In the last year two excellent books, Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance In an Age of Diversity by Mariana Valverde and Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate by Victoria Saker Woeste Speech, address how social anxieties about “diversity” emerge in the development and application of the law. Although the two books focus on different times and countries, they similarly illustrate the tensions in legal contexts that can arise from the growth of diversity. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Woeste's book focuses on events surrounding the litigation of the 1925 federal trial of Sapiro v. Ford in the Eastern District of Michigan. In the case, a prominent Jewish lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, sued the automaker Henry Ford for defamation. In the 1920s, Ford owned the Dearborn Independent newspaper, which at his behest “had published a series of articles accusing Sapiro of leading a Jewish conspiracy to subvert American agriculture” (Woeste 1). Starting in 1920, the Independent launched “International Jew,” a series of anti-Semitic articles that spoke of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. The “International Jew” was an adaptation of a Russian work called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which detailed an alleged Jewish plot to take over the world. The trial ended in a mistrial and a settlement was reached before a new trial could begin. Woeste's book is divided into two parts. The first details the main players in the lawsuit and the circumstances that led to it. The second concerns the process and its consequences. Plaintiff Sapiro was a Jewish-American lawyer nationally famous for organizing farmer cooperatives. Ford believed that Sapiro's work should be stopped. “20th century farms should work. . . as bastions of individual self-sufficiency, not as . . . interconnected production units,” he believed (Woeste 142). This seems ironic considering Ford's role in revolutionizing mass production. In 1924, the Dearborn Independent, under Ford's editorship, ran a series of articles specifically attacking Jews and Sapiro. The articles denounced the involvement of Sapiro and other Jews in agriculture and the subversion of the cooperative movement by international Jewish financiers. They described a conspiracy in which American farmers were organized into national associations controlled by Jews, including Sapiro. The articles alleged that cooperative associations paid Sapiro for services they did not need, that he enriched himself at farmers' expense, and that his cooperatives failed to get a fair price for their crops. When readers inquired about the veracity of the articles and whether they were supported by documentation, the document could not produce evidence to corroborate them. Sapiro demanded a retraction from Ford and the Independent. His request did not mention defamation of the group and was designed solely to protect his personal reputation. It notified Ford that the legal requirements for libel had been met: Sapiro's reputation had been damaged by the Independent's articles, which contained falsehoods. When the Independent refused to publish a retraction, Sapiro sued. According to the law of the time, he had strong arguments. One defense to defaming public figures was publishing the truth and Sapiro was able to contradict many of the Independent's claims. Furthermore, he could have “demonstrated the wickedness required fordamages” underscoring the Independent's refusal to correct factual errors even after others had identified them (Woeste 174). Sapiro's lawsuit came at a time when discrimination against Jews was not uncommon. While “anti-Semitism in America was muted compared to the more violent expressions” found in Europe at the time, many Jews in America still suffered from social discrimination (Woeste 3). However, the federal judge in charge of the case refused to allow discussions on collective defamation, limiting the case to the issue of individual defamation. Collective defamation laws of the time typically required that the accused publication tend to cause a "breach of the peace". ] that the publication was false and malicious” (Woeste 83). When the Sapiro case ended in a mistrial due to jurors' comments expressing bias against Ford, the case was settled out of court with a retraction of the Dearborn Independent's claims and a payment that would cover Sapiro's court costs. Separately from the settlement agreement, Ford signed a formal letter of apology which was released to the press. The letter admitted that the Independent's articles were fiction. It was also stated that Ford took responsibility for publishing the articles without admitting knowledge of their contents. The agreement allowed Ford to claim ignorance of what was in the newspaper articles in exchange for his “promise to limit the circulation of “The International Jew” in the United States and Europe” (Woeste 271). This promise was seen as a victory for Sapiro and the Jewish community because it stripped “The International Jew,” and, by extension, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of the power and prestige of Ford's name. But Woeste concludes that Sapiro v. Ford did