front cover of The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney
The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney
The Politics and Jurisprudence of a Northern Democrat from the Age of Jackson to the Gilded Age
David M. Gold
Ohio University Press, 2016

Ohio’s Rufus P. Ranney embodied many of the most intriguing social and political tensions of his time. He was an anticorporate campaigner who became John D. Rockefeller’s favorite lawyer. A student and law partner of abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade, Ranney acquired an antislavery reputation and recruited troops for the Union army; but as a Democratic candidate for governor he denied the power of Congress to restrict slavery in the territories, and during the Civil War and Reconstruction he condemned Republican policies.

Ranney was a key delegate at Ohio’s second constitutional convention and a two-time justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. He advocated equality and limited government as understood by radical Jacksonian Democrats. Scholarly discussions of Jacksonian jurisprudence have primarily focused on a handful of United States Supreme Court cases, but Ranney’s opinions, taken as a whole, outline a broader approach to judicial decision making.

A founder of the Ohio State Bar Association, Ranney was immensely influential but has been understudied until now. He left no private papers, even destroying his own correspondence. In The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney, David M. Gold works with the public record to reveal the contours of Ranney’s life and work. The result is a new look at how Jacksonian principles crossed the divide of the Civil War and became part of the fabric of American law and at how radical antebellum Democrats transformed themselves into Gilded Age conservatives.

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Japanese Law
An Economic Approach
J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this introduction to Japanese law, J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato combine an economic approach with a clear and often amusing account of the law itself to challenge commonly held ideas about the law. Arguing against such things as the assumption that Japanese law differs from law in the United States and the idea that law plays only a trivial role in Japan or is culturally determined, this book will be recognized as a major contribution to the understanding of Japanese law.

"A compelling economic analysis. . . . This book remains one of the few concerning Japanese law that successfully brings to life the legal culture of Japan." —Bonnie L. Dixon, New York Law Journal
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Japanese Law in Context
Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics
Curtis J. Milhaupt
Harvard University Press, 2001
This is a wide-ranging selection of 130 readings in Japanese law. The essays, extracted from previously published books and articles, cover subjects including historical context, the civil law tradition, the legal services industry, dispute resolution, constitutional law, contracts, torts, criminal law, family law, employment law, corporate law, and economic regulation. This unique collection of readings is accompanied by the texts of the Japanese constitution and other basic laws.
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Japanese Tradition and Western Law
Emperor, State, and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka
Richard H. Minear
Harvard University Press

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Japan’s Practice of International Law
Hidehisa Horinouchi
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Diplomacy is a series of crises, and the navigational beacon for a nation is international law. This book is a collection of articles on six selected international legal issues concerning Japan. It addresses various issues, including self-defence, post-war legal issues, chemical weapons, the law of the sea, consular immunities, and hijacking. It is a legal documentary through which the reader can look into the minds of Japanese officials challenged by one crisis after another. As a coherent whole, this book ably represents “Japan’s Practice of International Law” and remarkably portrays international law in action from a Japanese practitioner’s perspective.
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The Javanese Way of Law
Early Modern Sloka Phenomena
Mason Hoadley
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The author's investigation of early-modern Javanese law reveals that judicial authority does not come from the contents of legal titles or juridical texts, but from legal maxims and variations thereof. A century and a half ago Simon Keyzer, a recognized scholar of Javanese law, noted that understanding of that law is dependent upon a grasp of such pithy expressions, which provide the key to the whole body of suits. (*Preface*, C.F. Winter, *Javaansche Zamenspraken*, 1858, which examines hundreds of *sloka*, the majority of which are directed to prevailing legal practice).Drawing upon the contents of 18th century Javanese legal texts, the present work builds upon Keyzer's and Winter's references to '*sloka*-phenomena', namely *sloka* proper (maxims) and its derivatives *sinalokan* (that made of *sloka*), *aksara* here meaning legal principles, and *prakara* (matter, case). These are usually conveyed in vignettes illustrating their function and as a group, constitute the essence of traditional Javanese written law.
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Jefferson's Louisiana
Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions
George Dargo
Harvard University Press, 1975

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Jersey Justice
The Story of the Trenton Six
Cathy D. Knepper
Rutgers University Press, 2011

The case of the Trenton Six attracted international attention in its time (1948–1952) and was once known as the “northern Scottsboro Boys case.” Yet, there is no memory of it. The shame of racism evident in the case has been nearly erased from the public record. Now, historian Cathy D. Knepper takes us back to the courtroom to make us aware of this shocking chapter in American history.

Jersey Justice: The Story of the Trenton Six begins in 1948 when William Horner, an elderly junk dealer, was murdered in his downtown Trenton shop. Over a two-week period, six local African American men were arrested and charged with collectively killing Horner. Violating every rule in the book, the Trenton police held the six men in incommunicado detention, without warrants, and threatened them until they confessed. At the end of the trial the all-white jury sentenced the six men to die in the electric chair.

That might have been the end of the story were it not for the tireless efforts of Bessie Mitchell, the sister of one of the accused men. Undaunted by the refusal of the NAACP and the ACLU to help appeal the conviction of the Trenton Six, Mitchell enlisted the aid of the Civil Rights Congress, ultimately taking the case as far as the New Jersey Supreme Court. Along the way, the Trenton Six garnered the attention and involvement of many prominent activists, politicians, and artists, including Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, Arthur Miller, and Albert Einstein. Jersey Justice brings to light a shameful moment in our nation’s history, but it also tells the story of a personal battle for social justice that changed America.

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Jewish Legal Theories
Writings on State, Religion, and Morality
Edited by Leora Batnitzky and Yonatan Brafman
Brandeis University Press, 2018
Contemporary arguments about Jewish law uniquely reflect both the story of Jewish modernity and a crucial premise of modern conceptions of law generally: the claim of autonomy for the intellectual subject and practical sphere of the law. Jewish Legal Theories collects representative modern Jewish writings on law and provides short commentaries and annotations on these writings that situate them within Jewish thought and history, as well as within modern legal theory. The topics addressed by these documents include Jewish legal theory from the modern nation-state to its adumbration in the forms of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism in the German-Jewish context; the development of Jewish legal philosophy in Eastern Europe beginning in the eighteenth century; Ultra-Orthodox views of Jewish law premised on the rejection of the modern nation-state; the role of Jewish law in Israel; and contemporary feminist legal theory.
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JLE vol 61 num 4
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018
This is volume 61 issue 4 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
[more]

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John Brown’s Trial
Brian McGinty
Harvard University Press, 2009

Mixing idealism with violence, abolitionist John Brown cut a wide swath across the United States before winding up in Virginia, where he led an attack on the U.S. armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Supported by a “provisional army” of 21 men, Brown hoped to rouse the slaves in Virginia to rebellion. But he was quickly captured and, after a short but stormy trial, hanged on December 2, 1859.

Brian McGinty provides the first comprehensive account of the trial, which raised important questions about jurisdiction, judicial fairness, and the nature of treason under the American constitutional system. After the jury returned its guilty verdict, an appeal was quickly disposed of, and the governor of Virginia refused to grant clemency. Brown met his death not as an enemy of the American people but as an enemy of Southern slaveholders.

Historians have long credited the Harpers Ferry raid with rousing the country to a fever pitch of sectionalism and accelerating the onset of the Civil War. McGinty sees Brown’s trial, rather than his raid, as the real turning point in the struggle between North and South. If Brown had been killed in Harpers Ferry (as he nearly was), or condemned to death in a summary court-martial, his raid would have had little effect. Because he survived to stand trial before a Virginia judge and jury, and argue the case against slavery with an eloquence that reverberated around the world, he became a symbol of the struggle to abolish slavery and a martyr to the cause of freedom.

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John Henry Wigmore and the Rules of Evidence
The Hidden Origins of Modern Law
Andrew Porwancher
University of Missouri Press, 2016

Honorable Mention, 2017 Scribes Book Award, The American Society of Legal Writers

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was reeling from the effects of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Time-honored verities proved obsolete, and intellectuals in all fields sought ways to make sense of an increasingly unfamiliar reality. The legal system in particular began to buckle under the weight of its anachronism. In the midst of this crisis, John Henry Wigmore, dean of Northwestern University School of Law, single-handedly modernized the jury trial with his 1904–1905 Treatise on evidence, an encyclopedic work that dominated the conduct of trials. In so doing, he inspired generations of progressive jurists—among them Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter—to reshape American law to meet the demands of a new era. Yet Wigmore’s role as a prophet of modernity has slipped into obscurity. This book provides a radical reappraisal of his place in the birth of modern legal thought.

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John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court
Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest
Steven P. Brown
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Provides a penetrating analysis of US Supreme Court justice John McKinley
 
Steven P. Brown rescues from obscurity John McKinley, one of the three Alabama justices, along with John Archibald Campbell and Hugo Black, who have served on the US Supreme Court. A native Kentuckian who moved in 1819 to northern Alabama as a land speculator and lawyer, McKinley was elected to the state legislature three times and became first a senator and then a representative in the US Congress before being elevated to the Supreme Court in 1837. He spent his first five years on the court presiding over the newly created Ninth Circuit, which covered Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. His was not only the newest circuit, encompassing a region that, because of its recent settlement, included a huge number of legal claims related to property, but it was also the largest, the furthest from Washington, DC, and by far the most difficult to traverse.
 
