BiblioVault - Books about Law and legislation

Race and Education, 1954-2007

Raymond Wolters

University of Missouri Press, 2008

With the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955, American education changed forever. But Brown was just the beginning, and Raymond Wolters contends that its best intentions have been taken to unnecessary extremes.

In this compelling study, a scholar who has long observed the traumas of school desegregation uncovers the changes and difficulties with which public education has dealt over the last fifty years—and argues that some judicial decisions were ill-advised. Dealing candidly with matters usually considered taboo in academic discourse, Wolters argues that the Supreme Court acted correctly and in accordance with public sentiment in Brown but that it later took a wrong turn by equating desegregation with integration.

Retracing the history of desegregation and integration in America’s schools, Wolters distinguishes between several Court decisions, explaining that while Brown called for desegregation by requiring that schools deal with students on a racially nondiscriminatory basis, subsequent decisions—Green, Swann, Keyes—required actual integration through racial balancing. He places these decisions in the context of educational reform in the 1950s that sought to encourage bright students through advanced placement and honors courses—courses in which African American and Hispanic students were less likely to be enrolled. Then with the racial unrest of the 1960s, the pursuit of academic excellence yielded to concerns for uplifting disadvantaged youths and ensuring the predominance of middle-class peer groups in schools.

Wolters draws on rich historical records to document the devastating consequences of requiring racial balance and sheds new light on America’s legal, social, and cultural landscapes. He reexamines the educational theories of Kenneth Clark and James Coleman, and he challenges statistics that support the results of racial balancing by describing how school desegregation and integration actually proceeded in several towns, cities, and counties.

Race and Education is a bold challenge to political correctness in education and a corrective to the now widely accepted notion that desegregation and racially balanced integration are one and the same. It is essential reading for scholars of law and education and a wake-up call for citizens concerned about the future of America’s schools.

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Race and Schooling in the City

Adam Yarmolinsky

Harvard University Press, 1981

Here is a sober report by fifteen of the nations leading experts on desegregation, the product of an American Academy study group that met to assess the radically changed character of the urban school desegregation struggle over the quarter century since the Supreme Court”s landmark decision. The distinguished contributors differ sharply in their ideas about the nature of this vexing social problem and in their proposed remedies. They grapple with the range of relevant issues, from the effects of desegregation on children to societal attitudes, demographic developments, “white flight,” resegregation, incentives and other policy options, individual versus group rights, and ethical and legal considerations.

This is a book that reaches beyond the old disputes about busing to consider the issue in new ways and to suggest new options. If there are no quick solutions to the schooling problems in the nation’s big cities, neither is there any excuse for ignorance about this matter. Rich in its implications for the future, Race and Schooling in the City offers fresh assessments of one of the country’s most visible and intractable controversies.

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Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948

By David Delaney

University of Texas Press, 1998

Black and white Americans have occupied separate spaces since the days of "the big house" and "the quarters." But the segregation and racialization of American society was not a natural phenomenon that "just happened." The decisions, enacted into laws, that kept the races apart and restricted blacks to less desirable places sprang from legal reasoning which argued that segregated spaces were right, reasonable, and preferable to other arrangements.

In this book, David Delaney explores the historical intersections of race, place, and the law. Drawing on court cases spanning more than a century, he examines the moves and countermoves of attorneys and judges who participated in the geopolitics of slavery and emancipation; in the development of Jim Crow segregation, which effectively created apartheid laws in many cities; and in debates over the "doctrine of changed conditions," which challenged the legality of restrictive covenants and private contracts designed to exclude people of color from white neighborhoods. This historical investigation yields new insights into the patterns of segregation that persist in American society today.

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Race, Rape, and Injustice

Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era

Barrettt J. Foerster

University of Tennessee Press, 2012

This book tells the dramatic story of twenty-eight law students—one of whom was the author—who went south at the height of the civil rights era and helped change death penalty jurisprudence forever.
    The 1965 project was organized by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sought to prove statistically whether capital punishment in southern rape cases had been applied discriminatorily over the previous twenty years. If the research showed that a disproportionate number of African Americans convicted of raping white women had received the death penalty regardless of nonracial variables (such as the degree of violence used), then capital punishment in the South could be abolished as a clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
    Targeting eleven states, the students cautiously made their way past suspicious court clerks, lawyers, and judges to secure the necessary data from dusty courthouse records. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, they managed—amazingly—to complete their task without suffering serious harm at the hands of white supremacists. Their findings then went to University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, who compiled and analyzed the data for use in court challenges to death penalty convictions. The result was powerful evidence that thousands of jurors had voted on racial grounds in rape cases.
    This book not only tells Barrett Foerster’s and his teammates story but also examines how the findings were used before a U.S. Supreme Court resistant to numbers-based arguments and reluctant to admit that the justice system had executed hundreds of men because of their skin color. Most important, it illuminates the role the project played in the landmark Furman v. Georgia case, which led to a four-year cessation of capital punishment and a more limited set of death laws aimed at constraining racial discrimination.

