Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Real Rape. Susan Estrich. Harvard University Press, $15.95. The strange man held an ice pick to Susan Estrich's throat. "Push over, shut up, or I'll kill you," he...
...What accounts for the increase...
...If increased interest group influence is a worry, look at the passage of the thick Naderite regulatory statutes around 1970, major deregulatory legislation in the late seventies, and the recent tax reform...
...But if we recognize that the real problem is occupational definition, there is at least a theoretical answer...
...In both countries there is a significant relationship between attentiveness to constituents and payoff in votes...
...She doesn't argue that this man actually exists but implies that changes in the law will contribute to his emergence...
...Anecdotes like this are amusing, but as Kenichi Ohmae warns his countrymen in this slender, impassioned book, Japan's inability to communicate with the rest of the world has pushed that country to the brink of economic disaster...
...This is all in the public interest, right...
...Estrich has drawn an audacious line in the dirt...
...When the 1957 civil rights bill came before his committee, Smith sided with his state's most ardent segregationists (who included James J. Kilpatrick, then editor of the Richmond News Leader...
...Trade figures don't account for the vast amount of American goods that are made and sold within Japan by U.S...
...In Britain, despite an inching up of MP independence on roll calls, party government seems alive and well under Thatcher...
...In the book's most controversial section, Ohmae argues that the much-ballyhooed U.S...
...in Washington, surpassed only by Dwight D. Eisenhower and House Speaker Sam Rayburn...
...The author of this informative biography, Bruce J. Dierenfield, writes that in the fifties Smith was widely regarded as the third most powerful figure...
...But they are also woefully inefficient...
...But at the end of the 19th century, the congressional leadership beefed up its powers to counter special interests and promote the will of the majority on, tax and tariff bills...
...Laws that open up some parts of the vast realms of "lawyering" and "doctoring" and other vocations to those with lesser, though adequate, skills are the only reasonable hope...
...Simple rape, Estrich argues, is still real rape and deserves punishment...
...What consequences should we expect from greater voting based on personal factors...
...Enemies of special-interest politics occasionally argue that Congress should reimpose discipline by restoring power to key senior committee chairmen...
...He suggests that since Japan has money but little land while Latin American countries have lots of land but little money, Japan should buy real estate in Brazil and Argentina to grow rice and reduce Third World debt...
...The American upswing is well known...
...Created in 1789, Rules was for a century an inconsequential committee charged with perpetuating old procedural rules...
...David Graulich The Rule of Experts: Occupational Licensing in America...
...But Estrich would convict a man for "negligently" ignoring a woman's refusal to have sex...
...For all the arcane statistics that surround the trade debate, it is only common sense that the U.S...
...companies that have diligently earned "insider" status...
...Instead, he's largely been forgotten, making it all too easy for pundits to get nostalgic about the days when Congress was ruled by a few powerful men...
...Negligence and reasonableness have little meaning apart from a particular social context...
...Despite the victim's protest that the relationship was over, the man undressed her, pushed her legs apart, and penetrated her...
...Negligent homicide or manslaughter can lead to a prison sentence...
...It is . . . the most common reaction of women to raper Estrich urges courts to shift their attention from how much force was used and whether it was resisted to the defendant's intent...
...Young estimates, citing an unpublished source, that nearly a thousand occupations are regulated...
...The trouble is that the remedies for this disturbing reality that Young suggests—public certification instead of licensing, private certification, and lawsuits—are unworkable, unlikely, or equally costly...
...This mistitled book is a useful, if at times baffling, monograph on the legal and economic status of occupational groups in America...
...Probably not a practical one...
...it then abdicated its imagined power to the president, who set up federal agencies to issue regulations that Smith judged illegitimate...
...It is hard to say which is more trying, our innocence or our arrogance," Ohmae writes...
...Her memory of being violated animates her teaching of sex discrimination at Harvard Law School (where I was her student) and, now, a provocative book...
...The Civil Rights Act that finally passed established an important precedent, but was so weak that it had to be followed up with another civil rights bill in 1964...
