BiblioVault - Books about Courts

Cave Rock

Climbers, Courts, and a Washoe Indian Sacred Place

Matthew S. Makley

University of Nevada Press, 2010

On August 27, 2007, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier district court ruling that sport climbing on a Washoe Indian sacred site in western Nevada must cease. Cave Rock, a towering monolith jutting over the shore of Lake Tahoe, has been sacred to the Washoe people for over five thousand years. Long abused by road builders and vandals, it earned new fame in the late twentieth century as a world-class sport rock-climbing site. Over twenty years of bitter disputes and confrontation between the Washoe and the climbers ensued. The Washoe are a small community of fewer than 2,000 members; the climbers were backed by a national advocacy and lobbying group and over a hundred powerful corporations. Cave Rock follows the history of the fight between these two groups and examines the legal challenges and administrative actions that ultimately resulted in a climbing ban. After over two centuries of judicial decisions allowing federal control, economic development, or public interests to outweigh Indian claims to their sacred places, the Court’s ruling was both unprecedented and highly significant. As the authors conclude, the long-term implications of the ruling for the protection of Native rights are of equal consequence.

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Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts

Archibald Cox, Mark DeWolfe Howe, and J. R. Wiggins

Harvard University Press

The Common Flaw

Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It

Thomas G. Moukawsher

Brandeis University Press, 2023

A sitting judge makes the compelling argument that we should simplify lawsuits to create a more humane and accessible legal system.

Americans are losing faith in their courts. After long delays, judges often get rid of cases for technical reasons, or force litigants to settle rather than issue a decision. When they do decide cases, we can't understand why.

The Common Flaw seeks to rid the American lawsuit of this needless complexity. The book proposes fifty changes from the filing of a complaint in court to the drafting of appellate decisions to replace the legal system’s formalism with a kind of humanism. Thomas G. Moukawsher calls for courts that decide cases promptly based more on the facts than the law, that prioritize the parties involved over lawyers, that consider the consequences for the people and the public, and that use words we can all understand. Sure to spark an important conversation about court reform, The Common Flaw makes the case for a more effective and credible legal system with warmth and humor, incorporating cartoons alongside insightful reflection.

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The Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Voting Rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court

Christina R. Rivers

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) claim to advocate minority political interests, yet they disagree over the intent and scope of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), as well as the interpretation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Whereas the Court promotes color-blind policies, the CBC advocates race-based remedies. Setting this debate in the context of the history of black political thought, Rivers examines a series of high-profile districting cases, from Rodgers v. Lodge (1982) through NAMUDNO v. Holder (2009). She evaluates the competing approaches to racial equality and concludes, surprisingly, that an originalist, race-conscious interpretation of the 14th Amendment, along with a revised states' rights position regarding electoral districting, may better serve minority political interests.

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The Conscience of the Court

Selected Opinions of Justice William J. Brennan Jr. on Freedom and Equality

Edited by Stephen L. Sepinuck and Mary Pat Treuthart

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

The Conscience of the Court celebrates the work of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who served on the United States Supreme Court for thirty-four years (1956–1990).

Stephen L. Sepinuck and Mary Pat Treuthart introduce and present selected judicial opinions written by Justice Brennan on issues involving personal freedom, civil liberties, and equality. Brennan is ranked by many as the best writer ever to have served on the Supreme Court, and his written opinions depict real people, often in desperate, emotional situations. Remarkable for their clarity of analysis, for their eloquence, and for their forcefulness and persuasiveness, his opinions demonstrate that judicial thought need not be a proprietary enclave of lawyers or the intellectual elite.

The extended excerpts selected by Sepinuck and Treuthart highlight Brennan's approach to judicial decision making. Concerned always with how each decision would actually affect people's lives, Brennan possessed a rare quality of empathy. In Brennan, the editors note, "people and groups who lacked influence in society—Communists and flag burners, children and foreigners, criminal defendants and racial minorities"—found a champion they could count on "to listen to their causes and judge them unmoved by the passions of the politically powerful."

In their introduction to each opinion, the editors provide background facts, discuss how the excerpted opinion transformed the law or otherwise fit into the realm of constitutional jurisprudence, and delve into Justice Brennan's judicial philosophy, his method of constitutional interpretation, and the language he used.