While this is a thorough biography of McKinley’s life, it also details early Alabama state politics and provides one of the most exhaustive accounts available of the internal workings of the antebellum Supreme Court and the very real challenges that accompanied the now-abandoned practice of circuit riding. In providing the first in depth assessment of the life and Supreme Court career of Justice John McKinley, Brown has given us a compelling portrait of a man active in the leading financial, legal, and political circles of his day.
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Journal of Law and Courts, volume 10 number 1 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

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Journal of Law and Courts, volume 10 number 2 (Fall 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

front cover of Journal of Law and Courts, volume 9 number 1 (Spring 2021)
Journal of Law and Courts, volume 9 number 1 (Spring 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

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Journal of Law and Courts, volume 9 number 2 (Fall 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 63 number 4 (November 2020)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2020

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 64 number 1 (February 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 64 number 2 (May 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 64 number 3 (August 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 64 number 4 (November 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number 1 (February 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number 2 (May 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number 3 (August 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

front cover of The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number 4 (November 2022)
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number 4 (November 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 65 issue 4 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
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The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number S1 (February 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

front cover of The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number S2 (November 2022)
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 65 number S2 (November 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 65 issue S2 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
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front cover of The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 1 (February 2023)
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 1 (February 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 66 issue 1 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
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front cover of The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 2 (May 2023)
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 2 (May 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 66 issue 2 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
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front cover of The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 3 (August 2023)
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 3 (August 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 66 issue 3 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
[more]

front cover of The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 4 (November 2023)
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 66 number 4 (November 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 66 issue 4 of The Journal of Law and Economics. Established in 1958, the Journal of Law and Economics publishes research on a broad range of topics, including the economic analysis of law, the economic analysis of regulation and the behavior of regulated firms, industrial organization and antitrust policy, the political economy of legislation and legislative processes, law and finance, and corporate finance and governance. The JLE has published some of the most influential and widely cited articles in these areas. It is an invaluable resource for academics and those interested in cutting-edge analysis of current public policy issues.
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Journal of Legal Analysis, Volume 1
Number 1 (2009): Winter
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard University Press

Co-published by the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School and Harvard University Press, the JLA is a faculty-refereed, peer-reviewed publication on law. It aspires to be broad in coverage, including doctrinal legal analysis and interdisciplinary scholarship. JLA articles are free online and available for sale in bound issues.

Volume 1, Issue 1 contains contributions from Adrian Vermeule (Many-Minds Arguments in Legal Theory), Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, and Eric A. Posner (Are Judges Overpaid? A Skeptical Response to the Judicial Salary Debate), James Q. Whitman (Equality in Criminal Law: The Two Divergent Western Roads), Jonathan R. Macey and Geoffrey P. Miller (Judicial Review of Class Action Settlements), Melvin A. Eisenberg (Impossibility, Impracticability, and Frustration), Edward L. Glaeser, Cass R. Sunstein (Extremism and Social Learning), R. H. Helmholz (Bonham's Case, Judicial Review, and the Law of Nature), and David A. Hyman, Bernard Black, Charles Silver, and William M. Sage (Estimating the Effect of Damages Caps in Medical Malpractice Cases).

http://jla.hup.harvard.edu

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Journal of Legal Analysis, Volume 1
Number 2 (2009): Summer
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard University Press

Co-published by the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School and Harvard University Press, the JLA is a faculty-refereed, peer-reviewed publication on law. It aspires to be broad in coverage, including doctrinal legal analysis and interdisciplinary scholarship. JLA articles are free online and available for sale in bound issues.

Volume 1, Issue 2 contains contributions from Tonja Jacobi (Competing Models of Judicial Coalition Formation and Case Outcome Determination), Thomas W. Merrill (Accession and Original Ownership), Kenneth M. Ayotte and Edward R. Morrison,(Creditor Control and Conflict in Chapter 11), Jonathan Baron and Ilana Ritov (The Role of Probability of Detection in Judgments of Punishment), John C. Coates (Reforming the Taxation and Regulation of Mutual Funds: A Comparative Legal and Economic Analysis), Adriaan Lanni (Social Norms in the Courts of Ancient Athens), Oren Bar-Gill and Omri Ben-Shahar (The Prisoners' (Plea Bargain) Dilemma), and William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner (Rational Judicial Behavior: A Statistical Study).

http://jla.hup.harvard.edu

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Journal of Legal Analysis, Volume 2
Number 1 (2010): Spring
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard University Press

Co-published by the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School and Harvard University Press, the JLA is a peer-reviewed publication on law. It aspires to be broad in coverage, including doctrinal legal analysis and interdisciplinary scholarship. JLA articles are free online and available for sale in bound issues.

Volume 2, Issue 1 contains contributions from Einer R. Elhauge, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn, Gabriella Blum, Andrew T. Guzman, Timothy L. Meyer, Alon Harel, Tsvi Kahana, Anup Malani, Ward Fransworth, Dustin Guzior, Steven Shavell, Victor P. Goldberg, and Melvin A. Eisenberg.

http://jla.hup.harvard.edu

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Journal of Legal Analysis, Volume 2
Number 2 (2010): Fall
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard University Press

Co-published by the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School and Harvard University Press, the JLA is a peer-reviewed publication on law. It aspires to be broad in coverage, including doctrinal legal analysis and interdisciplinary scholarship. JLA articles are free online and available for sale in bound issues.

Volume 2, Issue 2 contains contributions from Yair Listokin, Eric Posner, Kathryn Spier, Adrian Vermeule, Alan Sykes, Benito Arruñada, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise, Ncole Waters & Martin Wells, J. Mark Ramseyer, and Jonathan Masur.

http://jla.hup.harvard.edu

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The Journal of Legal Studies, volume 51 number 1 (January 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

front cover of The Journal of Legal Studies, volume 51 number 2 (June 2022)
The Journal of Legal Studies, volume 51 number 2 (June 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 51 issue 2 of The Journal of Legal Studies. The Journal of Legal Studies publishes interdisciplinary academic research that tests or develops a particular legal or social scientific theory about law and legal institutions, including short submissions that critique or extend articles published in previous issues of the JLS. The JLS emphasizes social science approaches, especially those of economics, political science, and psychology, but it also publishes the work of historians, philosophers, and others who are interested in legal theory. The Journal was founded in 1972.
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A Journey in Brazil
Henry Washington Hilliard and the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society
David I. Durham and Paul M. Pruitt Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2008
A Journey in Brazil: Henry Washington Hilliard and the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society is an investigative account of the vital career of Henry Washington Hilliard, who had a long and complicated relationship with slavery. A native Southerner, he was a former slave owner and Confederate soldier, but as a member of Congress Hilliard strongly opposed secession. Hilliard supported the constitutional legality of slavery; however, as a moderate he acknowledged the status quo and warned of the dangers of radical positions concerning the issue.
 
Throughout a diverse career that spanned six decades, Hilliard’s personal challenges, moderated by his faith in Divine Providence, eventually allowed him to return to his ideological roots and find a sense of redemption late in life by becoming an unlikely spokesman for the Brazilian emancipation movement through his association with Joaquim Nabuco. In A Journey in Brazil, authors David I. Durham and Paul M. Pruitt Jr. establish context for Hilliard’s beliefs, document his journey in Brazil, and offer a variety of primary documents—selections from newspapers, transcripts of letters, translations of speeches, and other documents that have never before been published.
 
AboutOccasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library
This collection offers a series of edited documents that contribute to an understanding of the development of legal history, culture, or doctrine. Series editors Paul M. Pruitt Jr. and David I. Durham have selected a variety of materials—a lecture, diaries, letters, speeches, a ledger, commonplace books, a code of ethics, court reports—to illustrate unique examples of legal life and thought.
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The Joy of Consent
A Philosophy of Good Sex
Manon Garcia
Harvard University Press, 2023

“From the bedroom to the classroom to the courtroom, ‘consent’ is a key term in our contemporary sexual ethics. In this timely reexamination, Manon Garcia deftly reveals the hidden complexities of consent and proposes how to reconceptualize it as a tool of liberation.”
—Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex


A feminist philosopher argues that consent is not only a highly imperfect legal threshold but also an underappreciated complement of good sex.

In the age of #MeToo, consent has become the ultimate answer to problems of sexual harassment and violence: as long as all parties agree to sex, the act is legitimate. Critics argue that consent, and the awkwardness of confirming it, rob sex of its sexiness. But that objection is answered with the charge that opposing the consent regime means defending a masculine erotics of silence and mystery, a pillar of patriarchy.

In The Joy of Consent, French philosopher Manon Garcia upends the assumptions that underlie this very American debate, reframing consent as an ally of pleasure rather than a legalistic killjoy. In doing so, she rejects conventional wisdom on all sides. As a legal norm, consent can prove rickety: consent alone doesn’t make sex licit—adults engaged in BDSM are morally and legally suspect even when they consent. And nonconsensual sex is not, as many activists insist, always rape. People often agree to sex because it is easier than the alternative, Garcia argues, challenging the simplistic equation between consent and noncoercion.