...On the British side, similar contacts are higher per capita, even though parliamentary staffs are virtually nonexistent...
...The party caucus is much stronger and the Dixiecrats have subsided...
...Estrich envisions a "reasonable man [of] the eighties" who has shed all vestiges of the species' sexist past...
...In fact, party-seat swings in the U.S...
...trade deficit with Japan is the stuff of myth because our way of keeping score is outmoded...
...Quick: who is chairman of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives...
...The court noted that the intercourse was against -the woman's will, but it found that the defendant had not used "force," as proven by the victim's failure to resist more strenuously...
...S. David Young...
...Bruce J. Dierenfield...
...I agree...
...Yet the Japanese, in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, retain the hermetic, insular attitude that resulted from the traumas of the forties...
...He believed that Congress rationalized its intervention in business activity through a misreading of the Constitution's commerce clause...
...But it was...
...The authors' theory as to why is certainly plausible...
...Reagan's pragmatic success with Congress in 1981-1982 will stand comparison with any president's in this century...
...And as legislators beef up their independent electoral bases, other consequences include weaker legislative.parties, less presidential clout with legislators, greater interest-group influence, greater emphasis on particularistic, districtcentered policy—in general, more policy stalemate...
...Estrich disagrees...
...national policy, and one presidential candidate has made it the centerpiece of his campaign, but Japan has done little to explain itself...
...Civil liability suits are the oldest and least interventionist response to quality breakdowns in professional markets," Young says...
...Goods and services flow around the globe with little regard for lines on a map...
...The Japanese hay's...
...A defendant could argue that where he comes from, everyone expects a man to keep asking, even when a woman says no...
...But most men, and many women, assume that a little psychological, and even physical, arm-twisting is a legitimate part of the mating game...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Real Rape...
...Her solution, however, contains a major flaw: the definition of "reasonable" behavior...
...Should genuine confusion send a man to prison...
...put their money on the surge in the number of contacts between incumbent legislators and their constituents...
...The House Democratic party seems to be at least as effective a policy instrument now as it was under, say, Roosevelt after 1937, Truman, or Kennedy...
...Up to a point, it could even keep a bill from coming to the floor...
...Thirteen years later, Estrich's fear and anger still linger...
...The legacy of these reforms—which Dierenfield, maddeningly, fails to discuss—is that Congress today is more decentralized, offering special interests a multitude of avenues to coopt legislation...
...But most of his book is deadly earnest, and it deserves as wide an audience in the U.S...
...Paul M. Barrett The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence...
...But he saves his harshest words for his compatriots: "We don't know how to behave in international circles...
...If the defendant acted "unreasonably," as defined by the court, he could not claim that he mistook "no" for a playful ''yes !, Criminal law punishes other negligent behavior...
...She obeyed...
...The committee was further weakened by a variety of procedural reforms in the mid-1970s, that weakened the seniority system...
...As for particularism, it is hard to beat 19th-century porkbarrel bills or the Smoot-Hawley tariff...
...Surprisingly, American courts rarely debate intent in rape cases, preferring to focus on overt acts...
...and Japan have far more shared interests than cause for confrontation...
...He kept asking his girlfriend, and she kept saying no, until finally she didn't say anything and they had sex...
...The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned the man's conviction...
...House elections have sagged lately...
...Timothy Noah...
...Ohmae clearly enjoys throwing out a few ideas for pure shock effect...
...After serving as a judge in Alexandria, he was elected to the House, where he became a leading opponent of FDR's New Deal...
...In fact, Ohmae argues, American companies are more successful at managing business on an international scale than Japanese firms, and he points to the success of companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Schick in Japan and Kodak and Ford in Europe...
...Isn't there a better solution to specialinterest gridlock than a return to the' system that gave us Howard Smith...
...as the white people of the South," said Smith...
...Originally published in Japan where it was a bestseller, this English translation gives Americans a rare opportunity to hear a prominent Japanese talk about his own country...
