In his memoir, Taking Liberties, Aryeh Neier emerges, almost despite himself, as a fascinating man. The story of his achievements is itself interesting and takes up the bulk of his pages. And I do mean the bulk. It is to the introduction that Neier relegates his childhood (born Berlin 1937) as a refugee in England (for a time he was confined to a hostel, "where, I am told, I stopped speaking"). We have a page on the Midlands towns where he grew up and what it was like to be a Jew there (odd at matins, otherwise not bad), then across the seas to Stuyvesant High in New York City, where he "opposed McCarthyism to the limited extent possible for a high-school student." Neier devoured the works of the midcentury antifascist and (mostly) anti-Communist writers, Orwell-Camus-Koestler-Silone, and hurried on to Cornell. There he agitated for free speech and cottoned to Norman Thomas. Naturally he was drawn to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). In what would become a pattern, he rocketed from newcomer to director (age 21).

This new job accounts for his never attending law school. Neier is appealingly modest on this score: Considering the profound effects he would have on American and international law, he has bragging rights for having succeeded without a law degree, but he chooses not to exercise them. This lack of professionalist hauteur (or of insecurity) is remarkable in the field of human rights, which is full of people who are not really lawyers (though many have the degree) trying to convince themselves and others that they're not really politicians. Neier very cleverly and exactly splits all these differences. He argues the law and he fights like a politician, as seen in his able demolition of Ernest Lefever as Reagan's nominee to be assistant secretary of state for human rights.

Neier's opposition to Lefever and much else in the Reagan Administration was not ideological in any standard sense of the term. What he thinks of as human rights are really the basic civil and political rights of American law. Much of his advocacy, in the American context, consisted in expanding the reach of these rights into, for example, reproductive freedom, fair treatment in jails, free speech even when it is hateful and respect from the state even when you are mentally ill. Neier's advocacy was not about elaborating the theory or expanding the number of rights. This remained true when he moved onto the international stage in the 1970s. What he took abroad was American rights, and to a considerable extent he, like many others, sees American power as the leading defender of those rights--if not always in reality, then in principle.

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