Best of
Law

2018

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life


Jane Sherron De Hart - 2018
    At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs--her Jewish background. Tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to "repair the world," with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II. We see the influence of her mother, Celia Amster Bader, whose intellect inspired her daughter's feminism, insisting that Ruth become independent, as she witnessed her mother coping with terminal cervical cancer (Celia died the day before Ruth, at seventeen, graduated from high school). From Ruth's days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn's James Madison High School, to Cornell University, Harvard and Columbia Law Schools (first in her class), to being a law professor at Rutgers University (one of the few women in the field and fighting pay discrimination), hiding her second pregnancy so as not to risk losing her job; founding the Women's Rights Law Reporter, writing the brief for the first case that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down a sex-discriminatory state law, then at Columbia (the law school's first tenured female professor); becoming the director of the women's rights project of the ACLU, persuading the Supreme Court in a series of decisions to ban laws that denied women full citizenship status with men. Her years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, deciding cases the way she played golf, as she, left-handed, played with right-handed clubs--aiming left, swinging right, hitting down the middle. Her years on the Supreme Court . . . A pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, on American society, on our American character and spirit, will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age


Tim Wu - 2018
    But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the twentieth century.In The Curse of Bigness, Columbia professor Tim Wu tells of how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age--but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.

Eve Was Shamed: How British Justice is Failing Women


Helena Kennedy - 2018
    In between are the so-called ‘lifestyle’ choices of the Rotherham girls; the failings of the current rules on excluding victims’ sexual history from rape trials; battered wives being asked why they don’t ‘just leave’ their partners; the way statistics hide the double discrimination experienced by BAME and disabled women; the failure to prosecute cases of female genital mutilation… the list goes on. The law holds up a mirror to society and it is failing women. The #MeToo campaign has been in part a reaction to those failures. So what comes next? How do we codify what we've learned? In this richly detailed and shocking book, one of our most eminent human rights thinkers and practitioners shows with force and fury that change for women must start at the heart of what makes society just.

A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law


Sherrilyn A. Ifill - 2018
    Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time.Covering topics as varied as "the commonality of pain," "when lawyers are heroes," and the concept of an "equality dividend" that is due to people of color for helping America brand itself internationally as a country of diversity and acceptance, Ifill, Lynch, Stevenson, and Thompson also explore topics such as "when did 'public' become a dirty word" (hint, it has something to do with serving people of color), "you know what Jeff Sessions is going to say," and "what it means to be a civil rights lawyer in the age of Trump."Building on Stevenson's hugely successful Just Mercy, Lynch's national platform at the Justice Department, Ifill's role as one of the leading defenders of civil rights in the country, and the occasion of Thompson's launch of a new center of on race, inequality and the law at the NYU School of Law, A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America's perpetual fault line.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights


Adam Winkler - 2018
    Hardly oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations, too, have fought since the nation’s earliest days to gain equal rights under the Constitution—and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people.Exposing the historical origins of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, Adam Winkler explains how those controversial Supreme Court decisions extending free speech and religious liberty to corporations were the capstone of a centuries-long struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business. Beginning his account in the colonial era, Winkler reveals the profound influence corporations had on the birth of democracy and on the shape of the Constitution itself. Once the Constitution was ratified, corporations quickly sought to gain the rights it guaranteed. The first Supreme Court case on the rights of corporations was decided in 1809, a half-century before the first comparable cases on the rights of African Americans or women. Ever since corporations have waged a persistent and remarkably fruitful campaign to win an ever-greater share of individual rights.Although corporations never marched on Washington, they employed many of the same strategies of more familiar civil rights struggles: civil disobedience, test cases, and novel legal claims made in a purposeful effort to reshape the law. Indeed, corporations have often been unheralded innovators in constitutional law, and several of the individual rights Americans hold most dear were first secured in lawsuits brought by businesses.Winkler enlivens his narrative with a flair for storytelling and a colorful cast of characters: among others, Daniel Webster, America’s greatest advocate, who argued some of the earliest corporate rights cases on behalf of his business clients; Roger Taney, the reviled Chief Justice, who surprisingly fought to limit protections for corporations—in part to protect slavery; and Roscoe Conkling, a renowned politician who deceived the Supreme Court in a brazen effort to win for corporations the rights added to the Constitution for the freed slaves. Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, Ralph Nader, Louis Brandeis, and even Thurgood Marshall all played starring roles in the story of the corporate rights movement.In this heated political age, nothing can be timelier than Winkler’s tour de force, which shows how America’s most powerful corporations won our most fundamental rights and turned the Constitution into a weapon to impede the regulation of big business.

Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times


Joel Richard Paul - 2018
    From the nation's founding in 1776 and for the next forty years, Marshall was at the center of every political battle. As Chief Justice of the United States - the longest-serving in history - he established the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of the federal Constitution and courts. As the leading Federalist in Virginia, he rivaled his cousin Thomas Jefferson in influence. As a diplomat and secretary of state, he defended American sovereignty against France and Britain, counseled President John Adams, and supervised the construction of the city of Washington. D.C.This is the astonishing true story of how a rough-cut frontiersman - born in Virginia in 1755 and with little formal education - invented himself as one of the nation's preeminent lawyers and politicians who then reinvented the Constitution to forge a stronger nation. Without Precedent is the engrossing account of the life and times of this exceptional man, who with cunning, imagination, and grace shaped America's future as he held together the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the country itself.

The Path to Otherwhere: or How I Spent My Summer Vacation


T.S. Paul - 2018
    But there are secrets never discussed and she believes the key is through the garden gate. Join Agatha and Fergus as they travel to the realm of the Mystical Library and discover who and what they were meant to be. This long awaited story is a crossover of sorts merging two story lines into one. It takes place between Witness Enchantment (Book 4) and Night of the Unicorn (Book 5).

Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion


Katie Watson - 2018
    Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right over 40 years ago, it bears stigma--a proverbial scarlet A--in the United States. Millions participate in or benefit from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in the US ends in abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend, or loved one to loved one? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many from sharing their abortion experiences with friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way. It argues persuasively that America would benefit from working to reverse such stigma, providing readers with tools that may help them model ways of doing so.Our silence around private experience with abortion has distorted our public discourse. Both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on the extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the public discourse polarized and contentious, and keeps the focus on the cases that occur the least. Katie Watson focuses instead on the remaining 95% of abortion cases. The book gives the reflective reader a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like. It explains why this public/private disjuncture exists, what it costs us, and what can be gained by including ordinary abortion in public debate.As Scarlet A explains, abortion has been a constitutional right for nearly 45 years, and it should remain one. What we need now are productive conversations about abortion ethics: how could or should people decide whether to exercise this right? Watson paints a rich, rarely seen picture of how patients and doctors currently think and act, and ultimately invites readers to draw their own conclusions.

The Inheritance: Poisoned Fruit of JFK's Assassination


Christopher Fulton - 2018
    Kennedy. Through Lincoln, crucial evidence ended up in Christopher's hands—evidence that was going to be used to facilitate a new future for America. But the U.S. government's position was clear: that evidence had to be confiscated and classified, and the truth hidden away from the public. Christopher was sent to federal prison for years under a sealed warrant and indictment. The Inheritance, Christopher's personal narrative, shares insider information from his encounters with the Russian Government, President Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, the Clinton White House, the U.S. Justice Department, the Secret Service, and the Kennedy family themselves. It reveals the true intentions of Evelyn Lincoln and her secret promise to Robert Kennedy—and Christopher's secret promise to John F. Kennedy Jr. The Inheritance explodes with history-changing information and answers the questions Americans are still asking, while pulling them through a gauntlet of some of the worst prisons this country has to offer. This book thrillingly exposes the reality of American power, and sheds light on the dark corners of current corruption within the executive branch and the justice and prison systems.

Drug Wars: The terrifying inside story of Britain’s drug trade


Neil Woods - 2018
    Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off – with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal' The Drug Wars have been fought on British streets for decades, bringing destruction, corruption and violence in their wake. Yet it is a story that remains fundamentally untold. Until now. In this groundbreaking book, former undercover police officer Neil Woods, who risked his life infiltrating some of the UK's most vicious gangs, pieces together the complex and terrifying reality of the drug war in Britain. Calling upon gripping first-hand accounts from those on both sides of the battle, Drug Wars is told by those who are fighting it.

Ranger


Richa Ganesh Aseem Arora - 2018
     He had an uphill task ahead to prove himself. A ragtag team, crumbling infrastructure and corrupt department seniors, nothing seemed to help. But then came a pleasant surprise – An unlikely friend who helps him find himself. ‘Ranger’ is a tale of friendship and commitment, of discovering self and the world; of protection and survival.

To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment


Laurence H. Tribe - 2018
    Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz provide an authoritative guide to impeachment's past and a bold argument about its proper role today. In an era of expansive presidential power and intense partisanship, we must rethink impeachment for the twenty-first century.Of impeachments, one Constitutional Convention delegate declared, "A good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one will be kept in fear of them." To End a Presidency is an essential book for all Americans seeking to understand how this crucial but fearsome power should be exercised.

