Book picks similar to
Introduction to European Tax Law: Direct Taxation by Michael Lang
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cocoon-of-solace-journeys
The U.S. Constitution: A Reader
Hillsdale College Politics Faculty - 2012
Constitution: A Reader was developed for teaching the core course on the U.S. Constitution at Hillsdale College. Divided into eleven sections with introductions by members of Hillsdale's Politics Department faculty, readings cover the principles of the American founding; the framing and structure of the Constitution; the secession crisis and the Civil War; the Progressive rejection of the Constitution; and the building of the administrative state based on Progressive principles.
When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
Leslie J. Reagan - 1996
Wade, it's crucial to look back to the time when abortion was illegal. Leslie J. Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion, which although illegal was nonetheless widely available, but always with threats for both doctor and patient. In a time when many young women don't even know that there was a period when abortion was a crime, this work offers chilling and vital lessons of importance to everyone. The linking of the words "abortion" and "crime" emphasizes the difficult and painful history that is the focus of Reagan's important book. Her study is the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with Roe v. Wade in 1973. Although illegal, millions of abortions were provided during these years to women of every class, race, and marital status. The experiences and perspectives of these women, as well as their physicians and midwives, are movingly portrayed here. Reagan traces the practice and policing of abortion. While abortions have been typically portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, she finds that abortion providers often practiced openly and safely. Moreover, numerous physicians performed abortions, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women often found cooperative practitioners, but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion again under attack in the United States, this book offers vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.
Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction
Andrew Clapham - 2007
Taking an international perspective, and focusing on highly topical issues such as torture, arbitrary detention, privacy, health, and discrimination, this Very Short Introduction will help readers to understand for themselves the controversies and complexities behind this vitally relevant issue. Looking at the philosophical justification for rights, the historical origins of human rights and how they are formed in law, Andrew Clapham explains what our human rights actually are, what they might be, and where the human rights movement is heading.
Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
Cyrus Farivar - 2018
That means all of the technologies that have made our lives easier, faster, better, and/or more efficient have also simultaneously made it easier to keep an eye on our activities. Or, as we recently learned from reports about Cambridge Analytica, our data might be turned into a propaganda machine against us. In 10 crucial legal cases, Habeas Data explores the tools of surveillance that exist today, how they work, and what the implications are for the future of privacy.
The Harm in Hate Speech
Jeremy Waldron - 2012
For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.Causing offense--by depicting a religious leader as a terrorist in a newspaper cartoon, for example--is not the same as launching a libelous attack on a group's dignity, according to Waldron, and it lies outside the reach of law. But defamation of a minority group, through hate speech, undermines a public good that can and should be protected: the basic assurance of inclusion in society for all members. A social environment polluted by anti-gay leaflets, Nazi banners, and burning crosses sends an implicit message to the targets of such hatred: your security is uncertain and you can expect to face humiliation and discrimination when you leave your home.Free-speech advocates boast of despising what racists say but defending to the death their right to say it. Waldron finds this emphasis on intellectual resilience misguided and points instead to the threat hate speech poses to the lives, dignity, and reputations of minority members. Finding support for his view among philosophers of the Enlightenment, Waldron asks us to move beyond knee-jerk American exceptionalism in our debates over the serious consequences of hateful speech.
The Fall of the House of Bush: How a Group of True Believers Put America on the Road to Armageddon
Craig Unger - 2007
Bush has led to the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States -- the bloody, unwinnable war in Iraq. How did this happen? Bush's fateful decision was rooted in events that began decades ago, and until now this story has never been fully told. From Craig Unger, the author of the bestseller "House of Bush, House of Saud," comes a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how they assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East that is getting worse day by day.Among the powerful revelations in this book: Why George W. Bush ignored the sage advice of his father, George H.W. Bush, and took America into war. How Bush was convinced he was doing God's will. How Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated George W. Bush, disabled his enemies within the administration, and relentlessly pressed for an attack on Iraq. Which veteran government official, with the assent of the president's father, protested passionately that the Bush administration was making a catastrophic mistake -- and was ignored. How information from forged documents that had already been discredited fourteen times by various intelligence agencies found its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in which he made the case for war with Iraq. How Cheney and the neocons assembled a shadow national security apparatus and created a disinformation pipeline to mislead America and start the war.A seasoned, award-winning investigative reporter connected to many back-channel political and intelligence sources, Craig Unger knows how to get the big story -- and this one is his most explosive yet. Through scores of interviews with figures in the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, the Bush administration, and sources close to the Bush family, as well as intelligence agents in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Israel, Unger shows how the Bush administration's certainty that it could bend history to its will has carried America into the disastrous war in Iraq, dooming Bush's presidency to failure and costing America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Far from ensuring our security, the Iraq War will be seen as a great strategic pivot point in history that could ignite wider war in the Middle East, particularly in Iran.Provocative, timely, and disturbing, "The Fall of the House of Bush" stands as the most comprehensive and dramatic account of how and why George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq.
Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt - 1948
This volume focuses on the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships
Mancur Olson - 2000
Olson contends that governments can play an essential role in the development of markets. Reliable enforcement of private contracts and protection of individual rights to property depend on governments strong enough not to undermine them. His exploration of "market-augmenting governments" will stand as a cutting-edge work on economic growth and provide a useful framework in which to consider the Asian financial crisis and its aftermath. As Susan Lee noted in Forbes, "his pioneering insights might have won a Nobel Prize for Olson had he lived a bit longer."
Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys
Matt Labash - 2010
Considered one of American’s most brilliant writers by the journalism community, this long-awaited book debut presents Labash at his very best. A latter day Leibling, Labash’s collection will take its place alongside books by writers such as Calvin Trillin and P.J. O’Rourke..• A unique voice that’s well-connected: Labash’s well-informed insights, self-deprecating wit, and provocative candor feature regularly in The Weekly Standard and have also appeared in Washingtonian Magazine , American Spectator , and on Slate.com. Extremely well-liked and respected, his media contacts are many and varied. He has declined invitations to appear on everything from HBO Sports to Meet the Press —but is finally willing to make the rounds. As LA Weekly wrote after his Detroit piece, “it’s not new to give props to Matt Labash.”.• Remarkable collection: Full of wit, insight, and a trenchant grasp of the American scoundrel, Labash’s masterful profiles of men on the nation’s fringe—Pirate Kingfish Gov. Edwin Johnson, The Right Reverend Dr. Al Sharpton, Dirty Trickster Roger Stone—are published alongside devastating pieces on such dead or dying cities as Detroit and New Orleans; work celebrating such joyous, but overlooked pockets of American culture as Revival music and Rebirth Brass Band; and scathing, hilarious briefs on the nation’s great phonies—Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Donald Trump to name a few..
The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom
Robert A. Levy - 2008
In The Dirty Dozen, two distinguished legal scholars shed light on the twelve worst cases, which allowed government to interfere in your private contractual agreements; curtail your right to criticize or support political candidates; arrest and imprison you indefinitely, without filing charges; seize your private property, without compensation, when someone uses the property for criminal activity-even if you don't know about it.
American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19
John Fabian Witt - 2020
Although he covers the broad sweep of the American experience of epidemics from yellow fever to COVID-19, he is especially timely in his exploration of the legal background to the current disaster of the American response to the coronavirus. A thought-provoking, readable, and important work.”—Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history’s answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?
Should Trees Have Standing?: Law, Morality, and the Environment
Christopher D. Stone - 1974
Supreme Court. Now, in the 35th anniversary edition of this remarkably influential book, Christopher D. Stone updates his original thesis and explores the impact his ideas have had on the courts, the academy, and society as a whole. At the heart of the book is an eminently sensible, legally sound, and compelling argument that the environment should be granted legal rights. For the new edition, Stone explores a variety of recent cases and current events--and related topics such as climate change and protecting the oceans--providing a thoughtful survey of the past and an insightful glimpse at the future of the environmental movement. This enduring work continues to serve as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights, so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations.
Too Soon To Tell
Calvin Trillin - 1995
His short takes send us back to contemporary life refreshed and delighted.
Why Socialism Works
Harrison Lievesley - 2017
Please note this book only contains two words and is entirely satire.
A Kind of Woman
Helen Burko - 2017
Barder does not return alone: with him is his new wife, Rachel, a beautiful blonde woman whom he met in Warsaw shortly after the war - a Jewish survivor who lost her entire family and remained alone in the world. Jacob fell in love with her and brought her to the states. Now he will defend her in the biggest battle of her life.
A Jewish lawyer’s wife is accused of committing Nazi war crimes
One evening, in a Broadway theater, Rachel is attacked by a woman who accuses her of being Matilda Krause - a German SS officer who served at the Nazi concentration camps. Rachel’s arrest and police investigation open the way to a sensational trial that will be written in the pages of history. With no one willing to protect a Nazi officer, Barder decides to defend his wife himself. Why would a Jewish survivor speak for a Nazi in the court of law? Barder is called to make an impossible case in the name of his beloved wife, and that of humanity altogether. The jury, the judge, and the readers will be astounded by what he has to say.