A Virginia native who studied law at UCLA, BARRETT J. FOERSTER (1942–2010) was a judge in the Superior Court in Imperial County, California.

MICHAEL MELTSNER is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University. During the 1960s, he was first assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His books include The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer and Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

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Racial Union

Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954

Julie Novkov

University of Michigan Press, 2008

In November 2001, the state of Alabama opened a referendum on its long-standing constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. A bill on the state ballot offered the opportunity to relegate the state's antimiscegenation law to the dustbin of history. The measure passed, but the margin was alarmingly slim: more than half a million voters, 40 percent of those who went to the polls, voted to retain a racist and constitutionally untenable law.

Julie Novkov's Racial Union explains how and why, nearly forty years after the height of the civil rights movement, Alabama struggled to repeal its prohibition against interracial marriage---the last state in the Union to do so. Novkov's compelling history of Alabama's battle over miscegenation shows how the fight shaped the meanings of race and state over ninety years. Novkov's work tells us much about the sometimes parallel, sometimes convergent evolution of our concepts of race and state in the nation as a whole.

"A remarkably nuanced account of interlocked struggles over race, gender, class and state power. Novkov's site is Alabama, but her insights are for all America."
---Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

"Hannah Arendt shocked Americans in the 1950s by suggesting that interracial intimacy was the true measure of a society's racial order. Julie Novkov's careful, illuminating, powerful book confirms Arendt's judgment. By ruling on who may be sexually linked with whom, Alabama's courts and legislators created a racial order and even a broad political order; Novkov shows us just how it worked in all of its painful, humiliating power."
---Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor

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Reasoning from Race

Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution

Serena Mayeri

Harvard University Press, 2011

Informed in 1944 that she was “not of the sex” entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School, African American activist Pauli Murray confronted the injustice she called “Jane Crow.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the analogies between sex and race discrimination pioneered by Murray became potent weapons in the battle for women’s rights, as feminists borrowed rhetoric and legal arguments from the civil rights movement. Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race is the first book to explore the development and consequences of this key feminist strategy.

Mayeri uncovers the history of an often misunderstood connection at the heart of American antidiscrimination law. Her study details how a tumultuous political and legal climate transformed the links between race and sex equality, civil rights and feminism. Battles over employment discrimination, school segregation, reproductive freedom, affirmative action, and constitutional change reveal the promise and peril of reasoning from race—and offer a vivid picture of Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others who defined feminists’ agenda.

Looking beneath the surface of Supreme Court opinions to the deliberations of feminist advocates, their opponents, and the legal decision makers who heard—or chose not to hear—their claims, Reasoning from Race showcases previously hidden struggles that continue to shape the scope and meaning of equality under the law.

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Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race

How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown

Kevin J. McMahon

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Many have questioned FDR's record on race, suggesting that he had the opportunity but not the will to advance the civil rights of African Americans. Kevin J. McMahon challenges this view, arguing instead that Roosevelt's administration played a crucial role in the Supreme Court's increasing commitment to racial equality—which culminated in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

McMahon shows how FDR's attempt to strengthen the presidency and undermine the power of conservative Southern Democrats dovetailed with his efforts to seek racial equality through the federal courts. By appointing a majority of rights-based liberals deferential to presidential power, Roosevelt ensured that the Supreme Court would be receptive to civil rights claims, especially when those claims had the support of the executive branch.

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Recycling Land

Understanding the Legal Landscape of Brownfield Development

Elizabeth Glass Geltman

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Older--and often economically depressed--industrial cities generally have a number of well located but abandoned industrial sites. Too frequently these sites are heavily polluted by the residue of toxic wastes dumped when old factories were still in use. These "brownfield" sites must be cleaned up under existing law before they can be redeveloped. And yet the question of who will bear the cost of this cleanup frequently stymies efforts to return these sites to productive use. A complicated net of federal, state and local regulations can involve several generations of owners in potential liability for the cleanup, frequently resulting only in extended litigation, not often in the cleanup of the site. In this book, Elizabeth Glass Geltman surveys the laws on both the federal and state level with regard to the cleanup of brownfield sites. The author makes valuable suggestions for reforming these laws that will help encourage land reuse and the accompanying redevelopment of the industrial base of many American cities both large and small.
Elizabeth Glass Geltman is Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School and is the author of many books on environmental law, including Modern Environmental Law: Policy and Practice.