In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law


Sarah Langford - 2018
    Her job is to stand in court representing the mad and the bad, the vulnerable, the heartbroken and the hopeful. She must become their voice: weave their story around the black and white of the law and tell it to the courtroom. These stories may not make headlines but they will change the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways. They are stories which, but for a twist of luck, might have been yours.To work at the Bar is to enter a world shrouded by strange clothing, archaic rituals and inaccessible language. So how does it feel to be an instrument of such an unknowable system? And what does it mean to be at its mercy? Our legal system promises us justice, impartiality and fair judgement. Does it, or can it, deliver this?With remarkable candour, Sarah describes eleven cases which reveal what goes on in our criminal and family courts. She examines how she feels as she defends the person standing in the dock. She tells compelling stories - of domestic fall out, everyday burglary, sexual indiscretion, and children caught up in the law – that are sometimes shocking and often heart-stopping. She shows us how our attitudes and actions can shape not only the outcome of a case, but the legal system itself.

The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind


Justin Driver - 2018
    Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school stu-dents, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades.Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation's public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un-authorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compul-sory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer--these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation.Justin Driver maintains that since the 1970s the Supreme Court has regularly abdicated its responsibility for protecting students' constitutional rights and risked trans-forming public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court's decisions in recent decades would conclude that the following actions taken by educators pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporal punishment on students without any proce-dural protections, searching students and their possessions without probable cause in bids to uncover violations of school rules, random drug testing of students who are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing student speech for the view-point it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have upheld a wide array of dubious school actions, including degrading strip searches, repressive dress codes, draconian "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies, and severe restrictions on off-campus speech.Driver surveys this legal landscape with eloquence, highlights the gripping personal narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor students' rights threatens our basic constitutional order. This magiste-rial book will make it impossible to view American schools--or America itself--in the same way again.

Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal


Alexandra Natapoff - 2018
    Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans--most of them poor and people of color--are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing.For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides.

How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School


Kathryne Young - 2018
    Each new crop experiences startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Kathryne M. Young was one of those disgruntled law students. After finishing law school (and a PhD), she set out to learn more about the law school experience and how to improve it for future students. Young conducted one of the most ambitious studies of law students ever undertaken, charting the experiences of over 1000 law students from over 100 different law schools, along with hundreds of alumni, dropouts, law professors, and more.How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School is smart, compelling, and highly readable. Combining her own observations and experiences with the results of her study and the latest sociological research on law schools, Young offers a very different take from previous books about law school survival. Instead of assuming her readers should all aspire to law-review-and-big-firm notions of success, Young teaches students how to approach law school on their own terms: how to tune out the drumbeat of oppressive expectations and conventional wisdom to create a new breed of law school experience altogether.Young provides readers with practical tools for finding focus, happiness, and a sense of purpose while facing the seemingly endless onslaught of problems law school presents daily. This book is an indispensable companion for today's law students, prospective law students, and anyone who cares about making law students' lives better. Bursting with warmth, realism, and a touch of firebrand wit, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School equips law students with much-needed wisdom for thriving during those three crucial years.

The Loophole in LSAT Logical Reasoning


Ellen Cassidy - 2018
    

From Shadow to Substance: The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642-1704) (Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies)


Samuel D. Renihan - 2018
    

Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition


Charles L. Black Jr. - 2018
    Now thoroughly updated with new chapters by Philip Bobbitt, it remains essential reading for every concerned citizen.  Praise for Impeachment:   “To understand impeachment, read this book. It shows how the rule of law limits power, even of the most powerful, and reminds us that the impact of the law on our lives ultimately depends on the conscience of the individual American.”—Bill Bradley, former United States senator   “The most important book ever written on presidential impeachment.”—Lawfare   “A model of how so serious an act of state should be approached.”—Wall Street Journal   “A citizen’s guide to impeachment. . . . Elegantly written, lucid, intelligent, and comprehensive.”—New York Times Book Review   “The finest text on the subject I have ever read.”—Ben Wittes  Charles L. Black, Jr. (1915–2001), was Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Philip Bobbitt is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School.

Nino and Me: My Unusual Friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia


Bryan A. Garner - 2018
    His dynamic and witty writing devoted to the Constitution has influenced an entire generation of judges. Based on his reputation for using scathing language to criticize liberal court decisions, many people presumed Scalia to be gruff and irascible. But to those who knew him as “Nino,” he was characterized by his warmth, charm, devotion, fierce intelligence, and loyalty. Bryan Garner’s friendship with Justice Scalia was instigated by celebrated writer David Foster Wallace and strengthened over their shared love of language. Despite their differing viewpoints on everything from gun control to the use of contractions, their literary and personal relationship flourished. Justice Scalia even officiated at Garner’s wedding. In this humorous, touching, and surprisingly action-packed memoir, Garner gives a firsthand insight into the mind, habits, and faith of one of the most famous and misunderstood judges in the world.

Free Private Cities: Making Governments Compete For You


Titus Gebel - 2018
    This service includes internal and external security, a legal and regulatory framework and independent dispute resolution. You pay a contractually fixed fee for these services per year. The government service provider, as the operator of the community, cannot unilaterally change this "citizens' contract" with you later on. As a "contract citizen", you have a legal claim to compliance and a claim for damages in the event the provider does not perform. You take care of everything else by yourself, but you can also do whatever you want, limited only by the rights of others and some limited rules of living together. And you only take part if and as long as the offer appeals to you. Disputes between you and the government service provider are heard in independent arbitration courts, as is customary in international commercial law. If the operator ignores the arbitral awards or abuses his power in another way, his customers leave and he goes bankrupt. He therefore has an economic risk and therefore an incentive to treat his customers well and in accordance with the contract. This concept is called a Free Private City. The first part of this book deals with fundamental questions that every social order has to face. The concept of Free Private Cities described in the second part is derived from this; historical and current models are examined. The third part deals with concrete questions of implementation of Free Private Cities. Finally, the fourth part provides an outlook on future developments.

Rectify: A Story of Healing and Redemption After Wrongful Conviction


Lara Bazelon - 2018
    Despite his pleas of innocence, five rape victims, including 20 year-old Janet Burke, ID'ed him as the offender. Only after over two decades of legal wrangling was he exonerated by DNA evidence. Conventional wisdom points to an exoneration as a happy ending to tragic tales of injustice like Haynesworth's. However, even when the physical shackles are left behind, invisible ones can be profoundly more difficult to unlock. In Rectify, former innocence project director and journalist Lara Bazelon takes stock of the massive damage inflicted by wrongful convictions. Despite a record 375 exonerations in the last three years, Bazelon argues that the criminal justice system has not done enough to rectify the devastation left in their wake--the suffering experienced by not only the exoneree, but their families, the crime victims who mistakenly identified them as perpetrators, the jurors who convicted them, and the prosecutors who realized too late that they helped convict an innocent person. In the midst of her frustration over the blatant limitations of courts and advocates, Bazelon's hope is renewed by the fledgling but growing movement to apply the centuries-old practice of restorative justice to wrongful conviction cases. Using the stories of Thomas Haynesworth, Janet Burke, and other crime victims and exonerees, she demonstrates how the transformative experience of connecting isolated individuals around mutual trauma and a shared purpose of repairing harm unites unlikely allies in the common cause of just reparations. Poignantly written and vigorously researched, Bazelon takes to task the far-reaching failures of our criminal justice system, and offers a window into a future where the power it yields can be used in pursuit of healing and unity rather than punishment and blame.

The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences


Marc Mauer - 2018
    

Rock Solid: How the Philippines Won Its Maritime Case against China


Marites Dañguilan Vitug - 2018
    Rock Solid is a landmark book detailing the Philippines' historic legal victory against China over the South China Sea.Seasoned Filipino journalist Marites Vitug pored over transcripts and documents from arbitral hearings at The Hague, and interviewed key personalities involved in the maritime case.

A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia


Tamar Herzog - 2018
    Tamar Herzog describes how successive legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through to the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was used and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition."A remarkable achievement, sure to become a go-to text for scholars and students alike. Comprehensive and concise, it bridges the Continental and Anglo-American traditions and focuses on vital questions of legal authority and legitimacy. It is a must-read for anyone eager to understand the origins of core legal concepts and institutions."--Amalia D. Kessler, Stanford University"A fundamental and timely contribution to the understanding of Europe as seen through its legal systems. Herzog masterfully shows the profound unity of legal thinking and practices across the Continent and in England. This will become required reading for students and scholars across the social sciences."--Federico Varese, Oxford University

Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership


Brenna Bhandar - 2018
    Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt


Khaled Fahmy - 2018
    Drawing on groundbreaking research in the Egyptian archives, this highly original book shows how the state affected those subject to it and their response. Illustrating how shari’a was actually implemented, how criminal justice functioned, and how scientific-medical knowledges and practices were introduced, Khaled Fahmy offers exciting new interpretations that are neither colonial nor nationalist. Moreover he shows how lower-class Egyptians did not see modern practices that fused medical and legal purposes in new ways as contrary to Islam. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Islam and modernity.