Drawing on sources rarely considered together—from Kantian ethics to kink practices—Garcia offers an alternative framework grounded in commitments to autonomy and dignity. While consent, she argues, should not be a definitive legal test, it is essential to realizing intimate desire, free from patriarchal domination. Cultivating consent makes sex sexy. By appreciating consent as the way toward an ethical sexual flourishing rather than a legal litmus test, Garcia adds a fresh voice to the struggle for freedom, equality, and security from sexist violence.

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Judge Frank Johnson and Human Rights in Alabama
Tinsley E. Yarbrough
University of Alabama Press, 1981

Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama until his elevation to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1979, was perhaps President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s most significant appointment to a lower court. His selection to the bench in 1955 followed by only a few months the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.

During Judge Johnson’s tenure, his court invalidated segregation and other forms of racial discrimination in Alabama’s transportation facilities, voter registration processes, school and colleges, administrative agencies, system of jury selection, prisons, mental institutions, political parties, and government grant programs. In fact, most of the state’s major racial crises were resolved in his courtroom. However, his impact on human rights policy in Alabama was not confined to a racial context. Among other significant developments, the Middle District Court ordered reapportionment of the state’s governing bodies and invalidated its grossly inequitable property tax systems.
Judge Johnson’s decisions made him one of the most widely respected and controversial trial judges in the country. Until recently, however, his name was anathema to many white Alabamians, and he and his family were subject to ostracism, threats, violence, and verbal abuse.
Yarbrough examines Judge Johnson’s life through the end of the Wallace era and the Judge’s appointment to the Fifth Circuit Court. More broadly, the book is a history of modern human rights reform in Alabama, cast in the biographical idiom. For, in a real sense, the history of the reform and of Judge Johnson’s judicial career have been synonymous.

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Judges and Unjust Laws
Common Law Constitutionalism and the Foundations of Judicial Review
Douglas E. Edlin
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"A powerful historical, conceptual, and moral case for the proposition that judges on common law grounds should refuse to enforce unjust legislation. This is sure to be controversial in an age in which critics already excoriate judges for excessive activism when conducting constitutional judicial review. Edlin's challenge to conventional views is bold and compelling."
---Brian Z. Tamanaha, Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo Professor of Law, St. John's University, and author of Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law
 
In Judges and Unjust Laws, Douglas Edlin uses case law analysis, legal theory, constitutional history, and political philosophy to examine the power of judicial review in the common law tradition. He finds that common law tradition gives judges a dual mandate: to apply the law and to develop it. There is no conflict between their official duty and their moral responsibility. Consequently, judges have the authority---perhaps even the obligation---to refuse to enforce laws that they determine unjust. As Edlin demonstrates, exploring the problems posed by unjust laws helps to illuminate the institutional role and responsibilities of common law judges.
 
Douglas E. Edlin is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Dickinson College.
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Judging Children As Children
A Proposal for a Juvenile Justice System
Michael A. Corriero
Temple University Press, 2007

At a time when America's court system increasingly tries juvenile offenders as adults, Michael Corriero draws directly from his experience as the founding judge of a special juvenile court to propose a new approach to dealing with youthful offenders.

Since 1992, Judge Corriero has presided over the Manhattan Youth Part, a New York City court specifically designed to discipline teenage offenders. Its guiding principles, clearly laid out in this book, are that children are developmentally different from adults and that a judge can be a formidable force in shaping the lives of children who appear in court.

Judging Children as Children makes a compelling argument for a better system of justice that recognizes the mental, emotional, and physical abilities of young people and provides them with an opportunity to be rehabilitated as productive members of society instead of being locked up in prisons.

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Judging Credentials
Nonlawyer Judges and the Politics of Professionalism
Doris Marie Provine
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Must judges be trained as lawyers in order to be effective in office, or can nonlawyers serve equally well? This question has long provoked controversy among lawyers, judges, legislators, and the public. In her empirical study of the place of the nonlawyer judge in the American legal system, Doris Marie Provine concludes that, despite the opposition of the legal profession to nonlawyer judges, they are as competent as lawyers in carrying out judicial duties in courts of limited jurisdiction.

Provine presents a persuasive argument that the case against nonlawyer judges has been weighted in favor of the professional interests of lawyers, not public concerns. Her examination reveals as much about the presuppositions of legal professionals as it does about the competency of nonlawyer judges to old judicial office. To substantiate her claims, Provine has conducted the most comprehensive survey of nonlawyer and lawyer judges yet undertaken, augmenting this material with court observations and extensive interviews of judges. She integrates the results of this survey into the historical context of the lay versus lawyer judge debate, showing how the legally trained judge came to predominate in the American judicial system and analyzing in detail the campaign both in and out of the courts to make legal training a prerequisite for being a judge. Ultimately, Provine suggests, Americans are too committed to the significance of credentials and to the legal profession's vision of the judicial process to respond very favorably to nonlawyer judges, however well they might perform.

Judging Credentials will force lawyers, judges, scholars, and the public to reconsider the role nonlawyer judges play in the American judicial system. Provine's provocative views and exhaustive research adds new dimensions to our understanding of the ethics of professionalism and its consequences.
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Judging Justice
How Victim Witnesses Evaluate International Courts
James David Meernik and Kimi Lynn King
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Some injustices are so massive, so heinous, and so extraordinary that ordinary courts are no longer adequate. The creation of international courts and tribunals to confront major violations of human rights sought to bring justice to affected communities as well as to the entire world. Yet if justice is a righting of the imbalance between what has happened and what is reflected in the law, no amount of punishment and no judgment could compensate for that suffering and loss.

In order to understand the meaning of justice, James David Meernik and Kimi Lynn King studied the perspective of witnesses who have testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Using a unique survey, Meernik and King look at the identity of the victims and their perception of the fairness of ICTY. Because of the need to justify the practical and emotional difficulties involved in testifying before an international tribunal, witnesses look not just to the institution to judge its effectiveness, but also to their own contribution, by testifying effectively. The central elements of the theory Meernik and King develop—identity, fairness, and experience—transcend specific conflicts and specific countries and are of importance to people everywhere.
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Judging under Uncertainty
An Institutional Theory of Legal Interpretation
Adrian Vermeule
Harvard University Press, 2006
How should judges, in America and elsewhere, interpret statutes and the Constitution? Previous work on these fundamental questions has typically started from abstract views about the nature of democracy or constitutionalism, or the nature of legal language, or the essence of the rule of law. From these conceptual premises, theorists typically deduce an ambitious role for judges, particularly in striking down statutes on constitutional grounds. In this book, Adrian Vermeule breaks new ground by rejecting both the conceptual approach and the judge-centered conclusions of older theorists. Vermeule shows that any approach to legal interpretation rests on institutional and empirical premises about the capacities of judges and the systemic effects of their rulings. Drawing upon a range of social science tools from political science, economics, decision theory, and other disciplines, he argues that legal interpretation is above all an exercise in decisionmaking under severe empirical uncertainty. In view of their limited information and competence, judges should adopt a restrictive, unambitious set of tools for interpreting statutory and constitutional provisions, deferring to administrative agencies where statutes are unclear and deferring to legislatures where constitutional language is unclear or states general aspirations.
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Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East
Sophie Démare-Lafont
SBL Press, 2023

This volume presents the first broadly inclusive collection, with accessible text and English translation, of documents related to judicial decisions in the ancient Near East, the oldest setting for such writing in the world. The texts in this volume belong to various genres, especially legal records and letters, and span almost two thousand years. With such varied material, the work depends on the expertise of specialists in each setting, from the Sumerian of early Ur to the late Akkadian of Babylonia under the Persians. The collection brings together not only 183 transliterated texts and new translations but also introductions and commentary that place these legal documents in their historical and social contexts. A glossary of legal terms, a concordance of texts included, and an index of legal terms makes this an invaluable tool for students and scholars across disciplines. The contributors are Dominique Charpin, Sophie Démare-Lafont, Daniel E. Fleming, Francis Joannès, Bertrand Lafont, Brigitte Lion, Ignacio Márquez Rowe, Cécile Michel, and Pierre Villard.

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Judicial Merit Selection
Institutional Design and Performance for State Courts
Greg Goelzhauser
Temple University Press, 2019

The judicial selection debate continues. Merit selection is used by a majority of states but remains the least well understood method for choosing judges. Proponents claim that it emphasizes qualifications and diversity over politics, but there is little empirical evidence regarding its performance. 

In Judicial Merit Selection, Greg Goelzhauser amasses a wealth of data to examine merit selection’s institutional performance from an internal perspective. While his previous book, Choosing State Supreme Court Justices, compares outcomes across selection mechanisms, here he delves into what makes merit selection unique—its use of nominating commissions to winnow applicants prior to gubernatorial appointment.    

Goelzhauser’s analyses include a rich case study from inside a nominating commission’s proceedings as it works to choose nominees; the use of public records to examine which applicants commissions choose and which nominees governors choose; evaluation of which attorneys apply for consideration and which judges apply for promotion; and examination of whether design differences across systems impact performance in the seating of qualified and diverse judges.

