Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hoag, Alexis

Titel

The color of justice

Ist Teil von

• Michigan Law Review, 2022, Vol.120 (6), p.977-997

Ort / Verlag

Ann Arbor: Michigan Law Review Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Review: 'Free justice: A history of the public defender in twentieth century America'. By Sara Mayeux. University of North Carolina Press. 2020. Pp. xi, 271. $26.95 Writing about history requires making certain decisions: when to start the account, what to include and exclude, which documents and artifacts to rely upon, and what questions to address. One factor that can significantly shape those decisions is the social and political moment occurring at the time the author writes. It is with this in mind that I read Sara Mayeux's thoroughly researched and engaging account of the history of public defenders, 'Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America'. As the subtitle indicates, it is not the history, but rather a history of defense counsel for low-income defendants. Despite explicit language in the Sixth Amendment, adopted in 1791, guaranteeing "the accused... to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence," the substantive right to counsel is largely a twentieth- century invention. Mayeux, a scholar of twentieth-century United States legal history, is well-suited to examine this development.