The Land is Ours


Tembeka Ngcukaitobi - 2018
    In an age of aggressive colonial expansion, land dispossession and forced labour, these men believed in a constitutional system that respected individual rights and freedoms, and they used the law as an instrument against injustice. The book follows the lives, ideas and careers of Henry Sylvester Williams, Alfred Mangena, Richard Msimang, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Ngcubu Poswayo and George Montsioa, who were all members of the ANC. It analyses the legal cases they took on, explores how they reconciled the law with the political upheavals of the day, and considers how they sustained their fidelity to the law when legal victories were undermined by politics. The Land Is Ours shows that these lawyers developed the concept of a Bill of Rights, which is now an international norm. The book is particularly relevant in light of current calls to scrap the Constitution and its protections of individual rights: it clearly demonstrates that, from the beginning, the struggle for freedom was based on the idea of the rule of law.

Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties


James F. Simon - 2018
    Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren framed the tumultuous future of the modern civil rights movement. Eisenhower was a gradualist who wanted to coax white Americans in the South into eventually accepting integration, while Warren, author of the Supreme Court’s historic unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, demanded immediate action to dismantle the segregation of the public school system. In Eisenhower vs. Warren, two-time New York Times Notable Book author James F. Simon examines the years of strife between them that led Eisenhower to say that his biggest mistake as president was appointing that “dumb son of a bitch Earl Warren.” This momentous, poisonous relationship is presented here at last in one volume. Compellingly written, Eisenhower vs. Warren brings to vivid life the clash that continues to reverberate in political and constitutional debates today.

A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic


Rohit de - 2018
    Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People's Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes--all despised minorities--shaped the constitutional culture.The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state's own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist's contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders' challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers' petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers' battle to protect their right to practice prostitution.Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People's Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

Most Law School Advice Is Bullsh*t: Why the Rankings Are Wrong, The Right Way to Pick a Law School, What to Do Once You Get There, and How to Graduate with Your Dream Job


Andy Brink - 2018
    This would involve trusting the U.S. News and World Report Law School Rankings and going to the "best" law school you get into, even if it means taking on $150,000 in debt to do so. And even if you can't articulate the difference between the law school experience at Harvard, Howard, Houston, or Hofstra. If you're a law student, you can follow the status quo advice hawked by your law school and accepted by virtually everyone around you. That advice says that the best way to do law school is to study as much as you can, pursue a high GPA and other academic accolades, and interview with the most prestigious firms across the country. I have some bad news. If you follow either of these patterns of advice, you are risking not just failure, but failure in a catastrophic sense. For decades to come. Both these schools of thought about how to pick a law school and how to do law school are completely and utterly wrong, misleading, untrue, dangerous, and most of all, enticing to the type of person who can get into law school. Which is why so many law school applicants and law students follow it blindly. Often they have no other lens through which to view the law school experience other than this established and time-tested dangerous advice. Don't follow that advice. Read what Andy Brink has to say instead. In Most Law School Advice Is Bullsh*t, attorney and writer Andy Brink presents a new way to experience law school, all the way from application to graduation. Andy takes you on his law school journey - from bewildered and confused applicant and LSAT taker in 2006, to frustrated and often listless prestigious law school attendee, to his current iteration as practicing attorney in 2018 - and points out the mistakes he made along the way. Mistakes you don't have to replicate. Perhaps more importantly, Andy illustrates where legal education gets it wrong, and how you as a consumer can prepare for these shortcomings, and sidestep them to your benefit. Most law school advice is very bad advice. So don't follow it. The other side to the coin is that if you find honest and truthful advice about how to pick a law school and what do to do once you get there, you will be light years ahead of every other law student in the country. That's what you want. That's what Andy Brink wants. That's what you get if you read this book and follow the advice in it. Most law school advice is bullsh*t: so brush it off. Don't listen to it. Find the truth you've always hungered for and knew existed in the pages of this innovative take on the law school experience.

We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow


Margaret Edds - 2018
    In We Face the Dawn, Margaret Edds tells the gripping story of how the South's most significant grassroots legal team challenged the barriers of racial segregation in mid-century America.Virginians Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson initiated and argued one of the five cases that combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, but their influence extends far beyond that momentous ruling. They were part of a small brotherhood, headed by social-justice pioneer Thurgood Marshall and united largely through the Howard Law School, who conceived and executed the NAACP's assault on racial segregation in education, transportation, housing, and voting. Hill and Robinson's work served as a model for southern states and an essential underpinning for Brown. When the Virginia General Assembly retaliated with laws designed to disbar the two lawyers and discredit the NAACP, they defiantly carried the fight to the United States Supreme Court and won.At a time when numerous schools have resegregated and the prospects of many minority children appear bleak, Hill and Robinson's remarkably effective campaign against various forms of racial segregation can inspire a new generation to embrace educational opportunity as the birthright of every American child.

Without Fear or Favour: Stories of Life and Law


Sarah Langford - 2018
    

The Limits of Presidential Power: A Citizen's Guide to the Law


Lisa Manheim - 2018
    In an engaging and accessible style, two law professors explain the principles that inform everything from President Washington's disagreements with Congress to President Trump's struggles with the courts, and more. Timely and to the point, this guide provides the essential information every informed civic participant needs to know about the laws that govern the president-and what those laws mean for those who want to make their voices heard.

51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law


Jeffrey S., Judge Sutton - 2018
    Yet much of our constitutional law is not made at the federal level. In 51 Imperfect Solutions, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton argues that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in protecting individual liberties. The book tells four stories that arise in four different areas of constitutional law: equal protection; criminal procedure; privacy; and free speech and free exercise of religion. Traditional accounts of these bedrock debates about the relationship of the individual to the state focus on decisions of the United States Supreme Court. But these explanations tell just part of the story. The book corrects this omission by looking at each issue-and some others as well-through the lens of many constitutions, not one constitution; of many courts, not one court; and of all American judges, not federal or state judges. Taken together, the stories reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system.

Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace


Kayanesenh Paul Williams - 2018
    When they established Kayanerenkó:wa, the Great Law of Peace, they not only resolved intractable coinflicts, but also shaped a system of law and government that would maintain peace for generations to come. This law remains in place today in Haudenosaunee communities: an Indigenous legal system, distinctive, complex, and principled. It is not only a survivor, but a viable alternative to Euro-American systems of law. With its emphasis on lasting relationships, respect for the natural world, building consensus, and on making and maintaining peace, it stands in contrast to legal systems based on property, resource exploitation, and majority rule.Although Kayanerenkó:wa has been studied by anthropologists, linguists, and historians, it has not been the subject of legal scholarship. There are few texts to which judges, lawyers, researchers, or academics may refer for any understanding of specific Indigenous legal systems. Following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a growing emphasis on reconciliation, Indigenous legal systems are increasingly relevant to the evolution of law and society.In Kayanerenkó:wa Great Law of Peace Kayanesenh Paul Williams, counsel to Indigenous nations for forty years, with a law practice based in the Grand River Territory of the Six Nations, brings the sum of his experience and expertise to this analysis of Kayanerenkó:wa as a living, principled legal system. In doing so, he puts a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous and settler communities.

Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law


Chaim Saiman - 2018
    This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its many detailed rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim that the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God--a claim no country makes of its law.In this panoramic book, Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. In the multifaceted world of halakhah where everything is law, law is also everything, and even laws that serve no practical purpose can, when properly studied, provide surprising insights into timeless questions about the very nature of human existence.What does it mean for legal analysis to connect humans to God? Can spiritual teachings remain meaningful and at the same time rigidly codified? Can a modern state be governed by such law? Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this book shows how halakhah is not just "law" but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing.

Moot Court: A Students in Love Novella (Legally in Love Book 7)


Jennifer Griffith - 2018
     As graduation nears, Daphne Ellison can’t keep her eyes off the sigh-worthy guy in her moot court class. She’s been crushing on Tighe Hartnett since day one of law school, even though he reportedly has a serious girlfriend. What—that means he’s safe, right? Crushable, with no chance of distracting her from earning that prized law degree. Until today. Because Tighe's girlfriend is old news, and when he and Daphne are pitted against each other in mock court, sparks fly. Moot Court is a novella in the Legally in Love series of top-selling romantic comedies by Jennifer Griffith. Full of swoony kisses, clean & wholesome romance, and hilarious incidents, Moot Court is just what the judge ordered. Great for fans of Jennifer Peel, Rachelle Christensen, Victorine Lieske, and Cami Checketts. Also great for fans of the Hallmark romance movies.

Contract Drafting and Negotiation for Entrepreneurs and Business Professionals


Paul A. Swegle - 2018
    Bender, Professor and Associate Dean, Seattle University School of Law "The book is written for the interested lay person, but I would recommend that my law students get a copy as well and use it as a handy reference when they enter practice and begin advising business clients.” - Daniel J. Morrissey, Professor of Law and Former Dean, Gonzaga University Law School "Every entrepreneur should read this book. Swegle does a wonderful job of making legal terminology and building blocks accessible to anybody - a rare accomplishment!... A marvelous blueprint for creating successful business relationships and avoiding costly problems and liabilities." -Seaton Gras, Founder and CEO, SURF Incubator - a vibrant community for technology startups DESCRIPTION Author and attorney Paul Swegle has spent much of his career working closely with business colleagues in companies across several industries to negotiate and document commercial arrangements - contracts that supported the design, development, launch, distribution and marketing of countless products and services. In doing so, Paul has witnessed and celebrated countless successful commercial relationships, some lasting more than a decade. He has also learned important lessons from myriad ill-fated relationships, tripped up by poorly written agreements, under-performing commercial partners and unexpected surprises of nearly every variety. Paul's book presents practical insights accumulated and shared with business colleagues over a 20-year period. Its purpose is to help business persons negotiate agreements that achieve their business goals without creating unexpected and unnecessary risks and liabilities. Paul’s guidance emphasizes mindfulness of the balance between protecting key interests while still getting important deals done. Paul has served as in-house general counsel to twelve different companies across many industries. He worked previously in the SEC’s Enforcement Division and its Division of Corporation Finance, and also served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney. Paul gives talks around the country on startup law and fundraising, guest-lectures in business law and technology law classes, serves on the Board of Governors of the Washington State Bar Association and writes on a range of law, governance and finance topics.

