Book picks similar to
The Grasping Hand: "Kelo v. City of New London" and the Limits of Eminent Domain by Ilya Somin
law
a-whole-book-about-what
econ
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The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business
Umair Haque - 2011
Trillions of dollars of financial assets and shareholder value destroyed; worldwide GDP stalled; new jobs vanishingly scarce. But this isn’t just a severe recession. It’s evidence that our economic institutions are obsolete—a set of ideas inherited from the industrial age that no longer work for business, people, society, or the future.In The New Capitalist Manifesto, economic strategist Umair Haque argues that business as usual has outgrown the old paradigm of short-term growth, competition at all costs, adversarial strategy, and pushing costs onto future generations. These outworn assumptions are good for creating only “thin” value—gains that are largely illusory and produce diminishing returns every year. For “thick” value—enduring, meaningful, sustainable advantage that deeply benefits the larger society—Haque details five new cornerstones of prosperity in the twenty-first century:•Loss advantage: From value chains to value cycles•Responsiveness: From value propositions to value conversations•Resilience: From strategy to philosophy•Creativity: From protecting a marketplace to completing a marketplace•Difference: From goods to bettersThe New Capitalist Manifesto makes a passionate, razor-sharp economic case that these methods will produce a more enduring prosperity for business as well as society.
Fighting for Dear Life: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo and What It Means for All of Us
David Gibbs - 2006
Lead attorney for Terri Schiavo, the author explains how Terri Schiavo's death changed his life, why it should never have happened, and why value of life issues are critical for Christians to understand.
John F. Kennedy’s Women: The Story of a Sexual Obsession
Michael O'Brien - 2011
Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized. Michael O’Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, here takes a comprehensive look at the feature of Camelot that remained largely under the radar during the White House years: Kennedy’s womanizing. Indeed, O’Brien writes, Kennedy’s approach to women and sex was near pathological, beyond the farthest reaches of the media’s imagination at the time. The record makes for an astonishing piece of presidential history.---Michael O’Brien was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He is the author of the widely praised John F. Kennedy: A Biography, a full-scale study based on eleven years’ research into letters, diaries, financial papers, medical records, manuscripts, and oral histories; and a concise analytical life of the president, Rethinking Kennedy. He is now emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley, and lives in Door County, Wisconsin.
Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away with Murder
Vincent Bugliosi - 1996
J. Simpson case that no one dared to write, that no one else could write. In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter, goes to the heart of the trial that divided the country and made a mockery of justice. He lays out the mountains of evidence; rebuts the defense; offers a thrilling summation; condemns the monumental blunders of the judge, the "Dream Team," and the media; and exposes, for the first time anywhere, the shocking incompetence of the prosecution.
The Supremes' Greatest Hits: The 34 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life
Michael G. Trachtman - 2006
Here are 34 of the most significant issues it has grappled with—from equal rights to privacy rights, from the limits of speech to the boundaries between church and state. Many of these cases read like thrillers…right down to their cliff-hanging endings. Among the most intriguing: the Dred Scott decision, Miranda v. Arizona, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore.
Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else
David Cay Johnston - 2003
Tax policies and their enforcement have become a disaster, and thanks to discreet lobbying by a segment of the top 1 percent, Washington is reluctant or unable to fix them. The corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax have been largely ignored by the media. But the cumulative results are remarkable: today someone who earns a yearly salary of $60,000 pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the four hundred richest Americans.Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston exposes exactly how the middle class is being squeezed to create a widening wealth gap that threatens the stability of the country. By relating the compelling tales of real people across all areas of society, he reveals the truth behind:- Middle class tax cuts and exactly whom they benefit. - How workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while disgraced CEOs walk away with millions. - How some corporations avoid paying any federal income tax. - How a law meant to prevent cheating by the top 2 percent of Americans no longer affects most of them, but has morphed into a stealth tax on single mothers making just $28,000. - Why the working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than everyone else. - How the IRS became so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive cheating by 1,600 people, it prosecuted only 4 percent of them.Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of The New York Times for seven years. With Perfectly Legal, he puts the whole shocking narrative together in a way that will stir up media attention and make readers angry about the state of our country.
