Book Alert / Architect of Justice

Architect of Justice -- Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism by Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, Cornell UP '07, $59.95, 384 pages, ISBN #0801439566. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

Among the many misfortunes Native Americans have suffered during the life of the American republic is the fact that Felix Cohen, Esq. died of a ruptured blood vessel at the age of 46. During 15 years in the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of the Interior, he drafted the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1934, the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946, and authored The Handbook of Federal Indian Law as head of the Indian Law Survey. Imagine the additional contributions he could have made had he been allotted his full three score and ten.

According to George Washington University law professor Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, what most informed this young Jewish lawyer's mission was his ongoing dialogue with the Jewish community on cultural pluralism and assimilation against the backdrop of the persecution of European Jews during the Second World War. Prof. Mitchell's work is the first biography of her subject.