...Is there a solution...
...displayed that pattern more in recent times than before...
...Certification and other nonintrusive schemes have been shown to afford substantially the same protection to consumers as licensure, but without the cost or violation of basic freedoms!' Actually, they haven't, and Young cites no evidence that they would generally suffice...
...The right to practice a profession or provide a service is subject to more or less strict control through licensing requirements in every state...
...Smith's committee could determine when a bill would be sent to the floor, whether it would be accompanied by open debate, and whether it could be subjected to an unlimited number of amendments...
...University Press of Virginia, $25...
...Forced sex wounds its victim, even if she knows the man and unwittingly has put herself in a vulnerable position...
...That defeat demonstrated that Smith couldn't stop the enfranchisement of either blacks or women...
...David R. Mayhew Beyond National Borders: Reflections on Japan and the World...
...Haryard University Press, $25.00...
...His abhorrence of extending federal power did not keep Smith from sponsoring the activist—and anticommunist— Smith Act, which led to the prosecution of scores of radicals in the late forties...
...In both U.S...
...After he raped her, he drove away in her car, never to be caught...
...He proposes Anchorage, Alaska, as the ideal New Age corporate headquarters, since it is equidistant to Japan, Europe, and the U.S...
...If you've ever wondered why U.S.-Japan trade talks are so protracted, circuitous, and exasperating, consider this: In Japan, the expression "that person says things clearly" is a term of disparagement, implying that the person has gone too far...
...We often behave like Yakuza, or an underground society...
...Dow Jones-Irwin, $16.95...
...American-educated Ohmae, who runs the Tokyo office of McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, has plenty of acerbic criticism for politicians and businessmen on both sides of the Pacific...
...Estrich predicts that it would take only a few rape convictions under a negligence standard for men to get the message and begin respecting a woman's right to refuse sexual advances...
...But on policymaking matters, has the U.S...
...Half the time we don't even know we look foolish...
...The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence...
...Trained in the precepts of strict constructionism at the University of Virginia law school, Smith dedicated his public career to fighting the expansion of the federal government...
...She cried...
...For example, Adidas, the big West German firm, sells shoes in Japan that it makes in Taiwan...
...A woman ought not to have to risk injury by attacking her attacker, she adds...
...Smith's opportunity to wield clout against the expanding federal government came with his ascent to Rules chairman in 1954...
...Shield" laws prevent defense attorneys from introducing irrelevant evidence of a victim's past sexual conduct...
...That goes for the cheerleader who gets drunk at a fraternity party and the woman whose date simply won't take "no" for an answer after she invites him up for coffee...
...An ardent segregationist who used his committee to hold up or weaken civil rights legislation, Smith, at the very least, deserves a place next to Bull Connor and the "old" George Wallace in the demonology of the civil rights movement...
...Despite these adjustments, Estrich contends that courts continue to distrust women who claim they were raped under any but the most harrowing circumstances...
...No physical force...
...only themselves to blame, he says, for their image as predatory industrial animals who dump their products all over the world and leave behind unemployment lines and shuttered factories...
...Three times as many Americans reported such contacts in 1978 as in 1958...
...Cain, et al...
...House and British parliamentary elections, recent decades have seen an increase in what these authors call the personal vote: that portion of a candidate's electoral support arising from his or her personal qualities and performance record rather than from, say, voters' party identification...
...The demand that women demonstrate "utmost" (read: superhuman) resistance in the case of simple rape has become, in most instances, a requirement of "reasonable" resistance...
...That leaves lawsuits...
...A brief summary of recent literature, it is not about how experts rule, but about how various providers of services manage to extract monopoly profits from the American public...
...During their previous "consensual" relationship, he had beaten her, and she had passively engaged in intercourse...
...Protectionist sentiment has become a part of U.S...
...The impetus for licensing comes from producers, not consumers, and therefore often costs the public in the form of monopoly profits, low quality performance, and lack of care for the poor...
...Ohmae's thesis is that the world economy has become so interlinked that national borders are irrelevant...