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Refining Child Pornography Law

Crime, Language, and Social Consequences

Edited by Carissa Byrne Hessick

University of Michigan Press, 2016

The legal definition of child pornography is, at best, unclear. In part because of this ambiguity and in part because of the nature of the crime itself, the prosecution and sentencing of perpetrators, the protection of and restitution for victims, and the means for preventing repeat offenses are deeply controversial. In Refining Child Pornography Law, experts in law, sociology, and social work examine child pornography law and its consequences in an effort to clarify the questions and begin to formulate answers. Focusing on the roles of language and crime definition, the contributors discuss the increasing visibility child pornography plays in the national conversation about child safety, and present a range of views regarding the punishment of those who produce, distribute, and possess materials that may be considered child pornography.

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Regulating Football

Commodification, Consumption and the Law

Steve Greenfield and Guy Osborn

Pluto Press, 2001

Regulating How We Die

The Ethical, Medical, and Legal Issues Surrounding Physician-Assisted Suicide

Linda L. Emanuel

Harvard University Press, 1998

The Supreme Court has ruled that states may prohibit physician-assisted suicide. Expressing the views of his fellow justices, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, "Americans are engaged in an earnest and profound debate about the morality, legality, and practicality of physician-assisted suicide. Our holding permits this debate to continue." Regulating How We Die is certain to be a landmark contribution to that debate.Dr. Linda Emanuel--one of America's most influential medical ethicists--has assembled leading experts to provide not only a clear account of the arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia but also historical, empirical, and legal perspectives on this complicated issue. These contributors include Marcia Angell, George Annas, Susan Wolf, and many others.

The important questions are addressed here, including: What does mercy dictate? Does physician-assisted suicide honor or violate autonomy? Is it more dignified than natural death? Is this decision purely a private matter? Will legalizing physician-assisted suicide put us on a slippery slope toward involuntary euthanasia? And, in an analysis of data not available in any other book, what can we learn from Holland, the only country in which physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are legal?

Regulating How We Die will be essential reading for anyone who has been handed a terminal diagnosis, for people close to those facing such a diagnosis, for professionals, including physicians, nurses, pastors, lawyers, legislators--indeed, for anyone who has considered the moral and political debate over doctor-assisted suicide.

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Regulatory Barriers and the Principle of Non-discrimination in World Trade Law

Past, Present, and Future

Thomas Cottier and Petros C. Mavroidis, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce the second volume in an annual series, the World Trade Forum. The Forum's members include scholars, lawyers, and government and business practitioners working in the area of international trade, law, and policy. They meet annually to discuss integration issues in international economic relations, focusing on a new theme each year.

The World Trade Forum 1998 deals with the issue of regulatory barriers. Contributors focus their attention on the implications that government intervention has on the principle of nondiscrimination, the cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The chapters, which cover both the positive and the normative level, deal in particular with the issue of "like product" definition, and with mutual recognition agreements. The relevant WTO case law is presented and analyzed, and the roundtable discussions are primarily aimed at clarifying to what extent a constitutional function should be assigned to the WTO organs, if at all.

Contributors include: Christoph Bail, Jacques Bourgeois, Marco Bronckers, Thomas Cottier, William Davey, Paul Demaret, Piet Eeckhout, Crawford Falconer, Olivier Guillod, Meinhard Hilf, Gary Horlick, Robert Howse, Robert Hudec, Patrick Low, Aaditya Mattoo, Petros C. Mavroidis, Patrick Messerlin, Damien Neven, Kalypso Nicolaidis, David Palmeter, Ernst Ulrich Petresmann, Andre Sapir, and Michel Waelbroeck.

Thomas Cottier is Professor of Law, Institute of European and International Economic Law, University of Bern Law School. Petros C. Mavroidis is Professor of Law, University of Neuchâtel.

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Regulatory Justice

Implementing a Wage-Price Freeze

Robert A. Kagan

Russell Sage Foundation, 1978

Regulatory Justice is based on a case study of two closely linked federal agencies—the Cost of Living Council (CLC) and the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP)—which administered a nationwide wage-price freeze in 1971.

