THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief American law begins with the Constitution of 1787. Or so we like to think. James Stoner usefully reminds us, however, that American law also includes the common...
...For the definitions of both (and such other terms as "writ of habeas corpus," "natural born," and "good behavior"), you'll need to look in the common law...
...Terry Eastland Last year's sniper shootings around Washington, D.C., turned Charles Moose into something of a national figure...
...Want to know what the framers meant when they declared that Congress may not pass a "bill of attainder or ex post facto law...
...Conservatives tend to see constitutional interpretation as a matter of discerning the will of the people as declared in specific texts...
...The trial of the accused sniper is unfolding daily here in Washington, but Chief Moose's memoir, the book that ought to have helped us understand it, is not much help at all...
...James Stoner usefully reminds us, however, that American law also includes the common law—indeed that the Constitution itself can't be understood without consulting the common law, whose roots were in England but which Americans "claimed as their inheritance...
...Aside from the chief's own emotions, Three Weeks in October reveals nothing the media didn't report last year...
...The problems don't stop there...
...Article III assigns to a single set of courts "all cases in law and equity...
...Liberals, following Oliver Wendell Holmes, tend to see the common law as merely providing a process of rational change by which even the substance of the common law may be reversed...
...He also appeared to escape the usual problems of race politics: Before the sniper incident, his success came from a hugely successful effort to restore safety to Portland's most infamous housing project...
...Not, assuredly, the one of Holmes, Earl Warren, William Brennan, et al., but one that "invites us to engage in dialogue with the wisdom of ages other than our own and to see the verdicts of the moment in the perspective of a larger whole...
...It's odd then that his new book, Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper (cowritten with Charles Fleming), is so obsessed with race...
...But those who follow policing issues knew him before as a wonky, theory-driven policeman who remade the police in Portland, Oregon, and promised to do great things with the police in Montgomery County, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington...
...Like a great many African-American police chiefs of his generation, Moose grew up middle class, spent a lot of time in school (he has a doctorate), and worked his way up by strategically alternating administrative assignments with work on the streets...
...And in the Bill of Rights the rights largely concern legal process...
...Those looking for insight into the Washington-area sniper shootings and the task force Moose headed will have to wait for another book...
...Article VI secures supremacy through courts of law...
...Eli Lehrer...
...Three Weeks in October contains at least a half-dozen minor errors, from the order in which New York City police chiefs served, to the places Washington-area residents shop...
...Stoner observes the tendency among liberals and conservatives alike to dismiss theimportance of the common law for constitutional law...
...Although Common-Law Liberty takes sharp issue with the liberals' approach, Stoner winds up embracing a "living Constitution...
...This is a book that tells almost nothing about either the sniper investigation or the man who headed it...
...Meanwhile, important portions of the Constitution presuppose the common law...
...Instead, Moose shows himself bizarrely sensitive to all issues touching on race, ranging from a twenty-year-old altercation with a department-store clerk to the skin color of evidence technicians he worked with on the sniper case...
Vol. 9 • November 2003 • No. 10
