In the letters section of the NYT Book Review Sunday, Larry Kramer responded to Tribe's review of Karmer's book. Kramer says, among other things:
Rather than reviewing my book, Tribe has written a common lawyer's brief, employing the sorts of tricks lawyers use to diminish a position they must attack: overreading, underreading or simply misreading complex arguments; taking snippets of quotations out of context; attributing contrived motives to an author or far-fetched consequences to a position; and so forth. No one doubts that Tribe is a good lawyer, and this stuff may be permissible in advocacy. It is, however, and for good reason, generally treated as inappropriate in serious debate.
(Emphasis added.) I find it interesting that the Dean of Stanford law school has such a low opinion of lawyers, and, in particular, litigators. If Dean Kramer was not advocating, what was the point of his book? I also wonder what "serious debate" refers to -- not academic reviews and interchanges, which reguarly include all of the listed tricks. Come to think of it, so does the letter. Well, that's what you get in reading the daily press.
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