The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier
Terry L. Anderson - 2004
In contrast, The Not So Wild, Wild West casts America's frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. Rather than describing the frontier as a place where heroes met villains, this book argues that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West.The authors emphasize that ownership of resources evolves as those resources become more valuable or as establishing property rights becomes less costly. Rules evolving at the local level will be more effective because local people have a greater stake in the outcome. This theory is brought to life in the colorful history of Indians, fur trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle drovers, homesteaders, and miners. The book concludes with a chapter that takes lessons from the American frontier and applies them to our modern "frontiers"—the environment, developing countries, and space exploration.
An Economic Theory of Democracy
Anthony Downs - 1957
Downs treats this differently than do other students of politics. His explanations are systematically related to, and deductible from, precisely stated assumptions about the motivations that attend the decisions of voters and parties and the environment in which they act. He is consciously concerned with the economy in explanation, that is, with attempting to account for phenomena in terms of a very limited number of facts and postulates. He is concerned also with the central features of party politics in any democratic state, not with that in the United State or any other single country. I. BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE MODEL. 1. Introduction. 2. Party Motivation and the Function of Government in Society. 3. The Basic Logic of Voting. 4. The Basic Logic of Government Decision-Making. II. THE GENERAL EFFECTS OF UNCERTAINTY. 5. The Meaning of Uncertainty. 6. How Uncertainty Affects Government Decision-Making. 7. The Development of Political Ideologies as Means of Getting Votes. 8. The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideologies 9. Problems of Rationality Under Coalition Governments. 10. Government Vote-Maximizing and Individual marginal Equilibrium. III. SPECIFIC EFFECTS OF INFORMATION COSTS. 11. The Process of Becoming Informed. 12. How Rational Citizens Reduce Information Costs. 13. The Returns From Information and Their Diminution. 14. The Causes and Effects of Rational Abstention. IV. DERIVATIVE IMPLICATIONS AND HYPOTHESIS. 15. A Comment on Economic Theories of Government Behavior. 16. Testable Prepositions Derived from the Theory.
Murder on the Malta Express: Who Killed Daphne Caruana Galizia?
Carlo Bonini - 2019
She was Malta’s most fearless journalist until someone with money and power decided that she should be silenced forever. Her assassination was a brutal blow to anyone who cares about the truth.Their book sets out the evidence on the dirty money merchants exposed by Daphne Caruana Galizia. It is written in her honour.
The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian - 2015
1, and creator of the World Passport, was a former Broadway actor and World War II bomber pilot who renounced his American citizenship in 1948 as a form of protest against nationalism, sovereign borders, and war. Today there are cosmopolites of all stripes, rich or poor, intentional or unwitting, from 1-percenters who own five passports thanks to tax-havens to the Bidoon, the stateless people of countries like the United Arab Emirates. Journalist Atossa Abrahamian, herself a cosmopolite, travels around the globe to meet the people who have come to embody an increasingly fluid, borderless world.Along the way you are introduced to a colorful cast of characters, including passport-burning atheist hackers, the new Knights of Malta, California libertarian "seasteaders," who are residents of floating city-states, Bidoons, who have been forced to be citizens of the island nation Comoros, entrepreneurs in the business of buying and selling passports, cosmopolites who live on a luxury cruise ship called The World, and shady businessmen with ties to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.
