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Dangerous Liaisons
Sex and Love in the Segregated South
Charles F. Robinson II
University of Arkansas Press, 2003

In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the southern white elite reclaimed power, “racial mixing” was the central concern of segregationists who strove to maintain “racial purity.” Segregation—and race itself—was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race. In this groundbreaking study, Charles Robinson examines how white southerners enforced anti-miscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecution under which interracial domestic relationships were punished even more harshly than transient sexual encounters. Robinson shows that the real crime was to suggest that black and white individuals might be equals, a notion which undermined the legitimacy of the economic, political, and social structure of white male supremacy.

Robinson examines legal cases from across the South, considering both criminal prosecutions brought by states and civil disputes over marital and family assets. He also looks at U.S. Supreme Court decisions, debates in state legislatures, comments in the U.S. Congressional Record, and newspaper editorials. He not only shows the hardening of racial categories but assesses the attitudes of African Americans about anti-miscegenation laws and intermarriage. The epilogue concerns “The Demise of Anti-miscegenation Law” including the case of Richard and Mildred Loving.

Dangerous Liaisons vividly documents the regulation of intimacy and its fundamental role in the construction of race.

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Dark Paradise
A History of Opiate Addiction in America
David T. Courtwright
Harvard University Press, 2001

In a newly enlarged edition of this eye-opening book, David T. Courtwright offers an original interpretation of a puzzling chapter in American social and medical history: the dramatic change in the pattern of opiate addiction--from respectable upper-class matrons to lower-class urban males, often with a criminal record. Challenging the prevailing view that the shift resulted from harsh new laws, Courtwright shows that the crucial role was played by the medical rather than the legal profession.

Dark Paradise tells the story not only from the standpoint of legal and medical sources, but also from the perspective of addicts themselves. With the addition of a new introduction and two new chapters on heroin addiction and treatment since 1940, Courtwright has updated this compelling work of social history for the present crisis of the Drug War.

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Dawn at Mineral King Valley
The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law
Daniel P. Selmi
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The story behind the historic Mineral King Valley case, which reveals how the Sierra Club battled Disney’s ski resort development and launched a new environmental era in America.
 
In our current age of climate change–induced panic, it’s hard to imagine a time when private groups were not actively enforcing environmental protection laws in the courts. It wasn’t until 1972, however, that a David and Goliath–esque Supreme Court showdown involving the Sierra Club and Disney set a revolutionary legal precedent for the era of environmental activism we live in today.
 
Set against the backdrop of the environmental movement that swept the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dawn at Mineral King Valley tells the surprising story of how the US Forest Service, the Disney company, and the Sierra Club each struggled to adapt to the new, rapidly changing political landscape of environmental consciousness in postwar America. Proposed in 1965 and approved by the federal government in 1969, Disney’s vast development plan would have irreversibly altered the practically untouched Mineral King Valley, a magnificently beautiful alpine area in the Sierra Nevada mountains. At first, the plan met with unanimous approval from elected officials, government administrators, and the press—it seemed inevitable that this expanse of wild natural land would be radically changed and turned over to a private corporation. Then the scrappy Sierra Club forcefully pushed back with a lawsuit that ultimately propelled the modern environmental era by allowing interest groups to bring litigation against environmentally destructive projects.
 
An expert on environmental law and appellate advocacy, Daniel P. Selmi uses his authoritative narrative voice to recount the complete history of this revolutionary legal battle and the ramifications that continue today, almost 50 years later.
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A Death of One's Own
Literature, Law, and the Right to Die
Jared Stark
Northwestern University Press, 2018
To be or not to be—who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One’s Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark’s wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency.
 
More than a survey or work of advocacy, A Death of One’s Own examines the consequences and limits of the three reasons most often cited for supporting a person’s right to die: that it is justified as an expression of personal autonomy or self-ownership; that it constitutes an act of self-authorship, of “choosing a final chapter” in one’s life; and that it enables what has come to be called “death with dignity.” Probing the intersections of law and literature, Stark interweaves close discussion of major legal, political, and philosophical arguments with revealing readings of literary and testimonial texts by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Améry.
 
A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One’s Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die.
 
