This book presents not only an excellent and easily understandable legal history of race and freedom in America, but also an outstanding and concise summary of two different and oppositely opposing approaches to "the law" that are necessary to know about if one seeks to understand the history of slavery and racism in America. As Judge Napolitano informs us in his Introduction, “[t]his book tells the unhappy story of the rejection of the natural law and the embracing of positivism by the government in America at every level, based on the ugliest of collectivist positivist ideology: This ideology is that of hatred based on race.”

According to Napolitano, the one approach to the law, called natural law, teaches that our rights come from our humanity. The other approach, called positivism, teaches that the law is whatever the [human] lawgiver says it is, providing it is written down. Napolitano argues that “only by adherence to the natural law, by a rejection of positivism, and by upholding the Constitution can our freedoms remain secure.”

Napolitano argues for a fundamental and obvious “public rejection of positivism and embrace of the natural law by government…”. In terms of judicial interpretation of the laws passed by Congress, Napolitano advocates that “the courts should presume that what the government seeks to do is unconstitutional; the government should be compelled to justify constitutionality, under the natural law and morally, what it wants to do, whenever and wherever it wants to do it.”

Is there a written standard that we can examine to see the contours of the natural law? Are courts or legislative bodies capable of articulating the limits of what comprises the natural law? Napolitano does not go into detail on the extensive arguments as to whether judicial interpretation of laws should be based upon positivism or natural law. But he shows quite clearly the effects of those differing approaches to “the law” and the great harm done by “legal positivism” to generations of Americans—including at least a hundred years of “freemen” who were abused of their natural rights to life and liberty from the “end” of the American Civil War to at least the times beginning with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s. ( )

This book starts with a bang. He is challenging the attitudes and actions of the founding fathers in the introduction and doesn’t slow down after that. The book covers history, politics, judicial rulings, and long-term effects of each major step in our nation’s path. The author offers a framework for looking at slavery and then uses that framework to show the wrong choices and bad values that kept slavery, segregation, and the view that blacks were an inferior race alive for so long in the United States.

He challenges a lot of what I learned in school and backs it up pretty well. He argues a few things that I am still not convinced about but that doesn’t detract from the truth of the book. Even if I think the founding fathers had little choice if they were going to create a united country, his point is well made when it goes on for another 200 years and not only does the federal government allow the South to keep slavery/segregation, but then it starts to institutionalize it across the entire nation.

He teaches more than just racism and sees more concerns with our government’s behavior than just race-related. But the arena of race is an excellent example of the issues and a subject worthy of more attention and effort. ( )