JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 178.250.250.21 on Wed, 30 Dec 2015 18:52:44 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BOOK REVIEWS CONFRONTING INJUSTICE. By Edmond N. Cahn.' Boston: Little, Brown & Co. I966. Pp. XXiV, 428. $8.95.Edmond Cahn was one of this country's most original legal thinkers. He authored three books, The Sense of Injustice, The Moral Decision, and The Predicament of Democratic Man, penetrating in their insights, challenging in their ideas, and matchless in their clarity and prose. All were widely acclaimed; the late Judge Jerome Frank characterized the first as "the most impelling discussion since Aristotle of the subject of justice," 2 and the second was hailed by Dr. Paul S. Douglass, a former President of American University, as deserving "a place on the shelf alongside Plato's Republic." 3 Prior to his death in I964 -at the age of 58 and at the height of his powers -Cahn was busy with yet another book, which he planned to call "The Meaning of Justice." But, even with that work unfinished, he had already given new accents and dimensions to the concept of "justice."In addition to his books, Professor Cahn left a legacy of numerous lectures, addresses and published articles which had appeared not only in legal periodicals but in such disparate publications as Harper's, Theology Today, the Nation, and the New York Times. The present volume, Confronting Injustice, is a collection of these writings, lovingly edited by his widow, Lenore Cahn, with an incisive introduction and helpful commentary by his close friend and colleague at New York University Law School, Professor Norman Redlich. Eloquent, perceptive, provocative, these papers truly reflect both the thinking and charm of the man whom Supreme Court Justice Black eulogizes in the Foreword as a "fascinating conversationalist" and a "great legal philosopher." Confronting Injustice has been divided, according to subject matter, into ten sections which cover an exceedingly wide variety of subjects, ranging from the Bill of Rights to the jurisprudence of "Fact-Skepticism." There is, however, a recurring theme reflecting the ideal which dominated Cahn's very being -his passion for justice. To him, justice was not a mere abstract concept but a vital force. "A concern with justice and compassion," he asserted, "is what converts mere legalism into living law" (p. 239).In his quest for justice, Cahn coined a distinctive terminology to picture the need for suitable accommodation in a representative democracy between the interests of the constituent citizen, on the one hand, and the competing interests of the general body politic, on the other. The individual was, in Cahn's view, "a consumer of the law" (p. 6), the...