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Decolonizing Discipline
Children, Corporal Punishment, Christian Theologies, and Reconciliation
Valerie E. Michaelson
University of Manitoba Press, 2020

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Defending Diversity
Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan
Patricia Gurin, Jeffrey S. Lehman, and Earl Lewis, with Eric L. Dey, Gerald Gurin, and Sylvia Hurtado
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Even as lawsuits challenging its admissions policies made their way through the courts, the University of Michigan carried the torch for affirmative action in higher education.
In June 2003, the Supreme Court vindicated UM's position on affirmative action when it ruled that race may be used as a factor for universities in their admissions programs, thus confirming what the UM had argued all along: diversity in the classroom translates to a beneficial and wide-ranging social value. With the green light given to the law school's admissions policies, Defending Diversity validates the positive benefits gained by students in a diverse educational setting.
Written by prominent University of Michigan faculty, Defending Diversity is a timely response to the court's ruling. Providing factual background, historical setting, and the psychosocial implications of affirmative action, the book illuminates the many benefits of a diverse higher educational setting -- including preparing students to be full participants in a pluralistic democracy -- and demonstrates why affirmative action is necessary to achieve that diversity.
Defending Diversity is a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion on affirmative action in higher education. Perhaps more important, it is a valuable record of the history, events, arguments, and issues surrounding the original lawsuits and the Supreme Court's subsequent ruling, and helps reclaim the debate from those forces opposed to affirmative action.
Patricia Gurin is Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. Jeffrey S. Lehman, former Dean of the University of Michigan Law School, is President of Cornell University. Earl Lewis is Dean of Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan.
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A Democratic Constitution for Public Education
Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim
University of Chicago Press, 2014
America’s education system faces a stark dilemma: it needs governmental oversight, rules and regulations, but it also needs to be adaptable enough to address student needs and the many different problems that can arise at any given school—something that large educational bureaucracies are notoriously bad at. Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim offer here a solution that is brilliant for its simplicity and distinctly American sensibility: our public education system needs a constitution. Adapting the tried-and-true framework of our forefathers to the specific governance of education, they show that the answer has been part of our political DNA all along.
           
Most reformers focus on who should control education, but Hill and Jochim show that who governs is less important than determining what powers they have. They propose a Civic Education Council—a democratic body subject to checks and balances that would define the boundaries of its purview as well as each school’s particular freedoms. They show how such a system would prevent regulations meant to satisfy special interests and shift the focus to the real task at hand: improving school performance. Laying out the implications of such a system for parents, students, teachers, unions, state and federal governments, and courts, they offer a vision of educational governance that stays true to—and draws on the strengths of—one of the greatest democratic tools we have ever created.  
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Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures
Film and the First Amendment
By Jeremy Geltzer
University of Texas Press, 2015

From the earliest days of cinema, scandalous films such as The Kiss (1896) attracted audiences eager to see provocative images on screen. With controversial content, motion pictures challenged social norms and prevailing laws at the intersection of art and entertainment. Today, the First Amendment protects a wide range of free speech, but this wasn’t always the case. For the first fifty years, movies could be censored and banned by city and state officials charged with protecting the moral fabric of their communities. Once film was embraced under the First Amendment by the Supreme Court’s Miracle decision in 1952, new problems pushed notions of acceptable content even further.

Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures explores movies that changed the law and resulted in greater creative freedom for all. Relying on primary sources that include court decisions, contemporary periodicals, state censorship ordinances, and studio production codes, Jeremy Geltzer offers a comprehensive and fascinating history of cinema and free speech, from the earliest films of Thomas Edison to the impact of pornography and the Internet. With incisive case studies of risqué pictures, subversive foreign films, and banned B-movies, he reveals how the legal battles over film content changed long-held interpretations of the Constitution, expanded personal freedoms, and opened a new era of free speech. An important contribution to film studies and media law, Geltzer’s work presents the history of film and the First Amendment with an unprecedented level of detail.

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Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education
The Story behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District
Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber
University of Illinois Press, 2020
In 1988, Sandi and Larry Zobrest sued a suburban Tucson, Arizona, school district that had denied their hearing-impaired son a taxpayer-funded interpreter in his Roman Catholic high school. The Catalina Foothills School District argued that providing a public resource for a private, religious school created an unlawful crossover between church and state. The Zobrests, however, claimed that the district had infringed on both their First Amendment right to freedom of religion and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber use the Zobrests' story to examine the complex history and jurisprudence of disability accommodation and educational mainstreaming. They look at the family's effort to acquire educational resources for their son starting in early childhood and the choices the Zobrests made to prepare him for life in the hearing world rather than the deaf community. Dierenfield and Gerber also analyze the thorny church-state issues and legal controversies that informed the case, its journey to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the impact of the high court's ruling on the course of disability accommodation and religious liberty.

