLLIER and SALLY SHELDON (eds) Fathers Rights’ Activism and Law
Reform in Comparative Perspective, Oxford: Hart, 2006, 173pp., ISBN 1841136298/
9781841136295, £14.95 (pbk).
This volume of essays emerged from a series of papers delivered in 2005 at one of the
workshops funded by the ESRC in a Gender, Sexuality and Law project undertaken
by Keele, Kent, and Westminster Universities. Fathers’ rights activism has been around
a long time, as several of the contributors to this volume note, emerging periodically
with particular ferocity to challenge trends that threaten paternal power. The period
with which this edited collection is concerned is from the mid-1990s onwards when
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