The results have critical public policy implications.

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Judicial Politics in Polarized Times
Thomas M. Keck
University of Chicago Press, 2014
When the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, some saw the decision as a textbook example of neutral judicial decision making, noting that a Republican Chief Justice joined the Court’s Democratic appointees to uphold most provisions of the ACA. Others characterized the decision as the latest example of partisan justice and cited the actions of a bloc of the Court’s Republican appointees, who voted to strike down the statute in its entirety. Still others argued that the ACA’s fate ultimately hinged not on the Court but on the outcome of the 2012 election. These interpretations reflect larger stories about judicial politics that have emerged in polarized America. Are judges neutral legal umpires, unaccountable partisan activists, or political actors whose decisions conform to—rather than challenge—the democratic will?

Drawing on a sweeping survey of litigation on abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, and gun rights across the Clinton, Bush, and Obama eras, Thomas M. Keck argues that, while each of these stories captures part of the significance of judicial politics in polarized times, each is also misleading. Despite judges’ claims, actual legal decisions are not the politically neutral products of disembodied legal texts. But neither are judges “tyrants in robes,” undermining democratic values by imposing their own preferences. Just as often, judges and the public seem to be pushing in the same direction. As for the argument that the courts are powerless institutions, Keck shows that their decisions have profound political effects. And, while advocates on both the left and right engage constantly in litigation to achieve their ends, neither side has consistently won. Ultimately, Keck argues, judges respond not simply as umpires, activists, or political actors, but in light of distinctive judicial values and practices.
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Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics
Stanley I. Kutler
University of Chicago Press, 1968
A study of the Supreme Court in the wake of the Dred Scott decision.

This book investigates the political and public standing of the Supreme Court following the Dred Scott decision. Arguing against interpretations by previous historians, Kutler asserts instead that the "Chase Court" was neither enfeebled by the decision itself, nor by congressional Republicans during reconstruction. Instead, Kutler suggests that during reconstruction, the Court was characterized by forcefulness and judicious restraint rather than timidity and cowardice, holding a creative and determining role rather than abdicating its rightful powers. This volume assembles a series of essays by Kutler arguing for this characterization. Provocative and persuasive at turns, this collection of essays provides a bold and innovative reinterpretation of the Supreme Court after the Civil War.
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The Judicial Power of the Purse
How Courts Fund National Defense in Times of Crisis
Nancy Staudt
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Congress and the president are not the only branches that deal with fiscal issues in times of war. In this innovative book, Nancy Staudt focuses on the role of federal courts in fiscal matters during warfare and high-cost national defense emergencies. There is, she argues, a judicial power of the purse that becomes evident upon examining the budgetary effects of judicial decision making. The book provides substantial evidence that judges are willing—maybe even eager—to redirect private monies into government hands when the country is in peril, but when the judges receive convincing cues that ongoing wartime activities undermine the nation’s interests, they are more likely to withhold funds from the government by deciding cases in favor of private individuals and entities who show up in court.

In stark contrast with conventional legal, political, and institutional thought that privileges factors associated with individual preferences, The Judicial Power of the Purse sheds light on environmental factors in judicial decision making and will be an excellent read for students of judicial behavior in political science and law.

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Judicial Reputation
A Comparative Theory
Nuno Garoupa and Tom Ginsburg
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Judges are society’s elders and experts, our masters and mediators. We depend on them to dispense justice with integrity, deliberation, and efficiency. Yet judges, as Alexander Hamilton famously noted, lack the power of the purse or the sword. They must rely almost entirely on their reputations to secure compliance with their decisions, obtain resources, and maintain their political influence.

In Judicial Reputation, Nuno Garoupa and Tom Ginsburg explain how reputation is not only an essential quality of the judiciary as a whole, but also of individual judges. Perceptions of judicial systems around the world range from widespread admiration to utter contempt, and as judges participate within these institutions some earn respect, while others are scorned. Judicial Reputation explores how judges respond to the reputational incentives provided by the different audiences they interact with—lawyers, politicians, the media, and the public itself—and how institutional structures mediate these interactions. The judicial structure is best understood not through the lens of legal culture or tradition, but through the economics of information and reputation. Transcending those conventional lenses, Garoupa and Ginsburg employ their long-standing research on the latter to examine the fascinating effects that governmental interactions, multicourt systems, extrajudicial work, and the international rule-of-law movement have had on the reputations of judges in this era.
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Judicial Rhapsodies
Rhetoric and Fundamental Rights in the Supreme Court
Doug Coulson
Amherst College Press, 2023
All judges legitimize their decisions in writing, but US Supreme Court justices depend on public acceptance to a unique degree. Previous studies of judicial opinions have explored rhetorical strategies that produce legitimacy, but none have examined the laudatory, even operatic, forms of writing Supreme Court justices have used to justify fundamental rights decisions. Doug Coulson demonstrates that such “judicial rhapsodies” are not an aberration but a central feature of judicial discourse.

First examining the classical origins of divisions between law and rhetoric, Coulson tracks what he calls an epideictic register—highly affective forms of expression that utilize hyperbole, amplification, and vocabularies of praise—through a surprising number of landmark Supreme Court opinions. Judicial Rhapsodies recovers and revalues these instances as significant to establishing and maintaining shared perspectives that form the basis for common experience and cooperation.

“Judicial Rhapsodies is both compelling and important. Coulson brings his well-developed knowledge of rhetoric to bear on one of the most central (and most democratically fraught) means of governance in the United States: the Supreme Court opinion. He demonstrates that the epideictic, far from being a dispensable or detestable element of judicial rhetoric, is an essential feature of how the Court operates and seeks to persuade.” —Keith Bybee, Syracuse University
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Judicial Territory
Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire
Shaina Potts
Duke University Press, 2024
In Judicial Territory, Shaina Potts reveals how the American empire has benefitted from the post-World War II expansion of United States judicial authority over the economic decisions of postcolonial governments. Introducing the term “judicial territory” to refer to the increasingly transnational space over which US courts wield authority, Potts argues that law is an essential tool for US geopolitical and economic interests. Through close examination of cases involving private US companies, on the one hand, and foreign state-owned enterprises, nationalizations, and sovereign debt, on the other, she shows that technical changes relating to the treatment of foreign sovereigns in domestic US law allowed the United States to extend its purview over global financial and economic relations, including many economic decisions of foreign governments. Throughout, Potts argues, US law has not become divorced from territoriality but instead actively remapped it; and it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it—making the whole world part of US economic space in the process.
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Jumping the Queue
An Inquiry into the Legal Treatment of Students with Learning Disabilities
Mark Kelman and Gillian Lester
Harvard University Press, 1997

This book weighs alternative conceptions of the equal opportunity principle through an empirical and ethical exploration of the Federal law that directs local school districts to award special educational opportunities to students who are classified as learning disabled (LD). Mark Kelman and Gillian Lester consider the degree to which students with learning disabilities (rather than merely slow learners, the socially disadvantaged, or even the gifted) are entitled to benefits that might well prove advantageous to their classmates, such as extra time to complete an exam or expensive, individually tailored educational programs.

They examine the vexing question of how we should distribute extra educational funds: should we give them to those who have fewer material resources to begin with, to those who might benefit more than others from extra resources, or should we simply strive to create greater equality of outcome? The book exposes a growing conflict between those who want to distribute scarce resources on an individual basis to children who are in need whatever the reason, and those who seek to eliminate group inequalities.

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The Juridical Unconscious
Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century
Shoshana Felman
Harvard University Press, 2002

Death, wrote Walter Benjamin, lends storytellers all their authority. How do trials, in turn, borrow their authority from death? This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice.

Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."

Examining legal events that tried to repair the crimes and injuries of history, Felman reveals the "juridical unconscious" of trials and brilliantly shows how this juridical unconscious is bound up with the logic of the trauma that a trial attempts to articulate and contain but so often reenacts and repeats. Her book gives the drama of the law a new jurisprudential dimension and reveals the relation between law and literature in a new light.

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The Jurisprudence of Emergency
Colonialism and the Rule of Law
Nasser Hussain
University of Michigan Press, 2019

The Jurisprudence of Emergency examines British rule in India from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, tracing tensions between the ideology of liberty and government by law used to justify the colonizing power's insistence on a regime of conquest. Nasser Hussain argues that the interaction of these competing ideologies exemplifies a conflict central to all Western legal systems—between the universal, rational operation of law on the one hand and the absolute sovereignty of the state on the other. The author uses an impressive array of historical evidence to demonstrate how questions of law and emergency shaped colonial rule, which in turn affected the development of Western legality.

The pathbreaking insights developed in The Jurisprudence of Emergency reevaluate the place of colonialism in modern law by depicting the colonies as influential agents in the interpretation of Western ideas and practices. Hussain's interdisciplinary approach and subtly shaded revelations will be of interest to historians as well as scholars of legal and political theory.
 