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Disasters and Democracy
The Politics Of Extreme Natural Events
Rutherford H. Platt
Island Press, 1999

In recent years, the number of presidential declarations of “major disasters” has skyrocketed. Such declarations make stricken areas eligible for federal emergency relief funds that greatly reduce their costs. But is federalizing the costs of disasters helping to lighten the overall burden of disasters or is it making matters worse? Does it remove incentives for individuals and local communities to take measures to protect themselves? Are people more likely to invest in property in hazardous locations in the belief that, if worse comes to worst, the federal government will bail them out?

Disasters and Democracy addresses the political response to natural disasters, focusing specifically on the changing role of the federal government from distant observer to immediate responder and principal financier of disaster costs.

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Discretionary Justice
Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court
Paik, Leslie
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Juvenile drug courts are on the rise in the United States, as a result of a favorable political climate and justice officials' endorsement of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement--the concept of combining therapeutic care with correctional discipline. The goal is to divert nonviolent youth drug offenders into addiction treatment instead of long-term incarceration. Discretionary Justice overviews the system, taking readers behind the scenes of the juvenile drug court. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at a California court, Leslie Paik explores the staff's decision-making practices in assessing the youths' cases, concentrating on the way accountability and noncompliance are assessed. Using the concept of "workability," Paik demonstrates how compliance, and what is seen by staff as "noncompliance," are the constructed results of staff decisions, fluctuating budgets, and sometimes questionable drug test results.

While these courts largely focus on holding youths responsible for their actions, this book underscores the social factors that shape how staff members view progress in the court. Paik also emphasizes the perspectives of children and parents. Given the growing emphasis on individual responsibility in other settings, such as schools and public welfare agencies, Paik's findings are relevant outside the juvenile justice system.

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Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics
The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States since the New Deal
Paul Burstein
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Throughout this impressive and controversial account of the fight against job discrimination in the United States, Paul Burstein poses searching questions. Why did Congress adopt EEO legislation in the sixties and seventies? Has that legislation made a difference to the people it was intended to help? And what can the struggle for equal employment opportunity tell us about democracy in the United States?

"This is an important, well-researched book. . . . Burstein has had the courage to break through narrow specializations within sociology . . . and even to address the types of acceptable questions usually associated with three different disciplines (political science, sociology, and economics). . . . This book should be read by all professionals interested in political sociology and social movements."—Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Social Forces

"Discrimination, Jobs and Politics [is] satisfying because it tells a more complete story . . . than does most sociological research. . . . I find myself returning to it when I'm studying the U.S. women's movement and recommending it to students struggling to do coherent research."—Rachel Rosenfeld, Contemporary Sociology

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Doctors and Demonstrators
How Political Institutions Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada
Drew Halfmann
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has continued to be a divisive political issue in the United States. In contrast, it has remained primarily a medical issue in Britain and Canada despite the countries’ shared heritage. Doctors and Demonstrators looks beyond simplistic cultural or religious explanations to find out why abortion politics and policies differ so dramatically in these otherwise similar countries.
 