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Constitutions, Courts, and History

Historical Narratives in Constitutional Adjudication

Renata Uitz

Central European University Press, 2005

Emphasizes the role history and historical narratives play in constitutional adjudication. Uitz provocatively draws attention to the often-tense relationship between the constitution and historical precedence highlighting the interpretive and normative nature of the law. Her work seeks to understand the conditions under which references to the past, history and traditions are attractive to lawyers, even when they have the potential of perpetuating indeterminacy in constitutional reasoning. Uitz conclusively argues that this constitutional indeterminacy is obscured by 'judicial rhetorical toolkits' of continuity and reconciliation that allow the court's reliance on the past to be unaccounted for. Uitz' rigorous analysis and extensive research makes this work an asset to legal scholars and practitioners alike.

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Courting Failure

How Competition for Big Cases Is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Courts

Lynn Lopucki

University of Michigan Press, 2006

LoPucki's provocative critique of Chapter 11 is required reading for everyone who cares about bankruptcy reform. This empirical account of large Chapter 11 cases will trigger intense debate both inside the academy and on the floor of Congress. Confronting LoPucki's controversial thesis-that competition between bankruptcy judges is corrupting them-is the most pressing challenge now facing any defender of the status quo."
-Douglas Baird, University of Chicago Law School

"This book is smart, shocking and funny. This story has everything-professional greed, wrecked companies, and embarrassed judges. Insiders are already buzzing."
-Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

"LoPucki provides a scathing attack on reorganization practice. Courting Failure recounts how lawyers, managers and judges have transformed Chapter 11. It uses empirical data to explore how the interests of the various participants have combined to create a system markedly different from the one envisioned by Congress. LoPucki not only questions the wisdom of these changes but also the free market ideology that supports much of the general regulation of the corporate sector."
-Robert Rasmussen, University of Chicago Law School

A sobering chronicle of our broken bankruptcy-court system, Courting Failure exposes yet another American institution corrupted by greed, avarice, and the thirst for power.

Lynn LoPucki's eye-opening account of the widespread and systematic decay of America's bankruptcy courts is a blockbuster story that has yet to be reported in the media. LoPucki reveals the profound corruption in the U.S. bankruptcy system and how this breakdown has directly led to the major corporate failures of the last decade, including Enron, MCI, WorldCom, and Global Crossing.

LoPucki, one of the nation's leading experts on bankruptcy law, offers a clear and compelling picture of the destructive power of "forum shopping," in which corporations choose courts that offer the most favorable outcome for bankruptcy litigation. The courts, lured by big money and prestige, streamline their requirements and lower their standards to compete for these lucrative cases. The result has been a series of increasingly shoddy reorganizations of major American corporations, proposed by greedy corporate executives and authorized by case-hungry judges.

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Courting the Community

Legitimacy and Punishment in a Community Court

Christine Zozula

Temple University Press, 2019

Community Courts are designed to handle a city’s low-level offenses and quality-of-life crimes, such as littering, loitering, or public drunkenness. Court advocates maintain that these largely victimless crimes jeopardize the well-being of residents, businesses, and visitors. Whereas traditional courts might dismiss such cases or administer a small fine, community courts aim to meaningfully punish offenders to avoid disorder escalating to apocalyptic decline.

Courting the Community is a fascinating ethnography that goes behind the scenes to explore how quality-of-life discourses are translated into court practices that marry therapeutic and rehabilitative ideas. Christine Zozula shows how residents and businesses participate in meting out justice—such as through community service, treatment, or other sanctions—making it more emotional, less detached, and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders. She also examines both “impact panels,” in which offenders, residents, and business owners meet to discuss how quality-of-life crimes negatively impact the neighborhood, as well as strategic neighborhood outreach efforts to update residents on cases and gauge their concerns.

Zozula’s nuanced investigation of community courts can lead us to a deeper understanding of punishment and rehabilitation and, by extension, the current state of the American court system.

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Courts

A Comparative and Political Analysis

Martin Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 1981

In this provocative work, Martin Shapiro proposes an original model for the study of courts, one that emphasizes the different modes of decision making and the multiple political roles that characterize the functioning of courts in different political systems.

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The Courts and Education

Clifford P. Hooker

University of Chicago Press, 1978

Courts and Kids

Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts

Michael A. Rebell

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Over the past thirty-five years, federal courts have dramatically retreated from actively promoting school desegregation. In the meantime, state courts have taken up the mantle of promoting the vision of educational equity originally articulated in Brown v. Board of Education. Courts and Kids is the first detailed analysis of why the state courts have taken on this active role and how successful their efforts have been.

