BiblioVault - Books about Do Justice

A Power to Do Justice

Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law

Bradin Cormack

University of Chicago Press, 2008

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts.
A Power to Do Justice shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality.

Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

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To Do Justice

The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes

Randall C. Jimerson

University of Alabama Press, 2022

Biography of a civil rights activist who worked tirelessly at the heart of two social and political revolutions

A native Alabamian, Reverend Robert E. Hughes worked full-time in the civil rights movement as executive director of the Alabama Council of Human Relations, where he developed a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After facing backlash from the Ku Klux Klan, spending four days in jail for refusing to disclose ACHR membership lists, and ultimately being forced to leave the state of Alabama, he served as a Methodist missionary in Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe). After two years of organizing Black liberation groups, he was banned as a “prohibited immigrant” by the Ian Smith government. His lifelong commitment to social justice, racial equality, and peaceful resolution of conflicts marks a fascinating career richly documented in this comprehensive biography.

To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes traces the life and career of an admirable and lesser-known civil rights figure who fought injustice on two continents. This account presents valuable new evidence about the civil rights movement in the United States as well as human rights and liberation issues in colonial Southern Rhodesia in the years leading up to independence and self-rule. It provides an intimate portrait of a courageous individual who worked outside of the public spotlight but provided essential support and informational resources to public activists and news reporters
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Randall C. Jimerson explores the interwoven threads of race relations and religious beliefs on two continents, focusing on the dual themes of the American civil rights movement and the African struggles for decolonization and majority rule. The life and career of Robert Hughes provide insight into the international dimensions of racial prejudice and discrimination that can be viewed in comparative context to similar oppressions in other colonial lands.

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Venturing to Do Justice

Reforming Private Law

Robert E. Keeton

Harvard University Press, 1969

Since 1958 state courts of last resort in the United States have handed down a notably larger number of overruling decisions than ever before. This distinctive record raises many questions about how and by whom law reform should be effected. Mr. Keeton examines this issue in relation to private law the branch of law concerned with the rights and duties of private individuals toward each other, enforceable through civil proceedings.

In the first part of this book, the author reviews methods of law reform. He focuses on the role of the courts and legislatures as agencies of abrupt change; the remarkable rate at which the role of the courts has grown; and the means by which courts may discharge their increased responsibility for changing private law to meet contemporary needs. He strongly urges a more active and imaginative participation in law reform by both courts and legislatures, and proposes concrete methods for achieving it.

In the second part of this book, Mr. Keeton concentrates on reform in two important areas of private law: harms caused by defective products and by traffic accidents. He considers the developing rules for strict liability, and discusses the issues of principle underlying the basic protection plan for traffic victims--a proposal, of which he is co-author, which is under consideration in a number of state legislatures.

The closing chapter treats problems stemming from the necessity of blending the old with the new when private law reform is undertaken. This discussion stresses one of the book's recurring themes: the need to balance stability and predictability of law with flexibility and reform.

The author disposes of some misconceptions about the role of public policy in a workable legal system-misconceptions that sometimes affect the attitudes and thinking not only of professionals in the field of law, but also of those who see the system from the outside.

This book contains controversial ideas that will be of interest to all who are concerned with law reform, whether professionally or as informed citizens.

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