Understanding Criminal Law, Eighth Edition


Joshua Dressler - 2018
    Understanding Criminal Law is designed to be taught in conjunction with any casebook. The topics covered are those most often raised in criminal law casebooks, and coverage of these subjects is meant to complement professors' classroom discussions. The text focuses on the basic elements of, and defenses to, all crimes; provides in-depth coverage of such crimes as homicide, rape, and theft; and covers other important topics covered in the Criminal Law course, such as accomplice and inchoate liability. Understanding Criminal Law also covers theories of punishment, sources of the criminal law, and overarching principles such as legality and proportionality. The common law is emphasized with extensive comparisons to the Model Penal Code and modern statutes.  This edition offers the most significant updating ever, including coverage of quickly-changing legal areas, such as sexual assault and self-defense law. Recent and ongoing revisions to the Model Penal Code are also covered.

Privacy as Trust


Ari Ezra Waldman - 2018
    But the truth is that privacy is in danger only because we think about it in narrow, limited, and outdated ways. In this transformative work, Ari Ezra Waldman, leveraging the notion that we share information with others in contexts of trust, offers a roadmap for data privacy that will better protect our information in a digitized world. With case studies involving websites, online harassment, intellectual property, and social robots, Waldman shows how 'privacy as trust' can be applied in the most challenging real-world contexts to make privacy work for all of us. This book should be read by anyone concerned with reshaping the theory and practice of privacy in the modern world.

Objection: Disgust, Morality, and the Law


Debra Lieberman - 2018
    Shedding light on the evolutionary and psychological origins of disgust, theauthors reveal how ancient human intuitions about what is safe to eat or touch, or who would make an advantageous mate, have become co-opted by moral systems designed to condemn behavior and identify groups of people ripe for marginalization. Over time these moral stances have made their way intolegal codes, and disgust has thereby served as the impetus for laws against behaviors almost universally held to be disgusting (corpse desecration, bestiality) - and as the implicit justification for more controversial prohibitions (homosexuality, use of pornography). Written with a critical eyeon current events, Lieberman and Patrick build a case for a more reasoned approach to lawmaking in a system that often confuses gross with wrong.

Kaiaulu: Gathering Tides


Mehana Blaich Vaughan - 2018
    Waves rush singing onto the outer reef where two throw net fishermen stalk the surge. An elderly woman with her silver hair in a kerchief makes her way toward shore, two octopuses tucked in her mesh bag. Within hours, two hundred tourists will snorkel, sunbathe, and teeter on the coral, few ever knowing that people fish here or that their catch sustains an entire kaiāulu (community) connected to this stretch of reef. This coast is known as a playground for tourists and backdrop for Hollywood movies, but catch from small local reefs, and the sharing of this abundance, has sustained area families for centuries, helping them to thrive through tidal waves, hurricanes, an influx of new residents, and economic recessions. Yet fishing families are increasingly invisible and many have moved away, threatened by global commodification and loss of access to coastal lands that are now private retreats for star entertainers, investors, and dot-com millionaires. Building on two decades of interviews with more than sixty Hawaiian elders, leaders, and fishermen and women, Kaiāulu shares their stories of enduring community efforts to perpetuate kuleana, often translated to mean “rights and responsibilities.” Community actions extend kuleana to include nurturing respectful relationships with resources, guarding and cultivating fishing spots, perpetuating collective harvests and sharing, maintaining connection to family lands, reasserting local governance rooted in ancestral values, and preparing future generations to carry on. An important contribution to scholarship in the fields of natural resource management, geography, Indigenous Studies, and Hawaiian Studies, Kaiāulu is also a skillfully written and deeply personal tribute to a community based not on ownership, but reciprocity, responsibility, and caring for the places that shape and sustain us all.

Investigating American Presidents


Paul Rosenzweig - 2018
    But what limits are there if any on presidential power? How do we keep such awesome responsibility in check? These 12 eye opening, timely lectures examine the ins and outs of presidential investigations using past events as a lens through which to make sense of current (and future) ones. With his political and legal insights, Professor Rosenzweig walks you through the entire path of investigating potential misuse of presidential power, from the establishment of legislative committees to the impeachment process. You’ll witness the construction of the legal framework that informs how Congress and the courts handle charges of abuse of power. You’ll also dive into the investigations of presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ulysses S. Grant, and Bill Clinton as a way to lean what powers exist to ensure presidents adhere to the rule of law, and whether or not they can help us wrestle with current events coming out of the White House. These nonpartisan, unbiased lectures aren’t concerned with right and left but rather with the overarching progress and themes of American political and legal history. They’re detailed enough for legal experts and accessible enough to learners with only a basic understanding of how the US government and the justice system work.

Your Honor


Kristi Pelton - 2018
    People cross paths for a reason.I’m not sure why ours crossed but within a second, I realized, she could destroy everything.There’s a code of ethics in some professions where certain relationships are frowned upon. She’s the prosecutor. I’m the judge. Sleeping with her is all sorts of hell no!Ethic review boards could remove me from the bench—as in “You’re fired.” Even worse, my father would kill me if his name were tainted. But it would kill me more not to have her.They say rules are meant to be broken. But is she worth the risk? The only thing I was sure of—I wanted to completely overrule her perfect little world.

Critical Race Theory: A Primer (Concepts and Insights)


Khiara M. Bridges - 2018
    In addition to serving as a primary text for graduate and undergraduate Critical Race Theory seminars or courses on Race and the Law, it can also be assigned in courses on Antidiscrimination Law, Civil Rights, and Law and Society. The book can be used by any reader seeking to understand the relationship between constructions of race and the law.The text consists of four Parts. Part I provides a history of CRT. Part II introduces and explores several core concepts in the theory—including institutional/structural racism, implicit bias, microaggressions, racial privilege, the relationship between race and class, and intersectionality. Part III builds on Part II’s discussion of intersectionality by exploring the intersection of race with a variety of other characteristics—including sexuality and gender identity, religion, and ability. Part IV analyzes several contemporary issues to which CRT speaks—including racial disparities in health, affirmative action, the criminal justice system, the welfare state, and education.

Shattering Silences: Strategies to Prevent Sexual Assault, Heal Survivors, and Bring Assailants to Justice


Christopher Johnston - 2018
    But victims are no longer silent, and new practices by police, prosecutors, nurses, and rape crisis professionals are resulting in more humane and compassionate treatment of victims and more aggressive pursuit and prosecution of perpetrators.Shattering Silences is the first book to cover these new approaches and partnerships. Christopher Johnston shows how the people and organizations implementing these new approaches are having far-reaching impacts on helping victims heal and making it more likely that predators will be arrested and sentenced. His in-depth portrayals of the altruistic and hard-working people behind these radical approaches--based on seven years of interviews--provide a template of best practices for other organizations and communities to follow. With sexual assault taking center stage these days, this book is more important than ever.

I Know My Rights: A Children's Guide to the Bill of Rights and Individual Liberty


Rory Margraf - 2018
    They are tantamount to each individual living their most fulfilled life. The rights that we possess are not uniquely American, but rather natural rights that are possessed by all people. What is uniquely American is the explicit nature with which these rights must be acknowledged at all levels of government. As such, it is the responsibility of all Americans to exercise their rights daily, which means that the Bill of Rights must be a recurring study and part of regular discussion. Learning our rights at a young age is an important step in growing to be a conscious citizen; one that will not only defend their own liberties, but those of their neighbors, friends, community, and strangers around the world. I Know My Rights: A Children's Guide to the Bill of Rights and Individual Liberty presents the original text of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, coupled with an accessible and detailed explanation for each law, based in recent case law and scholarly interpretation. This book will provide a basic understanding of the Bill of Rights, as well as a foundation upon which each child can learn from and grow into active, peaceful, and prosperous individuals who seek personal fulfillment and happiness within their own lives and their communities.

