Brooke at the Bar is a candid, lively, and sometimes humorous autobiography by Brooke Wunnicke, the first woman to be a trial and appellate attorney in Wyoming and who went on to become a legal legend in Colorado. In conversational writing, Brooke provides insights from a lawyer, mentor, and educator. She advocates that, while not perfect, the United States has the world’s best legal system and that all citizens need to understand and protect their rights, freedoms, and responsibilities.
 
Brooke shares vignettes of her early life—California in the Great Depression, college at Stanford, law school in Colorado during World War II, and the 1946 opening of her Cheyenne law office, a precedent for women in law. She vividly describes memorable and amusing experiences with clients, witnesses, lawyers, juries, and judges and explains some significant cases. She recounts important and dynamic events from her twelve years as Denver’s chief appellate deputy district attorney, an era during which she was an inestimable mentor to many young lawyers who became prominent in the private and public sectors.
 
Brooke passionately believed “the law has been and will continue to be civilization’s hope.” In her book’s final part, she demystifies many legal terms and procedures and describes the parts of a civil jury trial—including information for jurors and witnesses—and provides an enthusiastic and clear refresher on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
 
Brooke at the Bar is a unique and historically important contribution that will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and students interested in US law, political science, government, women’s history, twentieth-century western history, civil rights, and legal communities, including those in Wyoming and Colorado, where Brooke was “at the Bar.”
 

Over the past two decades, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia have been engaged in unprecedented efforts to recast and rapidly expand the legal profession—with profound implications not only for law, but also for politics, international relations, and society itself. Raising the Bar is the first book-length study in English of this phenomenon. It examines a broad range of topics, including changes underway in the profession’s size and composition, its evolving relationship to state authority, the outlet it may be providing for historically disadvantaged sectors of society, and its impact on economic and political development. The book also explores the implications of these findings for broader theoretical work about both the legal profession and globalization. Contributors include William Alford, Yves Dezalay, Bryant Garth, Ryo Hamano, JaeWon Kim, Toshimitsu Kitagawa, Daniel Lev, Benjamin Liebman, Setsuo Miyazawa, Luke Nottage, Sang-Hyun Song, and Jane Kaufman Winn.

Issues spawned by the headlong pace of developments in science and technology fill the courts. How should we deal with frozen embryos and leaky implants, dangerous chemicals, DNA fingerprints, and genetically engineered animals? The realm of the law, to which beleaguered people look for answers, is sometimes at a loss—constrained by its own assumptions and practices, Sheila Jasanoff suggests. This book exposes American law’s long-standing involvement in constructing, propagating, and perpetuating a variety of myths about science and technology.

Science at the Bar is the first book to examine in detail how two powerful American institutions—both seekers after truth—interact with each other. Looking at cases involving product liability, medical malpractice, toxic torts, genetic engineering, and life and death, Jasanoff argues that the courts do not simply depend on scientific findings for guidance—they actually influence the production of science and technology at many different levels. Research is conducted and interpreted to answer legal questions. Experts are selected to be credible on the witness stand. Products are redesigned to reduce the risk of lawsuits. At the same time the courts emerge here as democratizing agents in disputes over the control and deployment of new technologies, advancing and sustaining a public dialogue about the limits of expertise. Jasanoff shows how positivistic views of science and the law often prevent courts from realizing their full potential as centers for a progressive critique of science and technology.

With its lucid analysis of both scientific and legal modes of reasoning, and its recommendations for scholars and policymakers, this book will be an indispensable resource for anyone who hopes to understand the changing configurations of science, technology, and the law in our litigious society.