A review that begs to be read

     Since retiring from the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens- now 92- has busied himself with speeches, hearing appeals as a supply judge, and- most interestingly- writing for The New York Review of Books.
     Four times Stevens has published a long, thoughtful review on the kinds of topics he couldn't talk about while on the bench: criminal law in the 1950s, exemplified by a Delaware rape case; the broken state of the current US criminal law system; the death penalty;
    His latest one, on a book about hate speech, begins this way:

          In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron discusses a loosely defined category of expression that he addressed in a review of Anthony Lewis’s book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate in The New York Review in 2008, and in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard University in 2009. Although his references to Justice Holmes in this book are not exactly flattering—Waldron writes that “at one time or another [Holmes] took both sides on most free speech issues,” and that Holmes’s judgment “that criticizing the military was comparable to shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” is “preposterous”—in her introduction of Waldron at the Holmes Lectures, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow praised Waldron as “one of the two or three greatest legal philosophers of our time.” That high praise also applies to one of Waldron’s former teachers, Ronald Dworkin, who has criticized Waldron’s writing about hate speech.

          While references to learned debates among such scholars suggest that the average reader might have difficulty understanding the arguments in Waldron’s book, such is not the case. The book is eminently readable and peppered with anecdotes and examples. For one, the instance of hateful speech that some readers may interpret as the proximate cause of Waldron’s decision to write the book was this e-mail addressed to him by a reader: “YOU ARE A TOTALITARIAN ASSHOLE.”