The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom


Aaron Rhodes - 2018
    How did this happen? Aaron Rhodes, recognized as "one of the leading human rights activists in the world" by the University of Chicago, reveals how an emancipatory ideal became so debased.Rhodes identifies the fundamental flaw in the Universal Declaration of Human of Rights, the basis for many international treaties and institutions. It mixes freedom rights rooted in natural law--authentic human rights--with "economic and social rights," or claims to material support from governments, which are intrinsically political. As a result, the idea of human rights has lost its essential meaning and moral power.The principles of natural rights, first articulated in antiquity, were compromised in a process of accommodation with the Soviet Union after World War II, and under the influence of progressivism in Western democracies. Geopolitical and ideological forces ripped the concept of human rights from its foundations, opening it up to abuse. Dissidents behind the Iron Curtain saw clearly the difference between freedom rights and state-granted entitlements, but the collapse of the USSR allowed demands for an expanding array of economic and social rights to gain legitimacy without the totalitarian stigma.The international community and civil society groups now see human rights as being defined by legislation, not by transcendent principles. Freedoms are traded off for the promise of economic benefits, and the notion of collective rights is used to justify restrictions on basic liberties.We all have a stake in human rights, and few serious observers would deny that the concept has lost clarity. But no one before has provided such a comprehensive analysis of the problem as Rhodes does here, joining philosophy and history with insights from his own extensive work in the field.

Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma


Michelle Oberman - 2018
    Oberman reveals the practical challenges raised by a thriving black market in abortion drugs, as well as the legal challenges to law enforcement. She describes a system in which doctors and lawyers collaborate in order to identify and prosecute those suspected of abortion-related crimes, and the troubling results of such collaboration: mistaken diagnoses, selective enforcement, and wrongful convictions.Equipped with this understanding, Oberman turns her attention to the United States, where the battle over abortion is fought almost exclusively in legislatures and courtrooms. Beginning in Oklahoma, one of the most pro-life states, and through interviews with current and former legislators and activists, she shows how Americans voice their moral opposition to abortion by supporting laws that would restrict it. In this America, the law is more a symbol than a plan.Oberman challenges this vision of the law by considering the practical impact of legislation and policies governing both motherhood and abortion. Using stories gathered from crisis pregnancy centers and abortion clinics, she unmasks the ways in which the law already shapes women's responses to unplanned pregnancy, generating incentives or penalties, nudging pregnant women in one direction or another.In an era in which every election cycle features a pitched battle over abortion's legality, Oberman uses her research to expose the limited ways in which making abortion a crime matters. Her insight into the practical consequences that will ensue if states are permitted to criminalize abortion calls attention to the naive and misguided nature of contemporary struggles over abortion's legality.A fresh look at the battle over abortion law, Her Body, Our Laws is an invitation to those on all sides of the issue to move beyond the incomplete discourse about legality by understanding how the law actually matters.

Counter-Economics: From the Back Alleys to the Stars


Samuel Edward Konkin III - 2018
    I hope it will indeed amuse and excite the reader about another, accessible way of life, give new explanation to some of the vexing problems that beset our social life, and perhaps solve a few."Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004) was the author of the seminal works on libertarianism and agorism, New Libertarian Manifesto and An Agorist Primer. Over the course of thirty years, he wrote, edited, and published newsletters and magazines such as Laissez Faire, New Libertarian Notes, and 101 issues of the longest-running publication of its kind, New Libertarian Weekly.Known to his friends as SEK3, Mr. Konkin graduated cum laude from the University of Alberta, serving as head of the Young Social Credit League there. He received his Masters in Theoretical Chemistry at New York University, but left NYU without submitting his doctoral dissertation in Quantum Mechanics to pursue his lifelong efforts to promote Counter-Economics and Agorism. He founded the New Libertarian Alliance, the Movement of the Libertarian Left, and served as Executive Director of the outreach organization The Agorist Institute.Counter-Economics was intended to be his magnum opus, the distillation of all his work and research over 15 years of movement activism. Sadly, of the 18 chapters outlined, only ten were written. Of those, only six had been found at the time of publication.Praise for Samuel Edward Konkin III“Konkin’s writings are to be welcomed. Because we need a lot more polycentrism in the movement. Because he shakes up Partyarchs who tend to fall into unthinking complacency. And especially because he cares deeply about liberty and can read and write, qualities which seem to be going out of style in the libertarian movement.” -- Murray N. Rothbard, PhD

Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD


Max Felker-Kantor - 2018
    But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti-police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.

The Judiciary's Class War (Encounter Broadsides)


Glenn Harlan Reynolds - 2018
    Correspondingly, since the Warren era, the Supreme Court has basically served as an engine for vindicating Front-Row preferences, from allowing birth control and abortion, to marginalizing religion in the public space, to legislative apportionment and libel law, and beyond. Professor Glenn Reynolds describes this problem in detail and offers some suggestions for making things better.

The Best Story Wins: How to Leverage Hollywood Storytelling in Business and Beyond


Matthew Luhn - 2018
    Former Pixar and The Simpsons Animator and Story Artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. A combination of Luhn’s personal stories and storytelling insights, The Best Story Wins retells the “Hero’s Journey” story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves!

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon


David H. Webber - 2018
    But where traditional labor action failed, a new approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees' Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd's boardroom allies.In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway's to shine a light on labor's most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism has been used to divest from anti-labor companies, gun makers, and tobacco; diversify corporate boards; support Occupy Wall Street; force global warming onto the corporate agenda; create jobs; and challenge outlandish CEO pay. Webber argues that workers have found in labor's capital a potent strategy against their exploiters. He explains the tactic's surmountable difficulties even as he cautions that corporate interests are already working to deny labor's access to this powerful and underused tool.The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder is a rare good-news story for American workers, an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Combining legal rigor with inspiring narratives of labor victory, Webber shows how workers can wield their own capital to reclaim their strength.

We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century


Erwin Chemerinsky - 2018
    Beautifully written and powerfully argued, this is a masterpiece." --Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School, and author of Free Culture Worried about what a super conservative majority on the Supreme Court means for the future of civil liberties? From gun control to reproductive health, a conservative court will reshape the lives of all Americans for decades to come. The time to develop and defend a progressive vision of the U.S. Constitution that protects the rights of all people is now.University of California Berkeley Dean and respected legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky expertly exposes how conservatives are using the Constitution to advance their own agenda that favors business over consumers and employees, and government power over individual rights.But exposure is not enough. Progressives have spent too much of the last forty-five years trying to preserve the legacy of the Warren Court’s most important rulings and reacting to the Republican-dominated Supreme Courts by criticizing their erosion of rights—but have not yet developed a progressive vision for the Constitution itself. Yet, if we just look to the promise of the Preamble—liberty and justice for all—and take seriously its vision, a progressive reading of the Constitution can lead us forward as we continue our fight ensuring democratic rule, effective government, justice, liberty, and equality.Includes the Complete Constitution and Amendments of the United States of America

#1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests (Social Justice Book, Civil Rights Photography Book)


Sheila Pree Bright - 2018
    Combining portraits of past and present social justice activists with documentary images from recent protests throughout the United States, #1960Now sheds light on the parallels between the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Shelia Pree Bright's striking black-and-white photographs capture the courage and conviction of '60s elder statesmen and a new generation of activists, offering a powerful reminder that the fight for justice is far from over. #1960Now represents an important new contribution to American protest photography.• Puts the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's in direct conversation with Black Lives Matter• Introduction from Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza• Builds on the appeal of #1960Now and @sheepreebright on Instagram Fans of Training School for Negro Girls, Martha Rosler: Irrespective, and Charles White: A Retrospective will love this book.This book is perfect for:• Politically engaged folks of all ages• Fine art photography buffs• Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights era activists • Community organizers

Greed on Trial: Doctors and Patients Unite to Fight Big Insurance


Theresa Barta - 2018
    In order to make a profit, insurers and health-care corporations often enact policies that require cutting corners on patient care. They ask doctors to double- and triple-book appointments and reduce the amount of time spent with each patient. They pressure doctors to prescribe older, cheaper medications and to limit the number of tests and referrals they order. Often, they threaten doctors that if they do not comply with the new policies, they'll lose their jobs or insurance affiliations. Despite these threats, in striving to provide excellent medical treatment, good doctors resist these new policies. And in turn, they can find themselves terminated. That's where Theresa Barta steps in. A highly successful trial attorney, Barta specializes in a very particular type of law: suing insurers and health-care companies who terminate doctors illegally and unethically. Greed on Trial brings Barta's work to life, following three actual cases from her files. In each case sits a doctor who was wrongfully terminated after rebelling against insurance policies in order to provide premium care to a patient. And in each story, we watch Theresa assemble her evidence, plan a strategy, and take the case to trial. Greed on Trial is an eye-opening book about an issue that affects everyone: insurance company abuses. Once you read it, you will never look at health care the same way again.

Death by Regulation: How We Were Robbed of a Golden Age of Health and How We Can Reclaim It


Mary J. Ruwart - 2018
    This “living law” continues to reshape our health care paradigm by censoring life-saving information about nutrients, delaying the entry of life-saving drugs into the marketplace, and slashing innovation in both prevention and treatment of disease. Learn how to reclaim the Golden Age of Health that should have been yours! Foreword by Dr. Ron Paul; Preface by Dr. Jonathan Wright; Afterword by Foster Gamble.

Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire


Renisa Mawani - 2018
    Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.

