Getting Justice

Justice in Everyday Life: The Way It Really Works, edited by Howard Zinn. New York: William Morrow & Co. 367 pp.

Years ago a character in the Pogo comic strip proclaimed that “all freedom is academic.” The same is true of justice, Howard Zinn would have us believe. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the “black-robed dignity of the Supreme Court,” this book asserts, are abstractions that rarely reach the ordinary scenes of confrontation between in...