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Regulatory Takings

Law, Economics, and Politics

William A. Fischel

Harvard University Press, 1995

Are rent controls and zoning regulations unconstitutional? Should the Supreme Court strike down the Endangered Species Act when its administration interferes with the use of private property? These questions are currently debated under the doctrine of regulatory takings, and William Fischel’s book offers a new perspective on the issue.

Regulatory Takings argues that the issue is not so much about the details of property law as it is about the fairness of politics. The book employs jurisprudential theories, economic analysis, historical investigation, and political science to show why local land use regulations, such as zoning and rent control, deserve a higher degree of judicial scrutiny than national regulations. Unlike other books on this topic, Regulatory Takings goes beyond case law to buttress its arguments. Its reality checks range from reviews of statistical evidence to local inquiries about famous takings cases such as Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission. The gap between legal theory and on-the-ground practice is one reason that Fischel investigates alternative means of protecting property rights.

Local governments are often deterred from unfairly regulating portable assets by their owners’ threat of “exit” from the jurisdiction. State and federal government regulations are disciplined by property-owner coalitions whose “voice” is clearly audible in the statehouses and in Congress.

Constitutional courts need to preserve their resources for use in areas in which politics is loaded against the property owner. Regulatory Takings advances an economic standard to decide when a local regulation crosses the border from legitimate police power to a taking that requires just compensation for owners who are adversely affected.

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Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age

Nelson Tebbe

Harvard University Press, 2017

Tensions between religious freedom and equality law are newly strained in America. As lawmakers work to protect LGBT citizens and women seeking reproductive freedom, religious traditionalists assert their right to dissent from what they see as a new liberal orthodoxy. Some religious advocates are going further and expressing skepticism that egalitarianism can be defended with reasons at all. Legal experts have not offered a satisfying response—until now.

Nelson Tebbe argues that these disputes, which are admittedly complex, nevertheless can be resolved without irrationality or arbitrariness. In Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age, he advances a method called social coherence, based on the way that people reason through moral problems in everyday life. Social coherence provides a way to reach justified conclusions in constitutional law, even in situations that pit multiple values against each other. Tebbe contends that reasons must play a role in the resolution of these conflicts, alongside interests and ideologies. Otherwise, the health of democratic constitutionalism could suffer.

Applying this method to a range of real-world cases, Tebbe offers a set of powerful principles for mediating between religion and equality law, and he shows how they can lead to workable solutions in areas ranging from employment discrimination and public accommodations to government officials and public funding. While social coherence does not guarantee outcomes that will please the liberal Left, it does point the way toward reasoned, nonarbitrary solutions to the current impasse.

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Remembering Brown at Fifty

The University of Illinois Commemorates Brown v. Board of Education

Edited by Orville Vernon Burton and David O'Brien

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision's fiftieth anniversary, this collection addresses the significance of Brown in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. Several authors describe their personal roles in the Brown case or similar cases, while others examine and illustrate events, performances, and exhibitions that were part of the anniversary commemoration. The book not only explores the repercussions of the Brown decision, but also stands as a historic document in its own right, preserving the reactions of many prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists fifty years after the decision.

Contributors are Kal Alston, Margaret L. Andersen, Kathryn H. Anthony, Nathaniel C. Banks, Bernice McNair Barnett, Christopher Benson, Ed Blankenheim, Julian Bond, Orville Vernon Burton, Jason Chambers, Constance Curry, Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Mary L. Dudziak, Joe R. Feagin, John Hope Franklin, Ophelia De Laine Gona, Lani Guinier, Darlene Clark Hine, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, John Jennings, Ralph Lemon, George Lipsitz, Jim Loewen, Laughlin McDonald, David O'Brien, James C. Onderdonk, Sekou Sundiata, Christopher Teal, Nicholas Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, Juan Williams, and Joy Ann Williamson.

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Renewable Resource Policy

The Legal-Institutional Foundations

David A. Adams

Island Press, 1993

Renewable Resource Policy is a comprehensive volume covering the history, laws, and important national policies that affect renewable resource management. The author traces the history of renewable natural resource policy and management in the United States, describes the major federal agencies and their functions, and examines the evolution of the primary resource policy areas.

The book provides valuable insight into the often neglected legal, administrative, and bureaucratic aspect of natural resource management. It is a definitive and essential source of information covering all facets of renewable resource policy that brings together a remarkable range of information in a coherent, integrated form.

