“Murder in New Jersey,” New York Review of Books, April 16, 1964. (A review of Doe Day: The Antlerless Deer Controversy in New Jersey by Paul Tillett.)

Excerpt:

Paul Tillett’s Doe Day has a far more modest compass, and in it science suffers no such interesting and ironic reversals. But it, too, is enlightening in a way that few works of “political science” (or of journalism, for that matter) can claim to be. Its ostensible subject is the dispute in New Jersey, during the years 1958-61, over the declaration of an annual Doe Day controversy reveals that “…female) deer could be shot with impunity—something that was otherwise strictly forbidden. Its real subject is the problem of defining the common good in a democracy; for, as Marion Clawson points out in his Preface, the Doe Day controversy reveals that “..a [mere] resolution of the conflicts between rival interest groups does not necessarily produce a solution in the general public interest or even in the long-run interests of the groups concerned…”

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New York Review of Books