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The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, by Deborah L. Rhode. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, xvi + 161 + (notes + index) 88pp (£ 15.99 hardback). ISBN 978-0-19-537287-8.

On a scale of one to ten, how beautiful are you? Unless you have answered five this book could be extremely relevant to you. In it Harvard Law Professor Deborah Rhode argues fiercely against disadvantages caused by discrimination on the grounds of appearance. If the concept of appearance discrimination takes hold, this book will be seen as having played an important part in its conception. The book is extremely well written. There are plenty of everyday examples of appearance discrimination and the book is written with a passion and enthusiasm that sweeps the reader along. I enjoyed playing ‘guess the next paragraph’, with some success. When discussing the error of judging by appearance I correctly guessed that Susan Boyle was over the page; and when healthy eating in schools was raised, Jamie Oliver, soon made an appearance. The theme of the book is important. Indeed it is surprising that relatively little has been written on appearance discrimination by lawyers, given the wealth of writing on the topic by feminist commentators from other disciplines. Perhaps the answer lies in Rhodes’s claim of a consensus that ‘college and university faculty are the worse dressed professionals by a considerable margin’. This is an allegation I am sure that many readers of Legal Studies would soon be able to disprove. Or maybe not! Academics have more important things to think about than what people look like. Well, we like to think people think we do. At the heart of the book is a claim to the unfairness of appearance discrimination: ‘Conventional wisdom underestimates the advantages that attractiveness confers, the costs of its pursuit, and the injustices that result.’ If any one were to doubt this, Rhode soon challenges their assumptions. Consider these examples cited by her: over half of young women in one survey are reported to have said it would be better to be hit by a truck than to be fat; two thirds of women would rather be mean or stupid than fat; the world’s most common form of survey is liposuction; and the highest paid member of Sarah Palin’s vice presidential campaign was her make-up ‘artist’. And those examples are all within the first ten pages of the book. Plenty more follow. The book is replete with statistics dealing with the unfair treatment of people on account of appearance: less attractive children receive less attention at school; unattractive individuals receive less favourable treatment in sentences in criminal law and lower damages in civil proceedings; and find it harder to get a partner. Perhaps more at home, we are told that good looking lecturers get a better course evaluation from students and good looking students get higher ratings on intelligence from teachers.