not represent a victory in stemming the spread of anti-Semitism and did not realize its potential in curbing hate speech. At the time of the litigation, there was much uncertainty about the law involving free speech rights. The resolution of the case did nothing to clarify this law because the apology that ended the case could not be enforced by law and subsequent legal developments have made it difficult to curb hate speech.2 Despite a series of humiliating fabrications the Jewish population Because of Henry Ford's anxiety about the presence of Jews in the United States, US law in 1925 was unable to protect the true targets of his smear campaign: the Jewish people. Woeste's main concern is that Ford's apology allowed him to avoid more lasting judgment. Today, dozens of editions of “The International Jew” with its hateful message can be purchased from bookstores on the Internet. A logical extrapolation from the book is that the Sapiro case also illustrates the inadequate capacity of US law to accommodate respect for diversity in the face of general First Amendment concerns. Valverde's Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity takes us to Canada today, where many of the same tensions arise about where and how to express concerns about changes in diversity. While Canadian law stands in stark contrast to U.S. law because it treats restrictions on hate speech as constitutionally valid limits on freedom of expression, Valverde's empirical examination of Toronto's municipal governance suggests that Canada is not free of conflict about the reality of diversity, this despite the fact that Toronto's motto is “Diversity is our strength”. Indeed, Valverde notes that Toronto is becoming increasingly unequal and poverty-strickenincreasingly racialized, despite the declarations of many of its residents about the value they place on diversity (Valverde 3). Valverde's book makes a systematic study of Toronto's various seats of municipal government, including zoning appeals. licensing boards and tribunals, 2003 to 2010. The book examines how sublegal regulations, inspections, and enforcement practices shape everyday urban life in ways that impact diversity. For example, Valverde provides examples of how private citizens can use the law as a tool against cultural trends they find threatening, such as when an English-speaking couple living next door to a Chinese couple was bothered by the smell of Chinese cooking. The English-speaking couple asked the municipality for help, which sent an inspector to mediate. The Chinese couple installed a new hood to contain the fumes but their neighbors were not satisfied. They filed a private nuisance lawsuit, claiming the odors were unpleasant and potentially carcinogenic. Furthermore, their lawyer wrote a letter to the Chinese couple telling them that their inability to speak English was not a defense and that they should not seek the court's sympathy. The dispute came to the attention of the Chinese Canadian National Council, a group that promotes the rights of Chinese immigrants. The board said the lawsuit was racially motivated. Although the case was eventually settled out of court, the English-speaking couple sued the Chinese Canadian National Council for defamation and defamation for making claims that they were racist. Nor are municipal public nuisance inspections free from distorted dynamics. In responding to noise complaints, nepotism and discrimination play a role in the allocation of municipal resources, the author says. The disparity in a resident's resources can also determine the type of inspections and services the city provides, he says. Another example in Valverde's book cites a noise complaint from a bar called Maxwell's, which played loud music during hours when it was illegal to do so. The law prohibited it between certain hours followed by the clause “to disturb the peace”. The bar's lawyer argued that the standard was arbitrary and not objective. The court ultimately disagreed, holding: “An inner-city community versus a suburban community, or again, a community of predominantly retired residents versus a community of predominantly college students can tolerate a very different standard of what which is reasonable for the night." noises of time” (Valverde 65–66).3 For Valverde, this type of participation perpetuates institutional discrimination. “Those who cannot afford to buy a house or pay the high rents demanded by owners of luxury apartments are imagined by law as not deserving of noise protection or as culturally predisposed to care less about noise” (Valverde 66). The judge in the case did not seek evidence from local residents, trusting that officers would decide whether the complaints were credible or frivolous. While municipal officials don't set out every morning solely to protect the rights of wealthy homeowners, some cultural assumptions persist. Valverde provides many other examples from taxi licensing, permit issuance, adult entertainment licensing, law enforcement, zoning hearings, and food vendor licensing to demonstrate how in “cities cosmopolitans who have experienced major demographic changes as a result of changing global migration patterns, some issues that are the subject of negotiations between.