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The Jurisprudence of Emergency
Colonialism and the Rule of Law
Nasser Hussain
University of Michigan Press, 2003

Ever-more-frequent calls for the establishment of a rule of law in the developing world have been oddly paralleled by the increasing use of "exceptional" measures to deal with political crises. To untangle this apparent contradiction, The Jurisprudence of Emergency analyzes the historical uses of a range of emergency powers, such as the suspension of habeas corpus and the use of military tribunals. Nasser Hussain focuses on the relationship between "emergency" and the law to develop a subtle new theory of those moments in which the normative rule of law is suspended.

The Jurisprudence of Emergency examines British colonial rule in India from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century in order to trace tensions between the ideology of liberty and government by law, which was used to justify the British presence, and the colonizing power's concurrent insistence on a regime of conquest. Hussain argues that the interaction of these competing ideologies exemplifies a conflict central to all Western legal systems—between the universal, rational operation of law on the one hand and the absolute sovereignty of the state on the other. The author uses an impressive array of historical evidence to demonstrate how questions of law and emergency shaped colonial rule, which in turn affected the development of Western legality.

The pathbreaking insights developed in The Jurisprudence of Emergency reevaluate the place of colonialism in modern law by depicting the colonies as influential agents in the interpretation and delineation of Western ideas and practices. Hussain's interdisciplinary approach and subtly shaded revelations will be of interest to historians as well as scholars of legal and political theory.

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Jurisprudence
The Philosophy and Method of the Law, Revised Edition
Edgar Bodenheimer
Harvard University Press, 1974

When Edgar Bodenheimer’s book, Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law, was published in 1962, it received extraordinary reviews. It was called by one commentator “a profoundly scholarly, clearly written and thoroughly unpretentious contribution to the literature of jurisprudence.” Because there have been significant developments in analytical jurisprudence and in the legal philosophy of values, Bodenheimer has brought his book up to date.

Part I now includes a discussion of important recent contributions to jurisprudence. Part II has been largely rewritten to give more extensive consideration to the psychological roots of the need for order and quest for justice, the conceptual scope and substantive components of the notion of justice, and the criteria for validity of the law. Part III of Bodenheimer’s study is concerned with the problems of legal method and the modes of legal reasoning.

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Jurors' Stories of Death
How America's Death Penalty Invests in Inequality
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"What is most extraordinary about Ben Fleury-Steiner's book is that it seeks to shed light on the 'black box' of capital jury deliberations. Based on a remarkable social science survey of persons who served on capital juries, this volume illuminates the workings of the most closely guarded secret in the criminal justice system."
-David Cole, from the Foreword

"Perhaps the most powerful, routinely enacted civic ritual in American public life is that of capital punishment. This state-sanctioned extirpation of human life in the collective pursuit of justice is a searing act of civic pedagogy, made legitimate only by the deliberative endorsement of a small group of ordinary citizens-the jury. In Jurors' Stories of Death, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner has taken a cold, hard look at how these ordinary citizens come to terms with their extraordinary role, and how they rationalize their irreversible decisions. The result is a chilling portrait of how we---that is, all of us Americans---constitute ourselves as a political community."
-Glenn Loury, Director, Institute on Race and Social Division

"This illuminating and insightful examination of jury deliberations makes a terrific contribution to the study of capital punishment. Fleury-Steiner's synthesis of sociological, legal and theoretical concepts with vivid juror narratives and statistical data, thoughtfully animates and details how race and class consciousness continue to shape America's death penalty."
---Bryan Stevenson, Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law, Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama


Jurors' Stories of Death is more than just another book on the death penalty; it is the first systematic survey of how death penalty decisions are made.

Benjamin Fleury-Steiner draws on real-life accounts of white and black jurors in capital punishment trials to discuss the effect of race on the sentencing process. He finds that race is invariably a factor in sentencing, with jurors relying on accounts that deny the often marginalized defendants their individuality and complexity, while reinforcing the jurors' own identities as superior, moral, and law-abiding citizens-a system that punishes in the name of dominance. This biased story of "us versus them" continues to infuse political rhetoric on crime and punishment in the United States even today.

Jurors' Stories of Death concludes with an original argument for abolition of the death penalty: If America values multiculturalism and cultural diversity, it must do away with institutions such as state-sanctioned capital punishment in order to begin to free itself from the racism and classicism that so insidiously plague social relations today.
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The Jury in Lincoln’s America
Stacy Pratt McDermott
Ohio University Press, 2012

In the antebellum Midwest, Americans looked to the law, and specifically to the jury, to navigate the uncertain terrain of a rapidly changing society. During this formative era of American law, the jury served as the most visible connector between law and society. Through an analysis of the composition of grand and trial juries and an examination of their courtroom experiences, Stacy Pratt McDermott demonstrates how central the law was for people who lived in Abraham Lincoln’s America.

McDermott focuses on the status of the jury as a democratic institution as well as on the status of those who served as jurors. According to the 1860 census, the juries in Springfield and Sangamon County, Illinois, comprised an ethnically and racially diverse population of settlers from northern and southern states, representing both urban and rural mid-nineteenth-century America. It was in these counties that Lincoln developed his law practice, handling more than 5,200 cases in a legal career that spanned nearly twenty-five years.

Drawing from a rich collection of legal records, docket books, county histories, and surviving newspapers, McDermott reveals the enormous power jurors wielded over the litigants and the character of their communities.

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The Just
Paul Ricoeur
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The essays in this book contain some of Paul Ricoeur's most fascinating ruminations on the nature of justice and the law. His thoughts ranging across a number of topics and engaging the work of thinkers both classical and contemporary, Ricoeur offers a series of important reflections on the juridical and the philosophical concepts of right and the space between moral theory and politics.
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Just a Journalist
On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between
Linda Greenhouse
Harvard University Press, 2017

In this timely book, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter trains an autobiographical lens on a moment of remarkable transition in American journalism. Just a few years ago, the mainstream press was wrestling with whether labeling waterboarding as torture violated important norms of neutrality and objectivity. Now, major American newspapers regularly call the president of the United States a liar. Clearly, something has changed as the old rules of “balance” and “two sides to every story” have lost their grip. Is the change for the better? Will it last?

In Just a Journalist, Linda Greenhouse—who for decades covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times—tackles these questions from the perspective of her own experience. A decade ago, she faced criticism from her own newspaper and much of journalism’s leadership for a speech to a college alumnae group in which she criticized the Bush administration for, among other things, seeking to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo Bay—two years after the Supreme Court itself had ruled that the detainees could not be hidden away from the reach of federal judges who might hear their appeals.

One famous newspaper editor expressed his belief that it was unethical for a journalist to vote, because the act of choosing one candidate over another could compromise objectivity. Linda Greenhouse disagrees. Calling herself “an accidental activist,” she raises urgent questions about the role journalists can and should play as citizens, even as participants, in the world around them.

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A Just Cause
The Impeachment and Removal of Governor Rod Blagojevich
Bernard H. Sieracki. Foreword by Jim Edgar
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence 2016

During the predawn hours of December 9, 2008, an FBI team swarmed the home of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and took him away in handcuffs. The shocking arrest, based on allegations of corruption and extortion, launched a chain of political events never before seen in Illinois. In A Just Cause, Bernard H. Sieracki delivers a dynamic firsthand account of this eight-week political crisis, beginning with Blagojevich’s arrest, continuing through his impeachment and trial, and culminating in his conviction and removal from office. Drawing on his own eyewitness observations of the hearings and trial, the comments of interviewees, trial transcripts, and knowledge gained from decades of work with the Illinois legislature, Sieracki tells the compelling story of the first impeachment and removal from office of an Illinois governor, while providing a close look at the people involved.

A Just Cause depicts Blagojevich as a master of political gamesmanship, a circus ringmaster driven by personal ambition and obsessed with private gain. Sieracki examines in depth the governor’s unethical behavior while in office, detailing a litany of partisan and personal hostilities that spanned years. He thoroughly covers the events leading to Blagojevich’s downfall and the reactions of the governor’s cohorts. The author discusses the numerous allegations against Blagojevich, including attempts to “sell” appointments, jobs, and contracts in exchange for financial contributions. Sieracki then exhaustively recounts Blagojevich’s senate trial and the governor’s removal from office.

This engrossing volume is both a richly detailed case study of the American checks-and-balances system and an eyewitness account of unprecedented events. It will appeal to anyone interested in the stunning, true tale of a state upholding the maxim “The welfare of the people is the supreme law.” 
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Just Who Loses?
Discrimination in the United States, Volume 2
Samuel Lucas
Temple University Press, 2013

In Just Who Loses? Samuel Roundfield Lucas continues his penetrating and comprehensive assessment of sex and race discrimination in the United States that he began in Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice.

This new volume demonstrates that the idea of discrimination being a zero-sum game is a fallacy. If discrimination costs women, men do not necessarily reap the gains. Likewise, if discrimination costs blacks, non-blacks do not reap the gains. Lucas examines the legal adjudication of discrimination, as well as wider public debates about policy on the issue, to prove how discrimination actually operates. 

He uses analytic methods to show that across the socioeconomic lifecycle—including special education placement, unemployment, occupational attainment, earnings, poverty, and even mortality—both targets and non-targets of discrimination “lose.”

In Just Who Loses? Lucas proposes the construction of a broad-based coalition to combat the pervasive discrimination that affects social relations and law in the United States.