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Repealed

Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights

Camilla Fitzsimons

Pluto Press, 2021

*Winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize 2022*

In Ireland, 2018, a constitutional ban that equated the life of a woman to the life of a fertilized embryo was overturned and abortion was finally legalized. This victory for the Irish feminist movement set the country alight with euphoria. But the celebrations were short-lived - the new legislation turned out to be one of the most conservative in Europe. This book tells the story of the ‘Repeal’ campaign through the lens of the activists.

The authors trace the shocking history of the origins of the eighth amendment, which was drawn up in fear of a tide of liberal reforms across Europe. They draw out the lessons learned through the decades and from the groundbreaking campaign in 2018, which was an inspiring example of modern grassroots activism. They also recount the tensions between a medicalized approach and reproductive justice approach to abortion, as well as the harsh effect of the campaign on the health of activists.

Grounded in a radical feminist politics, this book is an honest and inspirational account of a movement that is only just beginning.

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Reproducing Jews

A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel

Susan Martha Kahn

Duke University Press, 2000

There are more fertility clinics per capita in Israel than in any other country in the world and Israel has the world's highest per capita rate of in-vitro fertilization procedures. Fertility treatments are fully subsidized by Israeli national health insurance and are available to all Israelis, regardless of religion or marital status. These phenomena are not the result of unusually high rates of infertility in Israel but reflect the centrality of reproduction in Judaism and Jewish culture.

In this ethnographic study of the new reproductive technologies in Israel, Susan Martha Kahn explores the cultural meanings and contemporary rabbinic responses to artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, egg donation, and surrogacy. Kahn draws on fieldwork with unmarried Israeli women who are using state-subsidized artificial insemination to get pregnant and on participant-observation in Israeli fertility clinics. Through close readings of traditional Jewish texts and careful analysis of Israeli public discourse, she explains how the Israeli embrace of new reproductive technologies has made Jewish beliefs about kinship startlingly literal. Kahn also reveals how a wide range of contemporary Israelis are using new reproductive technologies to realize their reproductive futures, from ultraorthodox infertile married couples to secular unmarried women.

As the first scholarly account of assisted conception in Israel, this multisited ethnography will contribute to current anthropological debates on kinship studies. It will also interest those involved with Jewish studies.

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Reproductive Justice

The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women

Gurr, Barbara

Rutgers University Press, 2015

In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first analysis of Native American women’s reproductive healthcare and offers a sustained consideration of the movement for reproductive justice in the United States.

The book examines the reproductive healthcare experiences on Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota—where Gurr herself lived for more than a year. Gurr paints an insightful portrait of the Indian Health Service (IHS)—the federal agency tasked with providing culturally appropriate, adequate healthcare to Native Americans—shedding much-needed light on Native American women’s efforts to obtain prenatal care, access to contraception, abortion services, and access to care after sexual assault. Reproductive Justice goes beyond this local story to look more broadly at how race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and nation inform the ways in which the government understands reproductive healthcare and organizes the delivery of this care. It reveals why the basic experience of reproductive healthcare for most Americans is so different—and better—than for Native American women in general, and women in reservation communities particularly. Finally, Gurr outlines the strengths that these communities can bring to the creation of their own reproductive justice, and considers the role of IHS in fostering these strengths as it moves forward in partnership with Native nations.

Reproductive Justice offers a respectful and informed analysis of the stories Native American women have to tell about their bodies, their lives, and their communities.

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REVERSING FIELD

EXAMINING COMMERCIALIZATION, LABOR, GENDER, AND RACE IN 21ST CENTURY SPORTS LAW

edited by andré douglas pond cummings and Anne Marie Lofaso

West Virginia University Press, 2010

Reversing Field invites students, professionals, and enthusiasts of sport—whether law, management and marketing, or the game itself—to explore the legal issues and regulations surrounding collegiate and professional athletics in the United States. This theoretical and methodological interrogation of sports law openly addresses race, labor, gender, and the commercialization of sports, while offering solutions to the disruptions that threaten its very foundation during an era of increased media scrutiny and consumerism. In over thirty chapters, academics, practitioners, and critics vigorously confront and debate matters such as the Arms Race, gender bias, racism, the Rooney Rule, and steroid use, offering new thought and resolution to the vexing legal issues that confront sports in the 21st century.

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A Rift in the Clouds

Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900-1910

Brent J. Aucoin

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

A Rift in the Clouds chronicles the efforts of three white southern federal judges to protect the civil rights of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, when few in the American legal community were willing to do so. Jacob Treiber of Arkansas, Emory Speer of Georgia, and Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama challenged the Supreme Court's reading of the Reconstruction amendments that were passed in an attempt to make disfranchised and exploited African Americans equal citizens of the United States. These unpopular white southerners, two of whom who had served in the Confederate Army and had themselves helped to bring Reconstruction to an end in their states, asserted that the amendments not only established black equality, but authorized the government to protect blacks. Although their rulings won few immediate gains for blacks and were overturned by the Supreme Court, their legal arguments would be resurrected, and meet with greater success, over half a century later during the civil rights movement.