Paths of Justice


Johannes M.M. Chan - 2018
    

Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia


Julia Stephens - 2018
    The book uncovers the paradoxical workings of colonial laws that promised to separate secular and religious spheres, but instead fostered their vexed entanglement. It shows how religious laws governing families became embroiled with secular laws governing markets, and how calls to protect religious liberties clashed with freedom of the press. By following these interactions, Stephens asks us to reconsider where law is and what it is. Her narrative weaves between state courts, Islamic fatwas on ritual performance, and intimate marital disputes to reveal how deeply law penetrates everyday life. In her hands, law also serves many masters - from British officials to Islamic jurists to aggrieved Muslim wives. The resulting study shows how the neglected field of Muslim law in South Asia is essential to understanding current crises in global secularism.

Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?


Mark A. Graber - 2018
    Do these events represent simply the normal ebb and flow of political possibilities, or dothey instead portend a more permanent move away from constitutional democracy that had been thought triumphant after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989?Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? addresses these questions head-on: Are the forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world general or nation-specific? Why have some major democracies seemingly not experienced these problems? How can we as scholars and citizens think clearly about theideas of constitutional crisis or constitutional degeneration? What are the impacts of forces such as globalization, immigration, income inequality, populism, nationalism, religious sectarianism?Bringing together leading scholars to engage critically with the crises facing constitutional democracies in the 21st century, these essays diagnose the causes of the present afflictions in regimes, regions, and across the globe, believing at this stage that diagnosis is of central importance - asAbraham Lincoln said in his House Divided speech, If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

Destroying the Caroline: The Frontier Raid That Reshaped the Right to War


Craig Forcese - 2018
    That incident, and the diplomatic understanding that settled it, have become shorthand in international law for the "inherent right to self-defence" exercised by states in far-off places and in different sorts of war. The Caroline is remembered today when drones kill terrorists and state leaders contemplate responses to threatening adversaries through military action.But it is remembered by chance and not design, and often imperfectly.This book tells the story of the Caroline affair and the colourful characters who populated it. Along the way, it highlights how the Caroline and claims of self-defence have been used -- and misused -- in response to modern challenges in international relations. It is the history of how a forgotten conflict on an unruly frontier has redefined the right to war.

The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945


Tera Eva Agyepong - 2018
    Advocating that children's inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amid an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of "child" could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice.In this important study, Agyepong expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing so, she also complicates our understanding of the nature of migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in the early twentieth century.

Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine the Gospel


E. Calvin Beisner - 2018
    many are beginning to embrace an idea commonly called "social justice", thinking it is what Scripture requires.But just what is "social justice", and how does it compare with Biblical teaching?on the meaning of justice?In this concise booklet, theologian and philosopher E. Calvin Beisner offers a clear, Biblical definition of justice, contrasts it with "social justice", and explains why the common idea of "social Justice" undermines both Biblical justice and the Biblical gospel. He also carefully defines rights, distinguishes between negative rights (against harm) and positive rights (to benefits), and explains why positive rights are self-contradictory and endanger real, negative rights.

Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition


W. Fitzhugh Brundage - 2018
    Fitzhugh Brundage reveals in this essential and disturbing study, there is a long American tradition of excusing as well as decrying its use.The pilgrims and merchants who first came to America from Europe professed an intention to create a society free of the barbarism of Old World tyranny and New World savagery. But over the centuries Americans have turned to torture during moments of crisis at home and abroad and have debated its legitimacy in defense of law and order.From the Indian wars to Civil War POW prisons and early penitentiaries, from "the third degree" in police stations and racial lynchings to the War on Terror, U.S. institutions have proven to be far more amenable to torture than the nation's professed commitment to liberty would suggest. Legal and racial inequality fostered many opportunities for state agents to wield excessive power, which they justified as essential for American safety and well-being.Reconciling state violence with the aspirations of Americans for social and political justice is an enduring challenge. By tracing the historical debates about the efficacy of torture and the attempt to adapt it to democratic values, Civilizing Torture reveals the recurring struggle to decide what limits Americans are willing to impose on the power of the state. At a time of escalating rhetoric aimed at cleansing the nation of the undeserving, as well as ongoing military involvement in conflicts around the world, the debate over torture remains a critical and unresolved part of America's tradition.

Family Guide to Mental Illness and the Law: A Practical Handbook


Linda Tashbook - 2018
    Mental illness adds a layer of complexity to legal processes, and the justice system can be downright bewildering, even for the most well-intentioned. How can families find out if their loved one is being mistreated or ignored, and how can they make sense of their rights under various laws and regulations?Family Guide to Mental Illness and the Law offers the nuts-and-bolts legal information and problem-solving steps families need. This accessible resource explains how common legal issues uniquely impact people with various forms of mental illness and what family members can do to help. Readers will learn how to - help protect a loved one's job, housing, or medical care - participate in hearings about guardianship, involuntary commitment, bankruptcy, and more - assist in making financial arrangements - navigate federal laws surrounding the Family and Medical Leave Act, HIPAA, disability claims, and workers' compensation - steer criminal proceedings away from jail and toward treatmentBeyond the legal system, this book also guides readers in interacting with officials and authorities, lobbying for better laws, and working with local governments towards improving policies that affect those with mental illness. Complete with real-world examples, Family Guide to Mental Illness and the Law provides practical advice and eases the feelings of isolation that often accompany loving someone with mental illness.

FSMA Compliant in One Week: Be the FSMA Expert in Your Organization


Rob Kooijmans - 2018
    Next to giving a comprehensible overview of the requirements imposed by FSMA, the book also shows the reader how to come to effective implementation of these requirements. The book contains a wealth of useful links to on-line materials to be used during implementation.

Taxation in Six Concepts: A Student's Guide, 2019


Anne L. Alstott - 2018
    Armed with six concepts, you can decipher the law. In the United States, more so than in any other developed country, the tax law hosts many of the government's most important social and economic policies. Health care, housing, financial markets, education, and poverty, for example, involve tax. In short, tax turns out to host many interesting and pressing public policy problems. This book introduces the six concepts and uses them to unpack leading cases and real-world transactions. The six are valuation, net income, realization, tax deferral, substance over form and income-shifting. The cases discussed involve one (or two) of the six concepts discussed. This book also looks beyond the classroom. At every step, real-world transactions are included to show how tax planning harks back to the six concepts.

History of the Supreme Court


Timothy S. Huebner - 2018
    

Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire


Jennifer Pitts - 2018
    In fact, as Jennifer Pitts shows, international law was forged at least as much through Europeans' domineering relations with non-European states and empires, leaving a legacy still visible in the unequal structures of today's international order.Pitts focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great age of imperial expansion, as European intellectuals and administrators worked to establish and justify laws to govern emerging relationships with non-Europeans. Relying on military and commercial dominance, European powers dictated their own terms on the basis of their own norms and interests. Despite claims that the law of nations was a universal system rooted in the values of equality and reciprocity, the laws that came to govern the world were parochial and deeply entangled in imperialism. Legal authorities, including Emer de Vattel, John Westlake, and Henry Wheaton, were key figures in these developments. But ordinary diplomats, colonial administrators, and journalists played their part too, as did some of the greatest political thinkers of the time, among them Montesquieu and John Stuart Mill.Against this growing consensus, however, dissident voices as prominent as Edmund Burke insisted that European states had extensive legal obligations abroad that ought not to be ignored. These critics, Pitts shows, provide valuable resources for scrutiny of the political, economic, and legal inequalities that continue to afflict global affairs.

Contract Law: Text, Cases, and Materials Text, Cases, and Materials


Ewan McKendrick - 2018
    

Victory: How Pennsylvania Beat Gerrymandering and How Other States Can Do the Same


James B. Lieber - 2018
    The hijacking of Congress began in 2010, when the Republicans, badly beaten at all levels during the Obama landslide of 2008, arrived at a strategy to take back the House of Representatives not just in the next election, but permanently.In 2010, the GOP won control of most state legislatures, and these legislatures then set about re-drawing congressional districts to favor Republicans by gerrymandering them. The results have been stark. The Republicans now control the House of Representatives, which has become a far-right entity that fawns before President Trump.In Pennsylvania, gerrymandering gave Republicans thirteen and the Democrats five seats in Congress—even though Democratic Party registration exceeds GOP registration in the state. Politics is a blood sport in Pennsylvania: legislators regularly put each other in jail, and the General Assembly is a famously do-nothing place ruled by right wingnuts.And yet . . . in 2018, activists in the state engineered a brilliant legal effort to attack the lopsided redistricting, and won after fighting pitched battles all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Based on in-depth interviews with the people involved, this is the story of how a few dedicated voters took up the issue of disenfranchisement and won—and how activists around the country can do the same. The next Congressional redistricting occurs after the 2020 census: progressives need to be ready well before then.

Creating the Land of Lincoln: The History and Constitutions of Illinois, 1778-1870


Frank Cicero Jr. - 2018
    Its population of transplants lived an upland southern culture and in some cases owned slaves. Yet the nineteenth century and three constitutions recast Illinois as a crucible of northern strength and American progress. Frank Cicero Jr. provides an appealing new history of Illinois as expressed by the state's constitutions--and the lively conventions that led to each one. In Creating the Land of Lincoln, Cicero sheds light on the vital debates of delegates who, freed from electoral necessity, revealed the opinions, prejudices, sentiments, and dreams of Illinoisans at critical junctures in state history. Cicero simultaneously analyzes decisions large and small that fostered momentous social and political changes. The addition of northern land in the 1818 constitution, for instance, opened up the state to immigrant populations that reoriented Illinois to the north. Legislative abuses and rancor over free blacks influenced the 1848 document and the subsequent rise of a Republican Party that gave the nation Abraham Lincoln as its president. Cicero concludes with the 1870 constitution, revealing how its dialogues and resolutions set the state on the modern course that still endures today.