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Just Words
Law, Language, and Power
John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Is it "just words" when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it "just words" when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power.

Conley and O'Barr show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic that will be welcomed by students and specialists alike.
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Just Words
Law, Language, and Power, Third Edition
John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Is it “just words” when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it “just words” when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. 

John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or “multimodal,” communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.
 
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Just Words, Second Edition
Law, Language, and Power
John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Is it "just words" when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it "just words" when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power.

Conley and O'Barr show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic that will be welcomed by students and specialists alike.
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Justice among Nations
A History of International Law
Stephen C. Neff
Harvard University Press, 2014

Justice among Nations tells the story of the rise of international law and how it has been formulated, debated, contested, and put into practice from ancient times to the present. Stephen Neff avoids technical jargon as he surveys doctrines from natural law to feminism, and practices from the Warring States of China to the international criminal courts of today.

Ancient China produced the first rudimentary set of doctrines. But the cornerstone of later international law was laid by the Romans, in the form of natural law—a universal law that was superior to early laws and governments. As medieval European states came into contact with non-Christian peoples, from East Asia to the New World, practical solutions had to be devised to the many legal quandaries that arose. In the wake of these experiences, international legal doctrine began to assume its modern form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

New challenges in the nineteenth century encompassed the advance of nationalism, the rise of free trade and European imperialism, the formation of international organizations, and the arbitration of disputes. Innovative doctrines included liberalism, the nationality school, and solidarism. The twentieth century witnessed the formation of the League of Nations and a World Court, but also the rise of socialist and fascist states and the advent of the Cold War. Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union brought little respite. As Neff makes clear, further threats to the rule of law today come from environmental pressures, genocide, and terrorism.

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Justice and Gender
Sex Discrimination and the Law
Deborah L. Rhode
Harvard University Press, 1989
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive investigation of gender and the law in the United States. Deborah Rhode describes legal developments over the last two centuries against a background of historical and sociological changes in women’s activities and attitudes toward these new developments. She shows the way cultural perceptions of gender influence and in turn are influenced by legal constructions, and what this complicated interaction implies about the possibility—or impossibility—of using law as a tool of social change.
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Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory
Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Running through the history of jurisprudence and legal theory is a recurring concern about the connections between law and justice and about the ways law is implicated in injustice. In earlier times law and justice were viewed as virtually synonymous. Experience, however, has taught us that, in fact, injustice may be supported by law. Nonetheless, the belief remains that justice is the special concern of law.
Commentators from Plato to Derrida have called law to account in the name of justice, asked that law provide a language of justice, and demanded that it promote the attainment of justice. The justice that is usually spoken about in these commentaries is elusive, if not illusory, and disconnected from the embodied practice of law.
Furthermore, the very meaning of justice, especially as it relates to law, is in dispute. Justice may refer to distributional issues or it may involve primarily procedural questions, impartiality in judgment or punishment and recompense.
The essays collected in Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory seek to remedy this uncertainty about the meaning of justice and its disembodied quality, by embedding inquiry about justice in an examination of law's daily practices, its institutional arrangements, and its engagement with particular issues at particular moments in time. The essays examine the relationship between law and justice and injustice in specific issues and practices and, in doing so, make the question of justice come alive as a concrete political question. They draw on the disciplines of history, law, anthropology, and political science.
Contributors to this volume include Nancy Coot, Joshua Coven, Robert Gorton, Frank Michelin, and Michael Tossing.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.
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Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts
Intisar A. Rabb
Harvard University Press

This book presents an in-depth exploration of the administration of justice during Islam’s founding period, 632–1250 CE. Inspired by the scholarship of Roy Parviz Mottahedeh and composed in his honor, this volume brings together ten leading scholars of Islamic law to examine the history of early Islamic courts. This approach draws attention to both how and why the courts and the people associated with them functioned in early Islamic societies: When a dispute occurred, what happened in the courts? How did judges conceive of justice and their role in it? When and how did they give attention to politics and procedure?

Each author draws on diverse sources that illuminate a broader and deeper vision of law and society than traditional legal literature alone can provide, including historical chronicles, biographical dictionaries, legal canons, exegetical works, and mirrors for princes. Altogether, the volume offers both a substantive intervention on early Islamic courts and on methods for studying legal history as social history. It illuminates the varied and dynamic legal landscapes stretching across early Islam, and maps new approaches to interdisciplinary legal history.

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Justice and Legal Change on the Shores of Lake Erie
A History of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio
Paul Finkelman
Ohio University Press, 2012

Justice and Legal Change on the Shores of Lake Erie explores the many ways that the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio has affected the region, the nation, the development of American law, and American politics.

The essays in this book, written by eminent law professors, historians, political scientists, and practicing attorneys, illustrate the range of cases and issues that have come before the court. Since the court’s inception in 1855, judges have influenced economic developments and social issues, beginning with the court’s most famous early case, involving the rescue of the fugitive slave John Price by residents of Northern Ohio. Chapters focusing on labor strikes, free speech, women’s rights, the environment, the death penalty, and immigration illustrate the impact this court and its judges have had in the development of society and the nation’s law. Some of the cases here deal with local issues with huge national implications xad—like political corruption, school desegregation, or pollution on the Cuyahoga River. But others are about major national issues that grew out of incidents, such as the prosecution of Eugene V. Debs for opposing World War I, the litigation resulting from the Kent State shootings and opposition to the Vietnam War, and the immigration status of the alleged Nazi war criminal John Demyanjuk.

This timely history confirms the significant role played by district courts in the history of the United States.

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Justice and Natural Resources
Concepts, Strategies, and Applications
Edited by Kathryn M. Mutz, Gary C. Bryner, and Douglas S. Kenney; Foreword by Gerald Torres
Island Press, 2001

Just over two decades ago, research findings that environmentally hazardous facilities were more likely to be sited near poor and minority communities gave rise to the environmental justice movement. Yet inequitable distribution of the burdens of industrial facilities and pollution is only half of the problem; poor and minority communities are often denied the benefits of natural resources and can suffer disproportionate harm from decisions about their management and use.

Justice and Natural Resources is the first book devoted to exploring the concept of environmental justice in the realm of natural resources. Contributors consider how decisions about the management and use of natural resources can exacerbate social injustice and the problems of disadvantaged communities. Looking at issues that are predominantly rural and western -- many of them involving Indian reservations, public lands, and resource development activities -- it offers a new and more expansive view of environmental justice.

The book begins by delineating the key conceptual dimensions of environmental justice in the natural resource arena. Following the conceptual chapters are contributions that examine the application of environmental justice in natural resource decision-making. Chapters examine:

  • how natural resource management can affect a range of stakeholders quite differently, distributing benefits to some and burdens to others
  • the potential for using civil rights laws to address damage to natural and cultural resources
  • the unique status of Native American environmental justice claims
  • parallels between domestic and international environmental justice
  • how authority under existing environmental law can be used by Federal regulators and communities to address a broad spectrum of environmental justice concerns
Justice and Natural Resources offers a concise overview of the field of environmental justice and a set of frameworks for understanding it. It expands the previously urban and industrial scope of the movement to include distribution of the burdens and access to the benefits of natural resources, broadening environmental justice to a truly nationwide concern.
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Justice and Nature
Kantian Philosophy, Environmental Policy, and the Law
John Martin Gillroy. Foreword by Robert Paehlke
Georgetown University Press, 2001

Most decision making in environmental policy today is based on the economic cost-benefit argument. Criticizing the shortcomings of the market paradigm, John Martin Gillroy proposes an alternative way to conceptualize and create environmental policy, one that allows for the protection of moral and ecological values in the face of economic demands.

Drawing on Kantian definitions of who we are as citizens, how we act collectively, and what the proper role of the state is, Gillroy develops a philosophical justification for incorporating non-market values into public decision making. His new paradigm for justice toward nature integrates the intrinsic value of humanity and nature into the law.

To test the feasibility of this new approach, Gillroy applies it to six cases: wilderness preservation, national wildlife refuges, not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) siting dilemmas, comparative risk analysis, the Food and Drug Administration's risk regulation, and the National Environmental Policy Act. He also encourages others to adapt his framework to create alternative policy models from existing philosophies.

This book offers new insights, models, and methods for policymakers and analysts and for scholars in philosophy, political theory, law, and environmental studies.

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Justice and Public Administration
Charles F. Abel and Arthur J. Sementelli
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Justice and Administration is an ambitious effort to grapple with justice as a theoretical component of the practice of public administration, yet with sufficient theoretical power to be meaningful in philosophy, political studies, and sociology.
 