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The Right to Die with Dignity

An Argument in Ethics, Medicine, and Law

Cohen-Almagor, Raphael

Rutgers University Press, 2001

There are few issues more divisive than what has become known as “the right to die.” One camp upholds “death with dignity,” regarding the terminally ill as autonomous beings capable of forming their own judgment on the timing and process of dying. The other camp advocates “sanctity of life,” regarding life as intrinsically valuable, and that should be sustained as long as possible. Is there a right answer?

Raphael Cohen-Almagor takes a balanced approach in analyzing this emotionally charged debate, viewing the dispute from public policy and international perspectives. He offers an interdisciplinary, compelling study in medicine, law, religion, and ethics. It is a comprehensive look at the troubling question of whether physician-assisted suicide should be allowed. Cohen-Almagor delineates a distinction between active and passive euthanasia and discusses legal measures that have been invoked in the United States and abroad. He outlines reasons non-blood relatives should be given a role in deciding a patient’s last wishes. As he examines euthanasia policies in the Netherlands and the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity Act, the author suggests amendments and finally makes a circumscribed plea for voluntary physician-assisted suicide.

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Right to DREAM

Immigration Reform and America’s Future

William A. Schwab

University of Arkansas Press, 2013

The DREAM Act, bipartisan legislation first introduced in Congress in 2001, would provide conditional residency for undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. It recognizes that undocumented youth have done nothing wrong and that they should be allowed to work, to go to school, and to travel. The bill makes college more affordable through in-state tuition and gives the undocumented a path to citizenship if they graduate from college or serve in the military. Congress has failed to pass the DREAM Act, and fourteen states have filled the gap by implementing their own laws and policies that provide educational benefits to undocumented students. Right to DREAM makes a compelling argument for the DREAM Act and comprehensive immigration reform. William A. Schwab explores the key issues surrounding this legislation: What are the issues that divide? What do the proponents and opponents of the DREAM Act argue? Is there a middle ground? Is compromise possible? Answering these questions, Schwab explains the legal issues surrounding the education of immigrant children, who immigrates and why, how four waves of immigration have shaped the nation, the effects of immigrants on the U.S. economy and culture, and the process of becoming an American. Schwab analyzes the DREAM Act, deferred action, and immigration policy. He weaves personal stories of undocumented youth throughout the book and advocates for the economic, political, and social benefits of the DREAM Act that would bring undocumented youth out of the shadows and into the mainstream of society.

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The Right To Privacy

Gays, Lesbians, and the Constitution

Vincent J. Samar

Temple University Press, 1992

Where did the right to privacy come from and what does it mean? Grappling with the critical issues involving women and gays that relate to the recent Supreme Court appointment, Vincent J. Samar develops a definition of legal privacy, discusses the reasons why and the degree to which privacy should be protected, and shows the relationship between privacy and personal autonomy. He answers former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s questions about scope, content, and legal justification for a general right to privacy and emphasizes issues involving gays and lesbians, Samar maintains that these privacy issues share a common constitutional-ethical underpinning with issues such as abortion, surrogate motherhood, drug testing, and the right to die.

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Rights at Work

Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization

Michael W. McCann

University of Chicago Press, 1994

What role has litigation played in the struggle for equal pay between women and men? In Rights at Work, Michael W. McCann explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement over the past two decades.

Rights at Work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, McCann shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse—the understanding of legal rights and their constraints—for defining and advancing their cause.

Rights at Work offers new insight into the relation between law and social change—the ways in which grass roots social movements work within legal rights traditions to promote progressive reform.

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Rights in the Digital Era

Society of American Archivists, 2015

About Rights in the Digital Era:

MODULE 4
Understanding Copyright Law
Heather Briston
Describes the main principles of copyright law and outlines strategies for addressing common issues, special topics, and digital projects.

MODULE 5
Balancing Access and Privacy in Manuscript Collections
Menzi L. Behrnd-Klodt
Introduces basic access and privacy laws, concepts, definitions, and professional ethical standards affecting manuscript materials and private and family papers.

