The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars. By Joshua C. Wilson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 260 pp. $85.00 cloth. $24.95 paper.

• Published date: 01 September 2014
• Date: 01 September 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12096

arbitrariness of the forest bureaucracy against tribals into the ambit

of constitutional remedies. Secondly, Kannabiran advances the

interpretive strategy of “analogous grounds” of discrimination to

give groups, such as the disabled, people with HIV, and sexual

minorities that are not mentioned in the constitutional texts, the

benefit of constitutional protections (p. 28).

Kannabiran makes a case for insurgent constitutionalism, which

is not confined to courts or judicial interpretations. To do this, she

draws upon the visions that guide the various movements for social

transformation in India, be it arguments made by LGBT groups or

strategies adopted by dalit political parties. However, rather than

mapping a terrain of popular constitutionalism, the book recog-

nizes that the tools of insurgent constitutionalism are crafted by the

state in response to subaltern resistance (p. 465) and provides a

corpus of materials and arguments to judges and lawyers who

provide constitutional justice. Kannabiran’s magisterial account is

an essential reading for those interested in questions of justice in

unequal societies and makes a substantive addition to the scholar-

ship on comparative constitutional law.

References

Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India All India Reporter 1978 Supreme Court 597.

Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan All India Reporter 1997 Supreme Court 3011.

∗∗∗

The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America’s Culture

Wars. By Joshua C. Wilson. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2013. 260 pp. $85.00 cloth. $24.95 paper.

Reviewed by Helena Silverstein, Department of Government and

Law, Lafayette College

The Street Politics of Abortion chronicles a particular front in the fight

to reverse the 1973 ruling in Roev.Wade(1973): anti-abortion

activism that took shape at the doorsteps and on the sidewalks

of abortion clinics. Rising to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s,

this grassroots direct action campaign was one component of a

larger movement-countermovement battle. As street-level coun-

seling, protests, blockades, and violence increased, clinics and

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