Drew Halfmann argues that political institutions are the key. In the United States, federalism, judicial review, and a private health care system contributed to the public definition of abortion as an individual right rather than a medical necessity. Meanwhile, Halfmann explains, the porous structure of American political parties gave pro-choice and pro-life groups the opportunity to move the issue onto the political agenda. A groundbreaking study of the complex legal and political factors behind the evolution of abortion policy, Doctors and Demonstrators will be vital for anyone trying to understand this contentious issue.
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Does Business Learn?
Tax Breaks, Uncertainty, and Political Strategies
Sandra L. Suarez
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Firms in the United States have many political advantages when compared to other groups in society. They are the best-represented group in our nation's capital; they operate more Political Action Committees; and their lobbyists are among the most experienced political operatives. Yet firms are uncertain about their political power and hence about the effectiveness of their political strategies. This book deals with how firms decide which strategy to pursue among the existing alternatives when it comes to defending policies that play to their interests.
Sandra Suárez looks at the efforts of business to influence government policy in a detailed study of the efforts of major American corporations to protect the tax credit applicable to profits from investments in Puerto Rico. This rare longitudinal case-study explores the abilities of U.S. pharmaceutical and electronics companies to adapt their political strategies to a fluid and uncertain political environment. Drawing on interviews with tax lawyers, corporate lobbyists and government officials, the author follows the behavior of the same group of companies over the past twenty years.
This book advances a learning-based explanation of business political behavior, which argues that past political experience accounts for patterns of political behavior that government structures and salient issues alone cannot explain. Centered on attempts to protect an important tax break for business, the possessions tax battles provide an appropriate case for examining the value of the business learning approach.
Although written with a political science audience in mind, this book addresses issues that will resonate widely with sociologists, management researchers and students alike.
Sandra L. Suárez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Temple University.
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Doing Business in Arizona
A Legal Guide
Snell & Wilmer Associates Snell & Wilmer Associates
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Doing Business in Arizona brings together in one place the essential legal information for anyone who is planning to start a business, locate a facility, or invest in Arizona. What are the differences between sole proprietorships, general and limited partnerships, and corporations? And how do you choose between them in establishing your business? What is the best form of financing for your business? What do you need to know about immigration laws, employee benefits, and intellectual property? Doing Business in Arizona answers these and many more essential questions for both new and veteran business owners. The book includes valuable information for the foreign investors, offering a perspective not readily available in other legal guides. In addition to pointing out concerns specific to foreign companies and individuals doing business in the state, the book also provides a brief factual look at Arizona, including statistics on employment, industry, housing, and government, and an overview of the U.S. legal system. Compiled by the attorneys and staff of Snell & Wilmer, Arizona's largest law firm, Doing Business in Arizona is a necessary reference for business owners and investors alike.
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Domestic Tyranny
The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present
Elizabeth Pleck
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Elizabeth Pleck's Domestic Tyranny chronicles the rise and demise of legal, political, and medical campaigns against domestic violence from colonial times to the present. Based on in-depth research into court records, newspaper accounts, and autobiographies, this book argues that the single most consistent barrier to reform against domestic violence has been the Family Ideal--that is, ideas about family privacy, conjugal and parental rights, and family stability. This edition features a new introduction surveying the multinational and cultural themes now present in recent historical writing about family violence.
 
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Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
Emily S. Burrill
Ohio University Press, 2010

Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. As a lived experience and as a social and historical unit of analysis, domestic violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa is complex.

Using evidence drawn from Sub-saharan Africa, the chapters explore the range of domestic violence in Africa’s colonial past and its present, including taxation and the insertion of the household into the broader structure of colonial domination.

African histories of domestic violence demand that scholars and activists refine the terms and analyses and pay attention to the historical legacies of contemporary problems. This collection brings into conversation historical, anthropological, legal, and activist perspectives on domestic violence in Africa and fosters a deeper understanding of the problem of domestic violence, the limits of international human rights conventions, and local and regional efforts to address the issue.

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The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence
David H. Kaye
Harvard University Press, 2010
Bridging law, genetics, and statistics, this book is an authoritative history of the long and tortuous process by which DNA science has been integrated into the American legal system.In a history both scientifically sophisticated and comprehensible to the nonspecialist, David H. Kaye weaves together molecular biology, population genetics, the legal rules of evidence, and theories of statistical reasoning as he describes the struggles between prosecutors and defense counsel over the admissibility of genetic proof of identity. Combining scientific exposition with stories of criminal investigations, scientific and legal hubris, and distortions on all sides, Kaye shows how the adversary system exacerbated divisions among scientists, how lawyers and experts obfuscated some issues and clarified others, how probability and statistics were manipulated and misunderstood, and how the need to convince lay judges influenced the scientific research. Looking to the future, Kaye uses probability theory to clarify legal concepts of relevance and probative value, and describes alternatives to race-based DNA profile frequencies.Essential reading for lawyers, judges, and expert witnesses in DNA cases, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence is an informative and provocative contribution to the interdisciplinary study of law and science.
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A Dream of Justice
The Story of Keyes v. Denver Public Schools
by Pat Pascoe
University Press of Colorado, 2023
A Dream of Justice is Colorado state senator and former teacher Pat Pascoe’s firsthand account of the decades-long fight to desegregate Denver’s public schools. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with members of the legal community, parents, and students, as well as extensive institutional records, Pascoe offers a compelling social history of Keyes v. School District No. 1 (Denver).
 