MODULE 6
Balancing Access and Privacy in the Records of Organizations
Menzi L. Behrnd-Klodt
Introduces basic access and privacy laws, concepts, definitions, and professional ethical standards affecting the management of records created by organizations, businesses, agencies, and other entities.

MODULE 7
Managing Rights and Permissions
Aprille C. McKay
Provides practical guidance to help archivists transfer, clear, manage, and track rights information in analog and digital archives.

About Trends in Archives Practice:

This open-ended series by the Society of American Archivists features brief, authoritative treatments—written and edited by top-level professionals—that fill significant gaps in archival literature. The goal of this modular approach is to build agile, user-centered resources. Modules treat discrete topics relating to the practical management of archives and manuscript collections in the digital age. Select modules are clustered together by topic (as they are here) and are available in print or electronic format. Each module also is available separately in electronic format so that readers can mix and match modules that best satisfy their needs and interests. Stay on trend with Trends in Archives Practice!

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Rights of Inclusion

Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities

David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Rights of Inclusion provides an innovative, accessible perspective on how civil rights legislation affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Based on eye-opening and deeply moving interviews with intended beneficiaries of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger argue for a radically new understanding of rights-one that focuses on their role in everyday lives rather than in formal legal claims.

Although all sixty interviewees had experienced discrimination, none had filed a formal protest or lawsuit. Nevertheless, civil rights played a crucial role in their lives. Rights improved their self-image, enhanced their career aspirations, and altered the perceptions and assumptions of their employers and coworkers-in effect producing more inclusive institutional arrangements. Focusing on these long-term life histories, Engel and Munger incisively show how rights and identity affect one another over time and how that interaction ultimately determines the success of laws such as the ADA.

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Rights on Trial

How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality

Ellen Berrey, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Gerry Handley faced years of blatant race-based harassment before he filed a complaint against his employer: racist jokes, signs reading “KKK” in his work area, and even questions from coworkers as to whether he had sex with his daughter as slaves supposedly did. He had an unusually strong case, with copious documentation and coworkers’ support, and he settled for $50,000, even winning back his job. But victory came at a high cost. Legal fees cut into Mr. Handley’s winnings, and tensions surrounding the lawsuit poisoned the workplace. A year later, he lost his job due to downsizing by his company. Mr. Handley exemplifies the burden plaintiffs bear in contemporary civil rights litigation. In the decades since the civil rights movement, we’ve made progress, but not nearly as much as it might seem.

On the surface, America’s commitment to equal opportunity in the workplace has never been clearer. Virtually every company has antidiscrimination policies in place, and there are laws designed to protect these rights across a range of marginalized groups. But, as Ellen Berrey, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen compellingly show, this progressive vision of the law falls far short in practice. When aggrieved individuals turn to the law, the adversarial character of litigation imposes considerable personal and financial costs that make plaintiffs feel like they’ve lost regardless of the outcome of the case. Employer defendants also are dissatisfied with the system, often feeling “held up” by what they see as frivolous cases. And even when the case is resolved in the plaintiff’s favor, the conditions that gave rise to the lawsuit rarely change. In fact, the contemporary approach to workplace discrimination law perversely comes to reinforce the very hierarchies that antidiscrimination laws were created to redress.
Based on rich interviews with plaintiffs, attorneys, and representatives of defendants and an original national dataset on case outcomes, Rights on Trial reveals the fundamental flaws of workplace discrimination law and offers practical recommendations for how we might better respond to persistent patterns of discrimination.

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Rights to Nature

Ecological, Economic, Cultural, and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment

Edited by Susan S. Hanna, Carl Folke, and Karl-Goran Maler; Foreword by Kenneth Arrow

Island Press, 1996

Property rights are a tool humans use in regulating their use of natural resources. Understanding how rights to resources are assigned and how they are controlled is critical to designing and implementing effective strategies for environmental management and conservation.

Rights to Nature is a nontechnical, interdisciplinary introduction to the systems of rights, rules, and responsibilities that guide and control human use of the environment. Following a brief overview of the relationship between property rights and the natural environment, chapters consider:

ecological systems and how they function
the effects of culture, values, and social organization on the use of natural resources
the design and development of property rights regimes and the costs of their operation
cultural factors that affect the design and implementation of property rights systems
coordination across geographic and jurisdictional boundaries

The book provides a valuable synthesis of information on how property rights develop, why they develop in certain ways, and the ways in which they function. Representing a unique integration of natural and social science, it addresses the full range of ecological, economic, cultural, and political factors that affect natural resource management and use, and provides valuable insight into the role of property rights regimes in establishing societies that are equitable, efficient, and sustainable.

