Unfinished Business: A Civil Rights Strategy for America's Third Century.

In his latest book, Unfinished Business: A Civil Rights Strategy for America's Third Century Pacific Research Institute, 149 pp., $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper), Clint Bolick traces the philosophical ascendancy and decline of the American civil-rights movement with a specific goal in mind. Mr. Bolick believes the path to equal opportunity has become a quaginire, with group civil rights overwhelming individual rights. His goal is to examine "the natural-law principles of civil rights accompanied by a practical framework from which to apply those principles to contemporary civil-rights issues," emphasizing what Martin Luther King said 25 years ago: "that there are certain rights neither conferred nor derived from the state."

Mr. Bolick, director of the Landmark Legal Foundation Center for Civil Rights, believes that individual empowerment provides the means for social and economic ascent for minorities [see "Betting on Bush," NR, Aug. 61. That social engineering, group consciousness, and collective guilt have failed to guarantee equal opportunity in a "color blind" America is overwhelmingly evident, he contends. And to combat the growing disparity that he sees as resulting from this failure, he proposes a radical change in approach-a change that win depend on chipping away at the basis of current civil-rights theory, as enshrined in Supreme Court decisions.

Mr. Bolick describes in detail how two landmark decisions of the High Court-the Slaughter House cases (1873) and Plessy v. Ferguson 1896)defined and redefined the notions of "civil" and natural" rights. He reveals the pililosophical contradictions in these decisions by quoting the words of the Framers themselves. And he traces how they have influenced subsequent decisions, to the detriment of individual rights.

For Mr. Bolick the Slaughter House cases, allowing for the regulation of the livery industry in Louisiana, represent the point at which the -privileges and immunities" granted to citizens were virtually read out of the Constitution." He provides damning evidence that the majority opinion in the case, as set forth by Justice Samuel F. Miller, was the antithesis of the intentions of the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified just five years before. In the short term, Slaughter House established the precedent for the Jim Crow laws and other restrictive legislation, including the 'separate but equal" decision in Plessy. Over time it has come to represent the nullification of fundamental individual rights."

It is commonly believed that Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education-the 1954 case in which Thur-good Marshall, council for the plaintiff, argued that, so far as our argument on the constitutional debate is concerned ... the state is deprived of any power to make any racial classification in any governmental field.' But as Mr. Bolick points out, Brown failed to eliminate racial distinctions from constitutional debate; it merely found that 'separate" was inherently unequal. Thus racial distinctions remain a tool of the Court, now providing a reasonable" means to a desired goal. This tool enables the Court to attempt to engineer its own vision of a perfect society. Further, as a means toward reparation for the wrongs endured under 'separate but equal," the Court has proclaimed the pre-eminence of group rights over individual rights.

Unfinished Business outlines the agenda for a civil-rights battle Mr. Bolick intends to wage through the judiciary, a point about which he is very clear: this is not armchair polemics, but a plan of action. It is a book not easily absorbed, but in its completeness lies its success: Mr. Bolick relates passages on constitutional theory to current cases where individual rights are clearly being infringed, giving an idea of how these lofty ambitions might be realized.

Reversing the failed social experiments of an oligarchical Court that has dictated disastrously since its inception certainly runs against the tide, but the necessity is only highlighted by the later words of Justice Thurgood Marshall, just a few years after his successful Brown arguments: we must remember ... that the principle that the Constitution is color blind' appeared only in the opinion of the lone dissenter."