...More important, these assumptions—filtered through the actions of trial judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officials—reinforce the popular view that most victims of simple rape "asked for it" Estrich offers many convincing examples, including this 1984 case from North Carolina: The victim's former boyfriend told her he had a "right" to have sex with her...
...During the Roosevelt administration, however, it became a means for a dissident coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats to gum up the system...
...Their analysis is as resourceful and sophisticated as we are likely to get...
...Tb stop the bill, he employed a variety of delaying tactics, including simply leaving town for ten days...
...It's not too harsh to call Estrich's solution a lawyer's answer, with all the slipperiness that implies...
...And since one major difficulty with professional discipline today is that professionals control the public agencies, what makes anyone think they would be less able to control private ones...
...Only Congress junkies can answer that question today (Claude Pepper), but a generation ago liberals cursed the Rules Committee and its reactionary chairman, Howard W. Smith of Virginia...
...In Britain the trend is also up, though personal voting there is meager by American standards...
...Jethro K Lieberman Keeper of the Rules: Howard W. Smith of Virginia...
...Most of what Americans learn about Japan comes from other Americans—the academics, journalists, and economists whose praise of "Japanese management" has helped create a superiority complex among the Japanese and resentment among their best customers: Americans...
...Cato Institute, $7.95...
...Courts and legislatures have eased rules that a victim must notify police immediately after being attacked and that her testimony must be corroborated...
...He added that he would "fix" her face to show he "was not playing...
...Push over, shut up, or I'll kill you," he said...
...Licensing laws sweep too broadly because they are not restricted to the particular acts (surgery, courtroom advocacy) that require the high degrees of skill for which licensing makes sense...
...But don't hold your breath...
...They have data on such matters as the size of House members' staffs and the percentages of constituents who say they have been contacted by incumbents or their offices...
...It is the reaction of people who have already been beaten, or never had the power to Tight in the first place...
...Details of the mutation remain a mystery...
...Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, and Morris Fiorina...
...So says this comparative study which is based on public opinion surveys and interviews with politicians...
...Few people question the wisdom of locking up men who leap from the bushes with ice picks...
...On that go-round, Smith attached an amendment outlawing sex discrimination— a proposition so seemingly ridiculous that Smith believed it would never be adopted by Congress...
...The court, says Estrich, scorned the woman's reaction as that of " 'sissies' in playground fights...
...Estrich acknowledges that recent legal changes have favored rape victims...
...A Japanese man proposing marriage to a Japanese woman may say something like, "You know, I don't dislike you," or, "Would you wash my briefs...
...More sluggish election turnover rates, the authors suggest...
...as it had in Japan...
...But Dierenfield's book is a reminder that congressional fiefdoms like Rules were themselves captives of special interests...
...In Real Rape, Estrich focuses not on violent attacks by strangers but on what she calls "simple rape": a man the victim knows—a date, ex-boyfriend, or estranged husband—bullies or tricks her into sex against her will, without brandishing weapons or breaking bones...
...Now that we are on stage with America and Europe, we better act like and talk like world citizens," he writes...
...Through the twenties, Rules served to strengthen the hand of whichever party controlled the House...
...Kenichi Ohmae...
...Wrong, says Young...
...A key reason was that Smith's obstructionism had provoked a congressional revolt in which Rules was packed with more liberal members...
...Victorian notions that respectable ladies would prefer to die than have their virtue sullied intertwine with pseudo-Freudian truisms about women's "unconscious desire" to be forcefully dominated...
...Would a typical jury call that unreasonable and therefore rape...
...Estrich skillfully dissects the case law to reveal how such dubious and contradictory assumptions go unchallenged in court...
...the only time we speak up is when our .Prime Minister apologizes to the United States...
...Most licenses are merely taxes, but those for dozens of occupations make serious demands: years of schooling, practical experience, and state-administered testing...
...We make 'ugly Americans' in Europe look polished...
Vol. 19 • July 1987 • No. 6