The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights


Gerard Magliocca - 2018
    Until the twentieth century, few Americans called the first ten constitutional amendments drafted by James Madison in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791 the Bill of Rights. Even more surprising, when people finally started doing so between the Spanish-American War and World War II, the Bill of Rights was usually invoked to justify increasing rather than restricting the authority of the federal government. President Franklin D. Roosevelt played a key role in that development, first by using the Bill of Rights to justify the expansion of national regulation under the New Deal, and then by transforming the Bill of Rights into a patriotic rallying cry against Nazi Germany. It was only after the Cold War began that the Bill of Rights took on its modern form as the most powerful symbol of the limits on government power. These are just some of the revelations about the Bill of Rights in Gerard Magliocca's The Heart of the Constitution. For example, we are accustomed to seeing the Bill of Rights at the end of the Constitution, but Madison wanted to put them in the middle of the document. Why was his plan rejected and what impact did that have on constitutional law? Today we also venerate the first ten amendments as the Bill of Rights, but many Supreme Court opinions say that only the first eight or first nine amendments. Why was that and why did that change? The Bill of Rights that emerges from Magliocca's fresh historical examination is a living text that means something different for each generation and reflects the great ideas of the Constitution--individual freedom, democracy, states' rights, judicial review, and national power in time of crisis.

Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South


Kimberly M Welch - 2018
    They sued to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in conflicts over property and personal status. And they often won. Based on new research conducted in courthouse basements and storage sheds in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, Kimberly Welch draws on over 1,000 examples of free and enslaved black litigants who used the courts to protect their interests and reconfigure their place in a tense society.To understand their success, Welch argues that we must understand the language that they used--the language of property, in particular--to make their claims recognizable and persuasive to others and to link their status as owner to the ideal of a free, autonomous citizen. In telling their stories, Welch reveals a previously unknown world of black legal activity, one that is consequential for understanding the long history of race, rights, and civic inclusion in America.

Working for Yourself: Law & Taxes for Independent Contractors, Freelancers & Gig Workers of All Types


Stephen Fishman - 2018
    This excellent, well-organized reference will show you how to: decide the best form for your business (sole proprietor, LLC, or other) make sure you’re paid in full and on time pay estimated taxes (and avoid trouble with the IRS) take advantage of all available tax deductions available under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act choose health, property, and other kinds of insurance keep accurate records in case you get audited, and write legally binding contracts and letter agreements. Tired of doing endless web searches for legal and tax information? Want one easy-to-use and authoritative resource for everything you need to start and run your business? This book is for you.

Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers: Lives in the Law


Jill Norgren - 2018
    Many of these stories are being told for the first time. As adults these women were on the front lines fighting for access to law schools and good legal careers. They challenged established rules and broke the law's glass ceiling.Norgren uses these interviews to describe the profound changes that began in the late 1960s, interweaving social and legal history with the women's individual experiences.In 1950, when many of the subjects of this book were children, the terms of engagement were clear: only a few women would be admitted each year to American law schools and after graduation their professional opportunities would never equal those open to similarly qualified men. Harvard Law School did not even begin to admit women until 1950. At many law schools, well into the 1970s, men told female students that they were taking a place that might be better used by a male student who would have a career, not babies.In 2005 the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession initiated a national oral history project named the Women Trailblazers in the Law initiative: One hundred outstanding senior women lawyers were asked to give their personal and professional histories in interviews conducted by younger colleagues. The interviews, made available to the author, permit these women to be written into history in their words, words that evoke pain as well as celebration, humor, and somber reflection. These are women attorneys who, in courtrooms, classrooms, government agencies, and NGOs have rattled the world with insistent and successful demands to reshape their profession and their society. They are women who brought nothing short of a revolution to the profession of law.

Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies


Woodrow Hartzog - 2018
    Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship


Carrie Hyde - 2018
    political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship--as much as its scope--was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States.Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions--political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature--to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its "negative civic exemplars"--expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects.By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.

On the Spirit of Rights


Dan Edelstein - 2018
    Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?   In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Independence Corrupted: How America's Judges Make Their Decisions


Charles B Schudson - 2018
    With engaging candor, he takes readers behind the bench to probe judicial minds analyzing actual trials and sentencings—of abortion protesters, murderers, sex predators, white supremacists, and others. He takes us into chambers to hear judges forging appellate decisions about life and death, multimillion-dollar damages, and priceless civil rights. And, most significantly, he exposes the financial, political, personal, and professional pressures that threaten judicial ethics and independence.As political attacks on judges increase, Schudson calls for reforms to protect judicial independence and for vigilance to ensure justice for all. Independence Corrupted is invaluable for students and scholars, lawyers and judges, and all citizens concerned about the future of America's courts.

The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmasastra


Patrick Olivelle - 2018
    Part one provides a concise overview of the literary genres in which Dharmasastra was writtenwith attention to chronology and historical developments. This study divides the tradition into its two major historical periods -- the origins and formation of the classical texts and the later genres of commentary and digest -- in order to provide a thorough, but manageable overview of the textualbases of the tradition. Part two presents descriptive and historical studies of all the major substantive topics of Dharmasastra. Each chapter offers readers with direct knowledge of the debates, transformations, and fluctuating importance of each topic. Readers will also gain insight into the ethosor worldview of religious law in Hinduism, enabling them to get a feel for how dharma authors thought and why. Part three contains brief studies of the impact and reception of Dharmasastra in other South Asian cultural and textual traditions. Part four draws inspiration from critical terms incontemporary legal and religious studies to analyze Dharmasastra texts. Contributors offer interpretive views of Dharmasastra that start from hermeneutic and social concerns today.

Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire


Sam Erman - 2018
    As America became an overseas empire, a handful of remarkable Puerto Ricans debated with US legislators, presidents, judges, and others over who was a citizen and what citizenship meant. This struggle caused a fundamental shift in constitution law: away from the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood, and toward doctrines that accommodated racist imperial governance. Erman's gripping account shows how, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, administrators, lawmakers, and presidents together with judges deployed creativity and ambiguity to transform constitutional meaning for a quarter of a century. The result is a history in which the United States and Latin America, Reconstruction and empire, and law and bureaucracy intertwine.

The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics


Kaushik Basu - 2018
    

From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy


Sarah B. Snyder - 2018
    At a time of increased concern for the rights of their fellow citizens--civil and political rights, as well as the social and economic rights that Great Society programs sought to secure--many Americans saw inconsistencies between domestic and foreign policy and advocated for a new approach. The activism that arose from the upheavals of the 1960s fundamentally altered U.S. foreign policy--yet previous accounts have often overlooked its crucial role.In From Selma to Moscow, Sarah B. Snyder traces the influence of human rights activists and advances a new interpretation of U.S. foreign policy in the "long 1960s." She shows how transnational connections and social movements spurred American activism that achieved legislation that curbed military and economic assistance to repressive governments, created institutions to monitor human rights around the world, and enshrined human rights in U.S. foreign policy making for years to come. Snyder analyzes how Americans responded to repression in the Soviet Union, racial discrimination in Southern Rhodesia, authoritarianism in South Korea, and coups in Greece and Chile. By highlighting the importance of nonstate and lower-level actors, Snyder shows how this activism established the networks and tactics critical to the institutionalization of human rights. A major work of international and transnational history, From Selma to Moscow reshapes our understanding of the role of human rights activism in transforming U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s and highlights timely lessons for those seeking to promote a policy agenda resisted by the White House.

Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese American Rights


Charles Wollenberg - 2018
    Wayne Collins made a somewhat unlikely hero. An Irish American lawyer with a volatile temper, Collins’s passionate commitment to the nation’s constitutional principles put him in opposition to not only the United States government but also groups that acquiesced to internment such as the national office of the ACLU and the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League. Through careful research and legal analysis, Charles Wollenberg takes readers through each case, and offers readers an understanding of how Collins came to be the most effective defender of the rights and liberties of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese American population. Wollenberg portrays Collins not as a white knight but as a tough, sometimes difficult man whose battles gave people of Japanese descent the foundation on which to construct their own powerful campaigns for redress.

A Death in Hong Kong: The MacLennan Case of 1980 and the Suppression of a Scandal


Nigel Collett - 2018
    His death came mere hours before he was to be arrested for committing homosexual acts still, at that point, illegal in Hong Kong. But this was more than the desperate act of a young man, ashamed and afraid; both his death and the subsequent investigation were a smokescreen for a scandal that went to the heart of the establishment. MacLennan came to Hong Kong from Scotland during a time of social unrest and corruption scandals, a time when the triads still took their cut, and when homosexuality and paedophilia were considered interchangeable and both offered easy targets for blackmail. The governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose was to be a time of reform and progress, but with that remit came the determination of many to suppress scandals and silence those who stirred up trouble. Both the life and death of John MacLennan seemed to many of those in power to threaten the stability of one of Britain’s last colonies.