Illusion of Justice: Inside Making a Murderer and America's Broken System
Jerome F. Buting - 2017
Buting explains the flaws in America’s criminal justice system and lays out a provocative, persuasive blue-print for reform.Over his career, Jerome F. Buting has spent hundreds of hours in courtrooms representing defendants in criminal trials. When he agreed to join Dean Strang as co-counsel for the defense in Steven A. Avery vs. State of Wisconsin, he knew a tough fight lay ahead. But, as he reveals in Illusion of Justice, no-one could have predicted just how tough and twisted that fight would be—or that it would become the center of the documentary Making a Murderer, which made Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey household names and thrust Buting into the spotlight.Buting’s powerful, riveting boots-on-the-ground narrative of Avery’s and Dassey’s cases becomes a springboard to examine the shaky integrity of law enforcement and justice in the United States, which Buting has witnessed firsthand for more than 35 years. From his early career as a public defender to his success overturning wrongful convictions working with the Innocence Project, his story provides a compelling expert view into the high-stakes arena of criminal defense law; the difficulties of forensic science; and a horrifying reality of biased interrogations, coerced or false confessions, faulty eyewitness testimony, official misconduct, and more.Combining narrative reportage with critical commentary and personal reflection, Buting explores his professional and personal motivations, career-defining cases—including his shocking fifteen-year-long fight to clear the name of another man wrongly accused and convicted of murder—and what must happen if our broken system is to be saved. Taking a place beside Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow, Illusion of Justice is a tour-de-force from a relentless and eloquent advocate for justice who is determined to fulfill his professional responsibility and, in the face of overwhelming odds, make America’s judicial system work as it is designed to do.
Questioning Islam: Tough Questions & Honest Answers About the Muslim Religion
Peter Townsend - 2014
Among these questions the most important one of all sometimes gets lost: Is Islam true? With his new book author Peter Townsend invites you to accompany him on a journey through the foundational texts of the Muslim religion. In the process the truth-claims of Islam will be respectfully, honestly and impartially evaluated. Along the way the following questions will be asked: - Can the traditional Islamic historical accounts be trusted? - Is the Qur'an a 'Perfect Book, Perfectly Preserved'? - Was Muhammad indeed a 'Beautiful Pattern of Conduct'? The answers to these questions will not be sought from modern commentaries on Islam. Instead Questioning Islam goes straight to the classic sources of Islam namely the Qur'an, hadiths (traditions) and biographies of Muhammad. Questioning Islam is not an attempt to promote any other belief system or ideology. Its focus is simply on asking the hard questions about Islam that are all too often ignored or swept under the carpet. Simply put, if you have ever wondered whether the truth-claims of Islam can withstand critical scrutiny then this book is for you!
Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage
Daria Roithmayr - 2014
Long after the passage of civil rights laws and now the inauguration of our first black president, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why have we made so little progress? Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial inequality lives on because white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disciplines, Roithmayr brilliantly compares the dynamics of white advantage to the unfair tactics of giants like AT&T and Microsoft. With penetrating insight, Roithmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in positive feedback loops that connect the dramatic disparity of Jim Crow to modern racial gaps in jobs, housing and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors. Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers immediately take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system. Daria Roithmayr is the George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. An internationally acclaimed legal scholar and activist, she is one of the country’s leading voices on the legal analysis of structural racial inequality. Prior to joining USC, Professor Roithmayr advised Senator Edward Kennedy on the nominations of Clarence Thomas and David Souter, and taught law at the University of Illinois.
Profiling Violent Crimes: An Investigative Tool
Ronald M. Holmes - 1989
New chapters cover criminal behavior theories and psychological profiling; autoerotic deaths, and occult crimes, plus two new chapters detailing infamous unsolved crimes/criminals: Jack the Ripper and the Jon Benet Ramsey case. The authors′ continuing research and activities in the field result in a multitude of new case studies for this book, often included as boxed inserts.
The Pentagon Papers: Making History at the Washington Post (A Vintage Short)
Katharine Graham - 2017
After inheriting the Post from her father, and assuming its leadership in 1963 after the death of her husband, Graham found herself unexpectedly playing a role in history. Here she recounts the riveting episodes that transformed a shy widow into a newspaper legend, as she defied the government to publish the Pentagon Papers’ secrets about the Vietnam War and then led the way in exposing the Watergate scandal. Graham gives us an intimate behind-the-scenes view of the tense debates and high stakes she and her editors faced, and concludes with a powerful argument for the freedom of the press as a bulwark against abuses of power. An ebook short.