The time is ripe for such an effort, as the questions that gather under the labels of modernity, the postmodern and critical theory now transcend a single discipline. The work of John Rawls on justice in public life has had a generation of influence on scholarship, and this work seems to have a high degree of likelihood of making meaningful statements on these questions in the field.
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Justice and Reform
The Formative Years of the OEO Legal Services Program
Earl Johnson
Russell Sage Foundation, 1974
Justice and Reform is the first study of the origins, philosophy, creation, management, and impact of the Office of Economic Opportunity Legal Services Program. As such, it clearly and concisely describes the Program's role both as an instrument of equal justice and as a strategy for overcoming poverty. Timely, important, and unique, it tells the story behind the OEO Legal Services Program—an endeavor that has been called both the most successful element of the war on poverty and the most stimulating development to occur in the American legal profession during the Twentieth Century. The early chapters in the book reveal the nature and motivations of the two groups which joined to create the Program: the conservative, American Bar Association sponsored 89-year-old legal aid movement and the Ford Foundation-financed neighborhood lawyer experiments that started in 1962 under the direction of young activist lawyers. Why they merged and how they merged forms the background for a description of how the partners persuaded the OEO bureaucracy to start a legal services program and convinced over 200 communities (including most large cities) to set up a federally funded legal assistance agency. Legal Services Program established policy, how it settled upon "law reform" as the priority function of the Program, how it preserved the integrity of its policies within OEO, and how it caused its grantees to engage in law reform. Chapter 8 evaluates, for the first time, the economic, political, and social impact of the Program as of 1972. The final chapter speculates on the future of government-subsidized legal assistance in the United States from the perspective of the OEO program's twin goals of equal justice and social reform.
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Justice and Science
Trials and Triumphs of DNA Evidence
George "Woody" Clarke
Rutgers University Press, 2007

Databases of both convicted offenders and no-suspect cases demonstrate the power of DNA testing to solve the unsolvable. George “Woody” Clarke is a leading authority in legal circles and among the news media because of his expertise in DNA evidence. In this memoir, Clarke chronicles his experiences in some of the most disturbing and notorious sexual assault and murder court cases in California. He charts the beginnings of DNA testing in police investigations and the fight for its acceptance by courts and juries. He illustrates the power of science in cases he personally prosecuted or in which he assisted, including his work with the prosecution team in the trial of O. J. Simpson.

Clarke also covers cases where DNA evidence was used to exonerate. He directed a special project in San Diego County, proactively examining over six hundred cases of defendants convicted and sentenced to prison before 1993, with the goal of finding instances in which DNA typing might add new evidence and then offered testing to those inmates.

As Clarke tells the story of how he came to understand and use this new form of evidence, readers will develop a new appreciation for the role of science in the legal system.

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Justice as Translation
An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism
James Boyd White
University of Chicago Press, 1990
White extends his conception of United States law as a constitutive rhetoric shaping American legal culture that he proposed in When Words Lose Their Meaning, and asks how Americans can and should criticize this culture and the texts it creates. In determining if a judicial opinion is good or bad, he explores the possibility of cultural criticism, the nature of conceptual language, the character of economic and legal discourse, and the appropriate expectations for critical and analytic writing. White employs his unique approach by analyzing individual cases involving the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution and demonstrates how a judge translates the facts and the legal tradition, creating a text that constructs a political and ethical community with its readers.

"White has given us not just a novel answer to the traditional jurisprudential questions, but also a new way of reading and evaluating judicial opinions, and thus a new appreciation of the liberty which they continue to protect."—Robin West, Times Literary Supplement

"James Boyd White should be nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, solely on the strength of this book. . . . Justice as Translation is an important work of philosophy, yet it is written in a lucid, friendly style that requires no background in philosophy. It will transform the way you think about law."—Henry Cohen, Federal Bar News & Journal

"White calls us to rise above the often deadening and dreary language in which we are taught to write professionally. . . . It is hard to imagine equaling the clarity of eloquence of White's challenge. The apparently effortless grace of his prose conveys complex thoughts with deceptive simplicity."—Elizabeth Mertz, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities

"Justice as Translation, like White's earlier work, provides a refreshing reminder that the humanities, despite the pummelling they have recently endured, can be humane."—Kenneth L. Karst, Michigan Law Review
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Justice Deferred
Race and the Supreme Court
Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner
Harvard University Press, 2021

“[A] learned and thoughtful portrayal of the history of race relations in America…authoritative and highly readable…[An] impressive work.”
—Randall Kennedy, The Nation


“This comprehensive history…reminds us that the fight for justice requires our constant vigilance.”
—Ibram X. Kendi

“Remarkable for the breadth and depth of its historical and legal analysis…makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the US Supreme Court’s role in America’s difficult racial history.”
—Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Supreme Court’s race record—uplifting, distressing, and even disgraceful. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence, detailing the development of legal and constitutional doctrine, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings.

In addressing such issues as the changing interpretations of the Reconstruction amendments, Japanese internment in World War II, the exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries, and affirmative action, the authors bring doctrine to life by introducing the people and events at the heart of the story of race in the United States. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country’s promise of equal rights for all.

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Justice for Girls?
Stability and Change in the Youth Justice Systems of the United States and Canada
Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob
University of Chicago Press, 2009

For over a century, as women have fought for and won greater freedoms, concern over an epidemic of female criminality, especially among young women, has followed. Fear of this crime wave—despite a persistent lack of evidence of its existence—has played a decisive role in the development of the youth justice systems in the United States and Canada. Justice for Girls? is a comprehensive comparative study of the way these countries have responded to the hysteria over “girl crime” and how it has affected the treatment of both girls and boys.

Tackling a century of historical evidence and crime statistics, Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob carefully trace the evolution of approaches to the treatment of young offenders. Seeking to keep youths out of adult courts, both countries have built their systems around rehabilitation. But, as Sprott and Doob reveal, the myth of the “girl crime wave” led to a punitive system where young people are dragged into court for minor offenses and girls are punished far more severely than boys. Thorough, timely, and persuasive, Justice for Girls? will be vital to anyone working with troubled youths.

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Justice Hugo Black and Modern America
Tony Freyer
University of Alabama Press, 1990

            The struggle to accommodate both individual freedom and community welfare shaped modern America. American have disagreed about whether federal protection of national welfare could be reconciled with defense of individual rights; however, no public figure worked longer or more consistently to meet this challenge than Alabama’s Hugo L. Black

            This collection of essays, reprints of the spring 1985 and winter 1987 issues of the Alabama Law Review with a new introduction and minor revisions, suggests that Black’s constitutional principles and personal values provided a means to achieve a balance between majority will and individual freedom. Black’s life and career are reexamined here by leading scholars and jurors in the first major study in twenty years, tracing his relationship to the South, to the development of American liberalism, and to the constitutional revolution in individual rights.
            Contributors include, in addition to the editor, Howard Ball, Justice William Brennan, Jr., Irving Dilliard, Gerald Dunne, Harry Edwards, Arthur Goldberg, Sheldon Hackney, Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Jean McCulley Holcomb, Anthony Lewis, Paul L. Murphy, Timothy O’Rourke, Norman Redlich, David Shannon, Abigail Thernstrom, Cherry Thomas, J. Mills Thornton III, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

 


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Justice in Blue and Gray
A Legal History of the Civil War
Stephen C. Neff
Harvard University Press, 2010

Stephen C. Neff offers the first comprehensive study of the wide range of legal issues arising from the American Civil War, many of which resonate in debates to this day.

Neff examines the lawfulness of secession, executive and legislative governmental powers, and laws governing the conduct of war. Whether the United States acted as a sovereign or a belligerent had legal consequences, including treating Confederates as rebellious citizens or foreign nationals in war. Property questions played a key role, especially when it came to the process of emancipation. Executive detentions and trials by military commissions tested civil liberties, and the end of the war produced a raft of issues on the status of the Southern states, the legality of Confederate acts, clemency, and compensation. A compelling aspect of the book is the inclusion of international law, as Neff situates the conflict within the general laws of war and details neutrality issues, where the Civil War broke important new legal ground.

This book not only provides an accessible and informative legal portrait of this critical period but also illuminates how legal issues arise in a time of crisis, what impact they have, and how courts attempt to resolve them.

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Justice in Public Life
Claire Foster-Gilbert, Jane Sinclair, and James Hawkey
Haus Publishing, 2021
An exploration of the concept of justice, focusing on its place in public service.

