cover image Silence and Freedom

Silence and Freedom

Louis Michael Seidman, . . Stanford Univ., $27.95 (246pp) ISBN 978-0-8047-5620-4

Beyond cop-show arrests, the “right to remain silent” has profound and wide-ranging implications, argues this scattershot legal/philosophical treatise. Georgetown law professor Seidman (Our Unsettled Constitution ) examines the concept of a right to silence in several contexts, including police interrogations, Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, public apologies, the Pledge of Allegiance and, less convincingly, the right to die. He approaches these issues from many directions, including Supreme Court jurisprudence and the writings of Aquinas and Camus. Seidman contrasts silence, which for liberals is the bulwark of a mental private sphere free from government intrusion, with a “republican” duty to speak. But the question of whether one can really choose to remain silent, he says, is complicated by “pervasive determinism,” which considers that choices are compelled by social forces and power relationships, and “radical libertarianism,” which insists that choice is necessary in a meaningless universe. Seidman is a gadfly—he favors scrapping Miranda rules in favor of public interrogation in the presence of counsel, backed by contempt charges against suspects who won't talk—and delights in tripping up conventional wisdom in logical paradoxes; the book sometimes feels like a debate between the dormitory existentialist and the sophomore who proves free will doesn't exist. It's often stimulating, but too abstruse for the average reader. (Aug. 27)