BiblioVault - Books about Duties

Dilemma of Duties

The Conflicted Role of Juvenile Defenders

Anne M. Corbin

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

The role of a juvenile defender is riddled with conflict, and clients are uniquely challenging because of their lack of life experience and their underdeveloped decision-making abilities. In Dilemma of Duties, Anne M. Corbin examines the distinct function of defense counsel in juvenile courts, demonstrating the commonplace presence of role conflict and confusion, even among defenders in jurisdictions that clearly define their role. This study focuses on juvenile defense attorneys in North Carolina, where it is mandated that counselors advocate for their client’s wishes, even if they do not agree it is in the client’s best interest.

In Dilemma of Duties, Corbin outlines patterns of role conflict that defenders experience, details its impact on counselors and clients in the juvenile justice system, and addresses the powerful influence of the juvenile court culture and the lack of resources for defenders. Tasked with guiding these children, counselors frequently must contend with and manage their clients’ general distrust of adults as they attempt to serve as their voices to the court.

Understanding how juvenile defenders define their role and experience role conflict provides valuable insights into our juvenile justice system, especially its role in upholding due process rights. Such knowledge points to the importance of the training and practices of juvenile court functionaries and the efficacy, credibility, and legitimacy of the juvenile justice system itself.

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Duties of the Spirit

Patricia Fargnoli

Tupelo Press, 2005

Duties of the Spirit is comprised of deeply moving, lyrical and unforgettable explorations of the joys and fears that come with growing older in America.

“These poems are stamped with an energetic and outgoing attentiveness to the world. This, so much more than just the humming examination of the self, is what makes writing a sacred thing. Who does this is a true poet, and few do it better than Patricia Fargnoli.”
— Mary Oliver

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Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts

Essays in Struggle

Michael M. Thelwell

University of Massachusetts Press, 1987

This powerful collection of essays and short stories provides a unique perspective on the black civil rights movement over the past twenty-five years. A long-time activist, Michael Thelwell was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the early 1960s, a founder of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in 1970, author of the widely praised novel The Harder They Come published in 1980, and an organizer for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign in 1984. Thelwell is a writer of rare grace, integrity, and strong political convictions.

The collection begins with three stories. Set in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, the stories explore how individuals manage to preserve their dignity in a world of racism and violence. The next six essays, also written in the 1960s, are historical and journalistic. They discuss the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the situation in the South as seen by SNCC workers, the political challenges in Mississippi, the articulation of the Black Power movement, the causes of the black student revolt at Cornell, and the need for Black Studies as the intellectual offensive in the struggle for black liberation.

The section that follows is composed of literary pieces: two appreciative essays on James Baldwin, two critical reviews of William Styron and his treatment of Nat Turner, an excoriating assessment of V. S. Naipaul, a profile of Amos Tutuola, and a thoughtful analysis of the social responsibility of the black writer.

The final essay examines the history of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and comments on the political climate of the 1980s.

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On Duties

Cicero

Harvard University Press

The ethics of a statesman.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

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