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The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law

Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s

Masumi Izumi

Temple University Press, 2019

The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.

Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America.

Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist.

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The Road to Love Canal

Managing Industrial Waste before EPA

By Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner

University of Texas Press, 1995

The toxic legacy of Love Canal vividly brought the crisis in industrial waste disposal to public awareness across the United States and led to the passage of the Superfund legislation in 1980. To discover why disasters like Love Canal have occurred and whether they could have been averted with knowledge available to waste managers of the time, this book examines industrial waste disposal before the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Colten and Skinner build their study around three key questions. First, what was known before 1970 about the hazards of certain industrial wastes and their potential for causing public health problems? Second, what were the technical capabilities for treating or containing wastes during that time? And third, what factors other than technical knowledge guided the actions of waste managers before the enactment of explicit federal laws?

The authors find that significant information about the hazards of industrial wastes existed before 1970. Their explanations of why this knowledge did not prevent the toxic legacy now facing us will be essential reading for environmental historians and lawyers, public health personnel, and concerned citizens.

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Rock This Way

Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy

Mel Stanfill

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels.

Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.

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Root-Cause Regulation

Protecting Work and Workers in the Twenty-First Century

Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank

Harvard University Press, 2018

Work is now more deadly than war, killing approximately 2.3 million people a year worldwide. The United States, with its complex regulatory system, has one of the highest rates of occupational fatality in the developed world, and deteriorating working conditions more generally. Why, after a century of reform, are U.S. workers growing less safe and secure? Comparing U.S. regulatory practices to their European and Latin American counterparts, Root-Cause Regulation provides insight into the causes of this downward trend and ways to reverse it, offering lessons for rich and poor countries alike.

The United States assigns responsibility for wages and hours, collective bargaining, occupational safety, and the like to various regulatory agencies. In France, Spain, and their former colonies, a single agency regulates all firms. Drawing on history, sociology, and economics, Michael Piore and Andrew Schrank examine why these systems developed differently and how they have adapted to changing conditions over time. The U.S. model was designed for the inspection of mass production enterprises by inflexible specialists and is ill-suited to the decentralized and destabilized employment of today. In the Franco-Iberian system, by contrast, the holistic perspective of multitasking generalists illuminates the root causes of noncompliance—which often lie in outdated techniques and technologies—and offers flexibility to tailor enforcement to different firms and market conditions.

The organization of regulatory agencies thus represents a powerful tool. Getting it right, the authors argue, makes regulation not the job-killer of neoliberal theory but a generative force for both workers and employers.

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A Rule of Property for Bengal

An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement

Ranajit Guha

Duke University Press, 1996

A Rule of Property for Bengal is a classic work on the history of colonial India. First published in 1963, and long unavailable in this country, it is an essential text in the areas of colonial and postcolonial studies. In this book, Ranajit Guha examines the British establishment of the Permanent Settlement of Bengal—the first major administrative intervention by the British in the region and an effort to impose a western notion of private property on the Bengal countryside. Guha’s study of the intellectual origins, goals, and implementation of this policy provides an in-depth view of the dynamics of colonialism and reflects on the lasting effect of that dynamic following the formal termination of colonial rule.
By proclaiming the Permanent Settlement in 1793, the British hoped to promote a prosperous capitalist agriculture of the kind that had developed in England. The act renounced for all time the state’s right to raise the assessment already made upon landowners and thus sought to establish a system of property that was, in the British view, necessary for the creation of a stable government. Guha traces the origins of the Permanent Settlement to the anti-feudal ideas of Phillip Francis and the critique of feudalism provided by physiocratic thought, the precursor of political economy. The central question the book asks is how the Permanent Settlement, founded in anti-feudalism and grafted onto India by the most advanced capitalist power of the day became instrumental in the development of a neo-feudal organization of landed property and in the absorption and reproduction of precapitalist elements in a colonial regime.
Guha’s examination of the British attempt to mold Bengal to the contours of its own society without an understanding of the traditions and obligations upon which the Indian agrarian system was based is a truly pioneering work. The implications of A Rule of Property for Bengal remain rich for the current discussions from the postcolonialist perspective on the meaning of modernity and enlightenment.

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Rules of Origin in International Trade

A Comparative Study

Edwin Vermulst, Jacques Bourgeois, and Paul Waer, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1994

This title was formally part of the Studies in International Trade Policy Series, now called Studies in International Economics.

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Ruling Culture

Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy

Fiona Greenland

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.

In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.

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