Pascoe details Denver’s desegregation battle, beginning with the citizen studies that exposed the inequities of segregated schools and Rachel Noel’s resolution to integrate the system, followed by the momentous pro-integration Benton-Pascoe campaign of Ed Benton and Monte Pascoe for the school board in 1969. When segregationists won that election and reversed the integration plan for northeast Denver, Black, white, and Latino parents filed Keyes v. School District No. 1. This book follows the arguments in the case through briefs, transcripts, and decisions from district court to the Supreme Court of the United States and back, to its ultimate order to desegregate all Denver schools “root and branch.” It was the first northern city desegregation suit to be brought before the Supreme Court. However, with the end of court-ordered busing in 1995, schools quickly resegregated and are now more segregated than before Keyes was filed.
 
Pascoe asserts that school integration is a necessary step toward eliminating systemic racism in our country and should be the objective of every school board. A Dream of Justice will appeal to students, scholars, and readers interested in the history of civil rights in America, Denver history, and the history of US education.
 
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The Dred Scott Case
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law
David Thomas Konig
Ohio University Press, 2010

In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford raised issues that have not been fully resolved despite three amendments to the Constitution and more than a century and a half of litigation.

The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law presents original research and the reflections of the nation’s leading scholars who gathered in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of what was arguably the most infamous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision, which held that African Americans “had no rights” under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to alter that, galvanized Americans and thrust the issue of race and law to the center of American politics. This collection of essays revisits the history of the case and its aftermath in American life and law. In a final section, the present-day justices of the Missouri Supreme Court offer their reflections on the process of judging and provide perspective on the misdeeds of their nineteenth-century predecessors who denied the Scotts their freedom.
Contributors: Austin Allen, Adam Arenson, John Baugh, Hon. Duane Benton, Christopher Alan Bracey, Alfred L. Brophy, Paul Finkelman, Louis Gerteis, Mark Graber, Daniel W. Hamilton, Cecil J. Hunt II, David Thomas Konig, Leland Ware, Hon. Michael A. Wolff

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Drinkers, Drivers, and Bartenders
Balancing Private Choices and Public Accountability
Frank A. Sloan, Emily M. Stout, Kathryn Whetten-Goldstein, and Lan Liang
University of Chicago Press, 2000
According to the United States Public Health Service, over 100,000 deaths a year are attributable to alcohol, including 20,000 highway fatalities. In response, legislatures have enacted various forms of regulation intended both to reduce alcohol consumption and to curb its harmful effects. This groundbreaking study focuses on one such form of regulation, the liability imposed on alcohol servers and social hosts by tort law. Basing their analysis on important new data from their extensive research and in-depth interviews with actors on all sides of the issue, the authors conclude that, despite their relative unpopularity, tort laws are very effective in reducing accidents—even more than criminal sanctions.

Extraordinary in scope and exacting in detail, Drinkers, Drivers, and Bartenders: Balancing Private Choices and Public Accountability links alcohol problems, deterrence, and serving practices in a way no other work has been able to do and is certain to become a crucial reference point for researchers and policymakers alike.
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Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict
Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications
Edited by David Cortright, Rachel Fairhurst, and Kristen Wall
University of Chicago Press, 2015
During the past decade, armed drones have entered the American military arsenal as a core tactic for countering terrorism. When coupled with access to reliable information, they make it possible to deploy lethal force accurately across borders while keeping one’s own soldiers out of harm’s way. The potential to direct force with great precision also offers the possibility of reducing harm to civilians. At the same time, because drones eliminate some of the traditional constraints on the use of force—like the need to gain political support for full mobilization—they lower the threshold for launching military strikes. The development of drone use capacity across dozens of countries increases the need for global standards on the use of these weapons to assure that their deployment is strategically wise and ethically and legally sound.