Since 1973, litigants have challenged the constitutionality of education finance systems in forty-five states on the grounds that they deprive many poor and minority students of adequate access to a sound education. While the plaintiffs have won in the majority of these cases, the decisions are often branded “judicial activism”—a stigma that has reduced their impact. To counter the charge, Michael A. Rebell persuasively defends the courts’ authority and responsibility to pursue the goal of educational equity. He envisions their ideal role as supervisory, and in Courts and Kids he offers innovative recommendations on how the courts can collaborate with the executive and legislative branches to create a truly democratic educational system.

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Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries

Alison A. Chapman

University of Chicago Press, 2020

John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice has been often overlooked. As Alison A. Chapman shows, Milton’s many prose works are saturated in legal ways of thinking, and he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and ecclesiastical law to best suit his purpose in any given text. This book provides literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England and brings to light Milton’s use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time—natural versus positive law, for example—and the differences between them.

Surveying Milton’s early pamphlets, divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton’s contemporaries—including George Herbert, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—Chapman reveals the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical toolkit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice.

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Courts Liberalism And Rights

Gay Law And Politics In The United States and Canada

Jason Pierceson

Temple University Press, 2005

In the courts, the best chance for achieving a broad set of rights for gays and lesbians lies with judges who view liberalism as grounded in an expansion of rights rather than a constraint of government activity.

At a time when most gay and lesbian politics focuses only on the issue of gay marriage, Courts, Liberalism, and Rights guides readers through a nuanced discussion of liberalism, court rulings on sodomy laws and same-sex marriage, and the comparative progress gays and lesbians have made via the courts in Canada.

As debates continue about the ability of courts to affect social change, Jason Pierceson argues that this is possible. He claims that the greatest opportunity for reform via the judiciary exists when a judiciary with broad interpretive powers encounters a political culture that endorses a form of liberalism based on broadly conceived individual rights; not a negative set of rights to be held against the state, but a set of rights that recognizes the inherent dignity and worth of every individual.

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The Courts of International Trade

Judicial Specialization, Expertise, and Bureaucratic Policymaking

Isaac Unah

University of Michigan Press, 1998

In the United States cases involving the interpretation of laws dealing with international trade are heard by a specialized court, the Court of International Trade, and on appeal by a specialized appellate court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In a groundbreaking study, Isaac Unah studies these courts to explore the way specialized courts work and how they fit into the federal court system. We know little about why specialized courts are created and how their role in interpreting law might differ from the role played by the courts of general jurisdiction. These courts play an important role in regulating agencies that affect many aspects of our lives, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Patent Office, and agencies that administer trade laws. The author considers the way these courts relate to the work of the agencies whose cases must always come to these courts. And he offers fresh insights into the differences between specialized courts and courts of general jurisdiction.
This book will be of interest to scholars studying the judiciary, bureaucracies, and international trade law and administration.
Isaac Unah is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina.

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The Crown and the Courts

Separation of Powers in the Early Jewish Imagination

David C. Flatto

Harvard University Press, 2020

A scholar of law and religion uncovers a surprising origin story behind the idea of the separation of powers.

The separation of powers is a bedrock of modern constitutionalism, but striking antecedents were developed centuries earlier, by Jewish scholars and rabbis of antiquity. Attending carefully to their seminal works and the historical milieu, David Flatto shows how a foundation of democratic rule was contemplated and justified long before liberal democracy was born.

During the formative Second Temple and early rabbinic eras (the fourth century BCE to the third century CE), Jewish thinkers had to confront the nature of legal authority from the standpoint of the disempowered. Jews struggled against the idea that a legal authority stemming from God could reside in the hands of an imperious ruler (even a hypothetical Judaic monarch). Instead scholars and rabbis argued that such authority lay with independent courts and the law itself. Over time, they proposed various permutations of this ideal. Many of these envisioned distinct juridical and political powers, with a supreme law demarcating the respective jurisdictions of each sphere. Flatto explores key Second Temple and rabbinic writings—the Qumran scrolls; the philosophy and history of Philo and Josephus; the Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash, and Talmud—to uncover these transformative notions of governance.

The Crown and the Courts argues that by proclaiming the supremacy of law in the absence of power, postbiblical thinkers emphasized the centrality of law in the people’s covenant with God, helping to revitalize Jewish life and establish allegiance to legal order. These scholars proved not only creative but also prescient. Their profound ideas about the autonomy of law reverberate to this day.

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