A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America's First Mental Health Court


Ginger Lerner-Wren - 2018
    Unable to do more than offer guidance, she watched families being torn apart as client after client was ensnared in the criminal justice system for crimes committed as a result of addiction, homelessness, and severe mental illness. She soon learned that this was not an isolated issue--The Treatment Advocacy Center estimates that in 44 states, jails and prisons house ten times as many people with serious mental illnesses than state psychiatric hospitals.In Mental Health Courts, Judge Lerner-Wren tells the story of how the court grew from an offshoot of her criminal division held during lunch hour without the aid of any federal funding, to a revolutionary institution that has successfully diverted more than 17,000 people with serious mental illness from jail and into treatment facilities and other community resources. Working under the theoretical framework of therapeutic jurisprudence, Judge Wren and her growing network of fierce, determined advocates, families, and supporters sparked a national movement of using courts as a place of healing.Poignant and sharp, Lerner-Wren demonstrates that though mental health courts offer some relief in underserved communities, they can only serve as a single piece of a new focus on the vast overhaul of the policies that got us here. Lerner-Wren crafts a refreshing possibility for a future where our legal system and mental health infrastructure work in step to decriminalize rather than stigmatize.

California Greenin': How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader


David Vogel - 2018
    How has this state, more than any other, enacted so many innovative and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time? The first comprehensive look at California's history of environmental leadership, California Greenin' shows why the Golden State has been at the forefront in setting new environmental standards, often leading the rest of the nation.From the establishment of Yosemite, America's first protected wilderness, and the prohibition of dumping gold-mining debris in the nineteenth century to sweeping climate- change legislation in the twenty-first, David Vogel traces California's remarkable environmental policy trajectory. He explains that this pathbreaking role developed because California had more to lose from environmental deterioration and more to gain from preserving its stunning natural geography. As a result, citizens and civic groups effectively mobilized to protect and restore their state's natural beauty and, importantly, were often backed both by business interests and strong regulatory authorities. Business support for environmental regulation in California reveals that strict standards are not only compatible with economic growth but can also contribute to it. Vogel also examines areas where California has fallen short, particularly in water management and the state's dependence on automobile transportation.As environmental policy debates continue to grow more heated, California Greenin' demonstrates that the Golden State's impressive record of environmental accomplishments holds lessons not just for the country but for the world.

Excessive Force: Toronto's Fight to Reform City Policing


Alok Mukherjee - 2018
    In this provocative and highly readable collaboration with Tim Harper, former Toronto Star national affairs columnist, Mukherjee reveals how Police Chief Bill Blair changed the channel after the police-killing of Sammy Yatim. He explains how society has given police tacit approval to cull people in mental health crisis and pulls the curtain back on a police culture which avoids accountability, puts officer safety above public safety, colludes on internal investigations and pushes for use of force over empathy and crisis resolution.The book takes the reader inside the G20 debacle; the police push for an ever-growing budget; the battle over carding, which disproportionately targeted blacks; the police treatment of its own members in mental health distress; and the battles with an entrenched union that pushed back on Mukherjee’s every move toward reform. In spite of, or as a result of all this, Mukherjee played a leading role in shaping the national conversation about policing, sketching a way forward for a new type of policing that brings law enforcement out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century.There is no shortage of “inside” police books written by former cops. Here is a rare title—not only in Canada but the Western world—written from the community’s perspective.

How to Save a Constitutional Democracy


Tom Ginsburg - 2018
    Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self-rule. In the United States, the tenure of Donald Trump has seemed decisive turning point for many. What kind of president intimidates jurors, calls the news media the “enemy of the American people,” and seeks foreign assistance investigating domestic political rivals? Whatever one thinks of President Trump, many think the Constitution will safeguard us from lasting damage. But is that assumption justified?How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to be complacent. Drawing on a rich array of other countries’ experiences with democratic backsliding, Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq show how constitutional rules can both hinder and hasten the decline of democratic institutions. The checks and balances of the federal government, a robust civil society and media, and individual rights—such as those enshrined in the First Amendment—often fail as bulwarks against democratic decline. The sobering reality for the United States, Ginsburg and Huq contend, is that the Constitution’s design makes democratic erosion more, not less, likely. Its structural rigidity has had unforeseen consequence—leaving the presidency weakly regulated and empowering the Supreme Court conjure up doctrines that ultimately facilitate rather than inhibit rights violations. Even the bright spots in the Constitution—the First Amendment, for example—may have perverse consequences in the hands of a deft communicator who can degrade the public sphere by wielding hateful language banned in many other democracies. We—and the rest of the world—can do better. The authors conclude by laying out practical steps for how laws and constitutional design can play a more positive role in managing the risk of democratic decline.

Law Versus Power: Our Global Fight for Human Rights


Wolfgang Kaleck - 2018
    Until then, we can be grateful that he has chosen to write this account of struggles well fought.” —Edward SnowdenWolfgang Kaleck, best known as Edward Snowden’s lawyer, is a human rights activist extraordinaire. For more than two decades, he has travelled the world to fight alongside those suffering injustice at the hands of powerful players, people who, prior to the arrival of Kaleck and his colleagues, often enjoyed impunity.Kaleck’s work has taken him to Buenos Aires, to stand with the mothers of youngsters “disappeared” under the Argentinian military dictatorship; to exiled Syrian communities, where he assembled the case against torture mandated by those high up in the Assad government; to Central America, where he collaborated with those pursuing the Guatemalan military for its massacres of indigenous people; to New York, to partner with the Center for Constitutional Rights in taking action against Donald Rumsfeld for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” he greenlighted after 9/11; and to Moscow, where he represents the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, “a likeable man whose talents go far beyond his technical skills.”In recounting his involvement in such cases, Kaleck gives full voice to those he is representing, emphasizing the courage and persistence they bring to the global search for justice. The result is a book crammed with compelling and vivid stories, underscoring the notion that, while the world is often a terrible place, universal standards of human rights can prevail when people are willing to struggle for them.

Sharia Compliant: A User's Guide to Hacking Islamic Law


Rumee Ahmed - 2018
    This book covers the ins and outs of Islamic legal change and provides readers with step-by-step instructions for shaping the future of Islamic law.

Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business


Robert D. Atkinson - 2018
    Small business is not responsible for most of the country's job creation and innovation. American democracy does not depend on the existence of brave bands of self-employed citizens. Small businesses are not systematically discriminated against by government policy makers. Rather, Atkinson and Lind argue, small businesses are not the font of jobs, because most small businesses fail. The only kind of small firm that contributes to technological innovation is the technological start-up, and its success depends on scaling up. The idea that self-employed citizens are the foundation of democracy is a relic of Jeffersonian dreams of an agrarian society. And governments, motivated by a confused mix of populist and free market ideology, in fact go out of their way to promote small business. Every modern president has sung the praises of small business, and every modern president, according to Atkinson and Lind, has been wrong.Pointing to the advantages of scale for job creation, productivity, innovation, and virtually all other economic benefits, Atkinson and Lind argue for a "size neutral" policy approach both in the United States and around the world that would encourage growth rather than enshrine an anachronism. If we overthrow the "small is beautiful" ideology, we will be able to recognize large firms as the engines of progress and prosperity that they are.

Complex Battlespaces: The Law of Armed Conflict and the Dynamics of Modern Warfare


United States Military Academy - 2018
    As the nature of how and where wars are fought changes, new challenges to the application of the extant body of international law that regulates armed conflictsarise. This inaugural volume of the Lieber Studies Series seeks to address several issues in the confluence of law and armed conflict, with the primary goal of providing the reader with both academic and practitioner perspectives.Featuring chapters from world class scholars, policymakers and other government officials; military and civilian legal practitioners; and other thought leaders, together they examine the role of the law of armed conflict in current and future armed conflicts around the world. Complex Battlespacesalso explores several examples of battlespace dynamics through four lenses of complexity: complexity in legal regimes, governance, technology, and the urbanization of the battlefield.

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales


Robin Chapman Stacey - 2018
    She argues that for jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively.Historians disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.

Homo Religiosus?: Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience


Timothy Samuel Shah - 2018
    The contributors to this original and important volume present individual, sometimes opposing points of view on the naturalness of religion thesis and its implications for religious freedom. Topics include the epistemological foundations of religion, the relationship between religion and health, and a discussion of the philosophical foundations of religious freedom as a natural, universal right, drawing implications for the normative role of religion in public life. By challenging dominant intellectual paradigms, such as the secularization thesis and the Enlightenment view of religion, the volume opens the door to a powerful and provocative reconceptualization of religious freedom.

Human Rights Futures


Stephen Hopgood - 2018
    They ask what makes human rights effective, what strategies will enhance the chances of compliance, what blocks progress, and whether the hope for human rights is entirely misplaced in a rapidly transforming world. Human Rights Futures sees the world as at a crucial juncture. The project for globalizing rights will either continue to be embedded or will fall backward into a maelstrom of nationalist backlash, religious resurgence and faltering Western power. Each chapter talks directly to the others in an interactive dialogue, providing a theoretical and methodological framework for a clear research agenda for the next decade. Scholars, graduate students and practitioners of political science, history, sociology, law and development will find much to both challenge and provoke them in this innovative book.