Presenting a robust conversation among leading scholars in the areas of international legal standards, counterterrorism strategy, humanitarian law, and the ethics of force, Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict takes account of current American drone campaigns and the developing legal, ethical, and strategic implications of this new way of warfare. Among the contributions to this volume are a thorough examination of the American government’s legal justifications for the targeting of enemies using drones, an analysis of American drone campaigns’ notable successes and failures, and a discussion of the linked issues of human rights, freedom of information, and government accountability.
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Drug Addiction and Drug Policy
The Struggle to Control Dependence
Philip B. Heymann
Harvard University Press, 2001

This book is the culmination of five years of impassioned conversations among distinguished scholars in law, public policy, medicine, and biopsychology, about the most difficult questions in drug policy and the study of addictions. As these intensely argued chapters show, the obvious answers are always alluring but frequently wrong.

Do drug addicts have an illness, or is their addiction under their control? Should they be treated as patients, or as criminals? Challenging the conventional wisdom in both the psychiatric community and the enforcement community, the authors show the falsity of these standard dichotomies. They argue that the real question is how coercion and support can be used together to steer addicts toward productive life.

Written in clear and forceful language, without ideological blinkers and with close attention to empirical data, this book has something to teach both novice and expert in the fields of drug addiction and drug policy. The authors' resistance to sloganeering from right or left will raise the quality of public discussion of a complex issue, and contribute to the management of one of the most painful and enduring problems of American society.

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A Drunkard's Defense
Alcohol, Murder, and Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America
Michele Rotunda
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
Is drunkenness a defense for murder? In the early nineteenth century, the answer was a resounding no. Intoxication was considered voluntary, and thus provided no defense. Yet as the century progressed, American courts began to extend exculpatory value to heavy drinking. The medicalization of alcohol use created new categories of mental illness which, alongside changes in the law, formed the basis for defense arguments that claimed unintended consequences and lack of criminal intent. Concurrently, advocates of prohibition cast "demon rum" and the "rum-seller" as the drunkard's accomplices in crime, mitigating offenders' actions. By the postbellum period, a backlash, led by medical professionals and an influential temperance movement, left the legacy of an unsettled legal standard.

In A Drunkard's Defense, Michele Rotunda examines a variety of court cases to explore the attitudes of nineteenth-century physicians, legal professionals, temperance advocates, and ordinary Americans toward the relationship between drunkenness, violence, and responsibility, providing broader insights into the country's complicated relationship with alcohol.
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Dust-Up
Asbestos Litigation and the Failure of Commonsense Policy Reform
Jeb Barnes
Georgetown University Press, 2011

In an era of polarization, narrow party majorities, and increasing use of supermajority requirements in the Senate, policy entrepreneurs must find ways to reach across the aisle and build bipartisan coalitions in Congress. One such coalition-building strategy is the “politics of efficiency,” or reform that is aimed at eliminating waste from existing policies and programs. After all, reducing inefficiency promises to reduce costs without cutting benefits, which should appeal to members of both political parties, especially given tight budgetary constraints in Washington.

Dust-Up explores the most recent congressional efforts to reform asbestos litigation—a case in which the politics of efficiency played a central role and seemed likely to prevail. Yet, these efforts failed to produce a winning coalition, even though reform could have saved billions of dollars and provided quicker compensation to victims of asbestos-related diseases. Why? The answers, as Jeb Barnes deftly illustrates, defy conventional wisdom and force us to rethink the political effects of litigation and the dynamics of institutional change in our fragmented policymaking system.

Set squarely at the intersection of law, politics, and public policy, Dust-Up provides the first in-depth analysis of the political obstacles to Congress in replacing a form of litigation that nearly everyone—Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, presidents, and experts—agrees is woefully inefficient and unfair to both victims and businesses. This concise and accessible case study includes a glossary of terms and study questions, making it a perfect fit for courses in law and public policy, congressional politics, and public health.

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The Dutch National Research Agenda in perspective
A reflection on Research and Science Policy in practice
Edited by Beatrice de Graaf, Alexander Rinnooy Kan, and Henk Molenaar
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The Dutch National Research Agenda is a set of national priorities that are set by scientists working in conjunction with corporations, civil society organisations, and interested citizens. The agenda consolidates the questions that scientific research will be focused on in the coming year. This book covers the current status of the Dutch National Research Agenda and considers what changes and adjustments may need to be made to the process in order to keep Dutch national research at the top of the pack.
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DYING TO BE BEAUTIFUL
FIGHT FOR SAFE COSMETICS
GWEN KAY
The Ohio State University Press, 2005


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