Book Reviews
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00132 |
HERETICS IN THE TEMPLE: AMERICANS WHO REJECT THE
NATION’S LEGAL FAITH
by DAVID RAY PAPKE
(New York: New York University Press, 1998, 201 pp., $35.00);
VOICE, TRUST, AND MEMORY: MARGINALIZED GROUPS AND
THE FAILINGS OF LIBERAL REPRESENTATION by MELISSA S.
WILLIAMS
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998, 330 pp., £24.95)
In New York City, in the early Spring of 1999, political upheaval sur-
rounding police brutality commands the headlines. People are outraged at
police violence directed at minorities. The struggle puts in perspective the
many activities that have an ongoing place at the centre of our life: family
and social networks, sporting and cultural events, teaching and research. It
also challenges traditional assumptions about the positive state and the
authority of law.
One morning the papers contain a picture of the city’s Police
Commissioner, at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles the night
before. It is fuzzy because it is taken from a video tape. The Daily News
features the picture on its front page. The New York Times buries it with-
in. The Commissioner is caught hobnobbing with celebrities on a distant
coast while battles rage in the Big Apple over the killing by police of
Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man, in a barrage of forty-one bullets
a few weeks prior.
In the conventional picture of legal power, the Commissioner sits at the
centre with the Mayor, while his critics, particularly the critics of police
brutality, operate from the margins. The Commissioner is the ‘top cop’, as
the headlines declare, the chief of law enforcement. The critics identify with
those killed by cops, the ‘consumers’ of law enforcement. But, this spring
morning when the papers catch the Commissioner at play on the opposite
coast, the margins intrude and with a foundation laid in weeks of protest,
the critique of police practices is being felt and one is led to think that the
centre may not hold. The revealing picture puts authorities on the defen-
sive. In the wake of this embarrassment, the margins acquire some of the
authority of the state, and the Commissioner returns quickly to New York
in a desperate effort to maintain control.
In this scenario, with the Commissioner and the Mayor embattled by
forces from the community, we need to rethink the simple picture of power
and authority in America as having an inside and an outside. We might, on
a day like this, re-examine our notions that authority has a centre and
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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