Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Hoover Inst Press Post Copub
Pages: 200
Trim: 6½ x 9⅜
978-0-7425-6286-8 • Hardback • July 2009 • $62.00 • (£48.00)
978-1-4422-0027-2 • eBook • July 2009 • $58.50 • (£45.00)
Amy L. Wax is Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she teaches courses on procedure, remedies, and social welfare. From 1988 to 1994, she was an Assistant Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice and has argued fifteen cases before the United States Supreme Court. She lives with her husband and three children in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Chapter 1. The Remedial Ideal and the Demand for Racial Justice
Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Group Disadvantage and the Case of Race
Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Racial Disparities and Human Capital Deficits
Chapter 5 Chapter 4. The Psychology of Victimization
Chapter 6 Is Self-Help Possible?
Chapter 7 Reparations, Affirmative Action, and the Relationship of Race and Class
Chapter 8 Notes
Chapter 9 Index
(Amy Wax) reviews a great deal of social science data showing the pallid or perverse effects of policies aimed at teenage pregnancy, education, job training, prison rehabilitation, and many more.
— American Lawyer, October 1, 2009
Amy Wax's Race, Wrongs, and Remedies is a provocative discussion of policies to close the race gap in America. Using the insightful legal distinction between liability and remedy, she shows that self-help can be a powerful force for remediating social wrongs. This book will help change the dialogue of race in America from a discussion about passive victims, guilt, and reparations to a more active embrace of individual responsibility and human agency. Its message is bold and clear.
— James J. Heckman, professor of economics, The University of Chicago
Professor Wax's book is the quintessence of cool, clean, and unassailable good sense. One is to be pardoned for wondering whether the most important book on race of the year could be one by a white female law professor. Well, one need wonder no more—it is.
— The New Republic
Amy L. Wax combines conceptual insights from the law of torts and remedies with a thorough reading of the scholarship on racial disparities to bring much-needed clarity to the discussion of the black man's burden.
— Claremont Review of Books
Every officer in the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs should read this book. Indeed, every federal or state public servant delivering services to, and/or making policy for Aborigines should think deeply about the applicability to Aborigines of Amy Wax's insights into the plight of black Americans.
— Public Administration