The author tackles a wide range of issues, from the democratic case against book banning to the role of teachers' unions in education, as well as the vexed questions of public support for private schools and affirmative action in college admissions.

    Self-serving monarchic social systems, which collectively reduced common people to servitude, were now attacked by Enlightenment philosophers, of whom Rouseau was a leading light.His masterpiece, The Social Contract, profoundly influenced the subsequent development of society and remains provocative in a modern age of continuing widespread vested interest. This is the most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes, index and chronology of Rousseau's life and times.

    She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.

    This new translation of the Treatise on Law offers fidelity to the Latin in a readable new version that will prove useful to students of the natural law tradition in ethics, political theory, and jurisprudence, as well as to students of Western intellectual history.

    It argues for an alternative to political theology, one that is more politically constructive than the dominant models of the past generation.

    rarely had time to answer his critics. But on April 16, 1963, he was confined to the Birmingham jail, serving a sentence for participating in civil rights demonstrations. "Alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell," King pondered a letter that fellow clergymen had published urging him to drop his campaign of nonviolent resistance and to leave the battle for racial equality to the courts. In response, King drafted his most extensive and forceful written statement against social injustice - a remarkable essay that focused the world's attention on Birmingham and spurred the famous March on Washington. Bristling with the energy and resonance of his great speeches, Letter from the Birmingham Jail is both a compelling defense of nonviolent demonstration and a rallying cry for an end to social discrimination that is just as powerful today as it was more than twenty years ago.

    He studies a variety of conflicts over the course of history, as well as the testimony of those who have been most directly involved--participants, decision makers, and victims. In his introduction to this new edition, Walzer specifically addresses the moral issues surrounding the war in and occupation of Iraq, reminding us once again that "the argument about war and justice is still a political and moral necessity."

    And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind.The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen's analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is "more" or "less" just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.At the heart of Sen's argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a "just society" really is. People of different persuasions--for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no--nonsense libertarians--might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.

    Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.

     WINNER OF THE CHRISTIAN BOOK AWARD(R) - THE GOSPEL COALITION'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR, PUBLIC THEOLOGY & CURRENT EVENTS - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WORLD MAGAZINE Many Americans feel like their religious freedom is under attack. They see the culture changing around them, and they fear that their beliefs will soon be punished as a form of bigotry. Others think these fears are overblown and say Christians should stop complaining about imaginary persecution.In Free to Believe leading religious freedom attorney Luke Goodrich challenges both sides of this debate, offering a fresh perspective on the most controversial religious freedom conflicts today. With penetrating insights on gay rights, abortion rights, Islam, and the public square, Goodrich argues that threats to religious freedom are real--but they might not be quite what you think.As a lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Goodrich has won several historic Supreme Court victories for clients such as the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby. Combining frontline experience with faithful attention to Scripture, Goodrich shows why religious freedom matters, how it is threatened, and how to protect it. The result is a groundbreaking book full of clear insight, practical wisdom, and refreshing hope for all people of faith.

    The idea of the rule of law as the foundation of modern states and civilisations has recently become even more talismanic than that of democracy, but what does it actually consist of?In this brilliant short book, Britain's former senior law lord, and one of the world's most acute legal minds, examines what the idea actually means. He makes clear that the rule of law is not an arid legal doctrine but is the foundation of a fair and just society, is a guarantee of responsible government, is an important contribution to economic growth and offers the best means yet devised for securing peace and co-operation. He briefly examines the historical origins of the rule, and then advances eight conditions which capture its essence as understood in western democracies today. He also discusses the strains imposed on the rule of law by the threat and experience of international terrorism.The book will be influential in many different fields and should become a key text for anyone interested in politics, society and the state of our world.

    The principles of individual liberty, the rule of law, government by consent of the people, and the right to private property are taken for granted as fundamental to the human condition now. Most liberal theorists writing today look back to Locke as the source of their ideas. Some maintain that religious fundamentalism, "post-modernism," and socialism are today the only remaining ideological threats to liberalism. To the extent that this is true, these ideologies are ultimately attacks on the ideas that Locke, arguably more than any other, helped to make the universal vocabulary of political discourse.

    In addition to a revised and extended introduction, this expanded Cambridge Texts edition contains an extensive guide to further reading and an index of names with biographical notes. Presentation of The Politics and The Constitution of Athens in a single volume will make this the most attractive and convenient student edition of these seminal works currently available.

    This development Jouvenel traces all the way back to the days of royal absolutism, which established large administrative bureaucracies and thus laid the foundation of the modern omnipotent state.On Power is an important work that Professor Angelo M. Petroni of the Luigi Einaudi Center for Research in Torino, Italy, has said is "simply a book that no serious scholar of political science or political philosophy can afford to ignore."Bertrand de Jouvenel was born in Paris in 1903; he traveled widely, becoming an astute observer of British and American institutions. Later in life, he was an author and teacher, first publishing On Power in 1945. Jouvenel died in 1987. Among his other books, besides The Ethics of Redistribution, are Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (1957) and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963).

