Book Review: Law and Social Action: Selected Essays

Abstract

Adam, the baby, and the man from Mars, as a distinguished philosopher once observed, are the three figures to whom our western society has most often turned in seeking a fresh and unprejudiced appraisal of its distinctive institutions. For the rest of us, most established practices are accepted uncritically because long familiarity and the normative force of the actual blind us to possible alternatives. We in America have been particularly fortunate in having received upon our shores a succession of itinerant observers whose freshness of approach to our scenes was strengthened by a vivid awareness of scenes in other plays. To the company of Las Casas, De Tocqueville, Lord Bryce, Andr6 Siegfried, and many others, not all of whom returned from what they found, there must now be added the gallant figure of Alexander Pekelis.