    Now newly published in paperback with an extensive list of web links to wrongful conviction sources internationally, "False Justice "is ideal for use in a wide array of criminal justice and criminology courses.Myth 1: Everyone in prison claims innocence. In fact, guilt is usually clear and undisputed either because the criminal was caught in the act, left substantial evidence, or made the decision to take a plea. While taking a plea does not assure guilt, often a combination of the above reveals the soundness of the defendant s decision to plead rather than go to trial. Lauren McGarity, a mediator, conflict resolution expert, and educator who has worked with hundreds of Ohio inmates for ten years, dispelled this myth for us in "False Justice."Myth 2: Our system almost never convicts an innocent person. We mined and share the research and opinion of both conservatives and liberals, and we have concluded that the 311 persons exonerated of serious felonies to date, December 12, 2013, by DNA technology (which was first employed in criminal forensics in the U.S. in the late 1980s) must be the tip of the iceberg, a phrase commonly mentioned in our research. Following the Elkins experience, Nancy and I suspected a substantial number of innocent people in our prisons, but our research required that we frequently revise our thinking upward. Estimates have ranged from, conservatively, about one thousand to as many as tens of thousands of innocent people in American prisons today. We believe and research and logic suggest that our system convicts innocent persons far more frequently than most imagine and that most Americans, if more fully informed, would consider this a national travesty.Myth 3: Only the guilty confess. Stephen Boorn confessed to a murder in Manchester, Vermont, even though there was no trace of evidence, including a body. Boorn is not alone. "False Justice" explores what prompted Christopher Ochoa and others falsely accused of murder to incriminate themselves. We explore why the Miranda warning failed in these cases to provide intended protections.Myth 4: Wrongful conviction is the result of innocent human error. As chief legal officer of Ohio, I supervised a staff of 1,250, including 350 lawyers, who managed more than 35,000 active legal cases at a time. Yet I was totally unaware of the extent of wrongful criminal conviction, and was disappointed to learn that misconduct by police and prosecutors has contributed to many wrong verdicts. In the first edition of "False Justice" we noted that official misconduct was identified early as a contributor in DNA-proven wrongful convictions. Prosecutorial misconduct was a factor in thirty-three of the first seventy-four DNA exonerations (44.6 percent) and police misconduct was present in thirty-seven, or exactly half of those cases.3 Subsequent exonerations have supported the finding that official misconduct is a significant contributor to wrongful conviction. The National Registry of Exonerations reports at this writing (Dec. 14, 2013) 564 known cases of official misconduct both police and prosecutor and in some cases both in its universe of 1,262 exonerations, or in 44.6 percent of known exonerations since 1989.4 This book challenges thinking on what tactics should and should not be dismissed as "human error."Myth 5: An eyewitness is the best testimony. Mistaken eyewitness testimony, a contributor in 75 percent of wrongful convictions, was the prevailing contributor to wrongful conviction in the cases of Elkins, Green, Gillispie, and others included in the book. "False Justice" shares highlights of what we now know about memory and how this has shaped legislative and procedural reforms that will enable more accurate capture of eyewitness testimony.Myth 6: Conviction errors get corrected on appeal. The long, difficult, and expensive struggle to reverse a conviction is demonstrated in the Boorn, Elkins, Green, and Gillispie cases. Our appeals process addresses only certain errors that may have occurred in preparation of the case or in the courtroom. Post-conviction relief is difficult to attain in a system that properly seeks finality in the criminal process. The other route to correcting a conviction error is through new evidence, which, as indicated in Elkins and Gillispie, must meet specific requirements that are very difficult to achieve.Myth 7: It dishonors the victim to question a conviction. "False Justice" reveals that, contrary to a popular opinion, only a minority of convicted persons claim innocence and represent cases that are worthy of post-conviction DNA analysis. Prosecutors who oppose access to post-conviction DNA evidence, which could conclusively prove guilt or innocence, frequently claim that this would dishonor the victim. Public safety requires that we abandon this myth, or understand that by allowing the real perpetrators to escape justice, we contribute to an increase in crime and victims. How does "that" honor victims?Myth 8: If the justice system has problems, the pros will fix them. While most men and women who work in the criminal justice system are well meaning, committed, and deserving of our respect, they typically do not have the authority, resources, perspective, time, or inclination to change the system. "False Justice" recommends reforms achieved through legislation, policy, and court opinion. However, these will not occur with any urgency until conventional wisdom catches up with the truths revealed in this DNA age. Therefore, it will take us everyday American citizens not the pros, to accelerate this process. By abandoning myths and advocating reforms, we will not only reduce the destruction that comes with wrongful conviction but will also make the United States safer."