The three essays in Justice in Public Life, written by Claire Foster-Gilbert, Jane Sinclair, and James Hawkey, examine the meaning of justice in the twenty-first century, asking how justice can be expressed by our public service institutions and in society more widely. They consider whether justice is tied to truth and whether our idea of justice is skewed when we conflate it with fairness. They also explore how justice as a virtue can help us navigate the complexities of life in economics, in wider society, and in righting wrongs. In addition, their essays consider the threats to a just society, including human nature itself, the inheritance of unjust structures, the wide range of views about what constitutes justice, and the difficulty of establishing it globally and between nation-states. Justice in Public Life brings an often abstract concept to life, calling on public servants to nurture justice as a virtue pursued both individually and communally.
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Justice in Robes
Ronald Dworkin
Harvard University Press, 2008
How should a judge’s moral convictions bear on his judgments about what the law is? Lawyers, sociologists, philosophers, politicians, and judges all have answers to that question: these range from “nothing” to “everything.”In Justice in Robes, Ronald Dworkin argues that the question is much more complex than it has often been taken to be and charts a variety of dimensions—semantic, jurisprudential, and doctrinal—in which law and morals are undoubtedly interwoven. He restates and summarizes his own widely discussed account of these connections, which emphasizes the sovereign importance of moral principle in legal and constitutional interpretation, and then reviews and criticizes the most influential rival theories to his own. He argues that pragmatism is empty as a theory of law, that value pluralism misunderstands the nature of moral concepts, that constitutional originalism reflects an impoverished view of the role of a constitution in a democratic society, and that contemporary legal positivism is based on a mistaken semantic theory and an erroneous account of the nature of authority. In the course of that critical study he discusses the work of many of the most influential lawyers and philosophers of the era, including Isaiah Berlin, Richard Posner, Cass Sunstein, Antonin Scalia, and Joseph Raz.Dworkin’s new collection of essays and original chapters is a model of lucid, logical, and impassioned reasoning that will advance the crucially important debate about the roles of justice in law.
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Justice in the Balkans
Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal
John Hagan
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Called a fig leaf for inaction by many at its inception, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has surprised its critics by growing from an unfunded U.N. Security Council resolution to an institution with more than 1,000 employees and a $100 million annual budget. With Slobodan Milosevic now on trial and more than forty fellow indictees currently detained, the success of the Hague tribunal has forced many to reconsider the prospects of international justice. John Hagan's Justice in the Balkans is a powerful firsthand look at the inner workings of the tribunal as it has moved from an experimental organization initially viewed as irrelevant to the first truly effective international court since Nuremberg.

Creating an institution that transcends national borders is a challenge fraught with political and organizational difficulties, yet, as Hagan describes here, the Hague tribunal has increasingly met these difficulties head-on and overcome them. The chief reason for its success, he argues, is the people who have shaped it, particularly its charismatic chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour. With drama and immediacy, Justice in the Balkans re-creates how Arbour worked with others to turn the tribunal's fortunes around, reversing its initial failure to arrest and convict significant figures and advancing the tribunal's agenda to the point at which Arbour and her colleagues, including her successor, Carla Del Ponte (nicknamed the Bulldog), were able to indict Milosevic himself. Leading readers through the investigations and criminal proceedings of the tribunal, Hagan offers the most original account of the foundation and maturity of the institution.

Justice in the Balkans brilliantly shows how an international social movement for human rights in the Balkans was transformed into a pathbreaking legal institution and a new transnational legal field. The Hague tribunal becomes, in Hagan's work, a stellar example of how individuals working with collective purpose can make a profound difference.

"The Hague tribunal reaches into only one house of horrors among many; but, within the wisely precise remit given to it, it has beamed the light of justice into the darkness of man's inhumanity, to woman as well as to man."—The Times (London)
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Justice in the U.S.S.R.
An Interpretation of Soviet Law, Revised Edition, Enlarged
Harold J. Berman
Harvard University Press

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Justice in Transactions
A Theory of Contract Law
Peter Benson
Harvard University Press, 2019

“One of the most important contributions to the field of contract theory—if not the most important—in the past 25 years.” —Stephen A. Smith, McGill University

Can we account for contract law on a moral basis that is acceptable from the standpoint of liberal justice? To answer this question, Peter Benson develops a theory of contract that is completely independent of—and arguably superior to—long-dominant views, which take contract law to be justified on the basis of economics or promissory morality. Through a detailed analysis of contract principles and doctrines, Benson brings out the specific normative conception underpinning the whole of contract law. Contract, he argues, is best explained as a transfer of rights, which is complete at the moment of agreement and is governed by a definite conception of justice—justice in transactions.

Benson’s analysis provides what John Rawls called a public basis of justification, which is as essential to the liberal legitimacy of contract as to any other form of coercive law. The argument of Justice in Transactions is expressly complementary to Rawls’s, presenting an original justification designed specifically for transactions, as distinguished from the background institutions to which Rawls’s own theory applies. The result is a field-defining work offering a comprehensive theory of contract law. Benson shows that contract law is both justified in its own right and fully congruent with other domains—moral, economic, and political—of liberal society.

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The Justice of Constantine
Law, Communication, and Control
John Noël Dillon
University of Michigan Press, 2012

As the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great has long interested those studying the establishment of Christianity. But Constantine is also notable for his ability to control a sprawling empire and effect major changes. The Justice of Constantine examines Constantine's judicial and administrative legislation and his efforts to maintain control over the imperial bureaucracy, to guarantee the working of Roman justice, and to keep the will of his subjects throughout the Roman Empire.

John Dillon first analyzes the record of Constantine's legislation and its relationship to prior legislation. His initial chapters also serve as an introduction to Roman law and administration in later antiquity. Dillon then considers Constantine's public edicts and internal communications about access to law, trials and procedure, corruption, and punishment for administrative abuses. How imperial officials relied on correspondence with Constantine to resolve legal questions is also considered. A study of Constantine's expedited appellate system, to ensure provincial justice, concludes the book.

Constantine's constitutions reveal much about the Theodosian Code and the laws included in it. Constantine consistently seeks direct sources of reliable information in order to enforce his will. In official correspondence, meanwhile, Constantine strives to maintain control over his officials through punishment; trusted agents; and the cultivation of accountability, rivalry, and suspicion among them.

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The Justice of Mercy
Linda Ross Meyer
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"The Justice of Mercy is exhilarating reading. Teeming with intelligence and insight, this study immediately establishes itself as the unequaled philosophical and legal exploration of mercy. But Linda Meyer's book reaches beyond mercy to offer reconceptualizations of justice and punishment themselves. Meyer's ambition is to rethink the failed retributivist paradigm of criminal justice and to replace it with an ideal of merciful punishment grounded in a Heideggerian insight into the gift of being-with-others. The readings of criminal law, Heideggerian and Levinasian philosophy, and literature are powerful and provocative. The Justice of Mercy is a radical and rigorous exploration of both punishment and mercy as profoundly human activities."
---Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, Bard College

"This book addresses a question both ancient and urgently timely: how to reconcile the law's call to justice with the heart's call to mercy? Linda Ross Meyer's answer is both philosophical and pragmatic, taking us from the conceptual roots of the supposed conflict between justice and mercy to concrete examples in both fiction and contemporary criminal law. Energetic, eloquent, and moving, this book's defense of mercy will resonate with philosophers, legal scholars, lawyers, and policymakers engaged with criminal justice, and anyone concerned about our current harshly punitive legal system." 
---Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School

"Far from being a utopian, soft and ineffectual concept, Meyer shows that mercy already operates within the law in ways that we usually do not recognize. . . . Meyer's piercing insights and careful analysis bring the reader to think of law, justice, and mercy itself in a new and far more profound light."
---James Martel, San Francisco State University

How can granting mercy be just if it gives a criminal less punishment than he "deserves" and treats his case differently from others like it? This ancient question has become central to debates over truth and reconciliation commissions, alternative dispute resolution, and other new forms of restorative justice. The traditional response has been to marginalize mercy and to cast doubt on its ability to coexist with forms of legal justice.

Flipping the relationship between justice and mercy, Linda Ross Meyer argues that our rule-bound and harsh system of punishment is deeply flawed and that mercy should be, not the crazy woman in the attic of the law, but the lady of the house. This book articulates a theory of punishment with mercy and illustrates the implications of that theory with legal examples drawn from criminal law doctrine, pardons, mercy in military justice, and fictional narratives of punishment and mercy.

Linda Ross Meyer is Carmen Tortora Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law; President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities; and Associate Editor of Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Jacket illustration: "Lotus" by Anthony James
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The Justice of the Greeks
Raphael Sealey
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Among the most distinguished scholars of ancient Greek law writing today, Raphael Sealey in his newest book examines the Greek contribution to the concept of justice. The Justice of the Greeks considers a series of themes inherent in or characteristic of Greek law, and it illuminates the fundamental difference between Greek law and other legal systems both ancient and modern.
The introductory chapter surveys theories of law and maintains that every system of law is characterized by distinctive principles, concepts, and aims. The process of issuing laws in writing led the Greeks to regard laws as discrete things, whereas modern thought--drawing on the Roman practice of argument by analogy--assumes that law is a continuum. The Justice of the Greeks also considers ancient codes of written law, Greek distinctions of personal status, and the development of procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes.
The Justice of the Greeks is directed toward people versed in the history and literature of Classical Greece. It aspires to bring the study of Greek law out of isolation, and to reveal its place in the main current of legal development. Scholars of comparative law, as well as classicists and legal historians, will find much of interest in this unusual book.
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Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mark DeWolfe Howe
Harvard University Press

Distinguished biographies of great men are not uncommon, but it is seldom indeed that the pairing of biographer and subject is so natural and fortunate as in the case of Mark DeWolfe Howe and that giant of nine decades of American life, Justice Holmes. A lawyer whose early career included a year as secretary to Holmes, Howe comes from the New England world that produced Holmes and he inherits a similar tradition of creative probing and pragmatic curiosity.

In a lesser figure than Holmes the foreshadowings of youth may be misleading or the fulfillment of manhood incomplete, but for him neither of these things was so. In the course of his journey to emotional and professional maturity—the period of this book—Holmes outlined the entire realm he was later to inhabit and make his own. When at the close of this volume Howe temporarily takes leave of him, Holmes has satisfied himself of his strengths and capacities; the tools he will use are ready. During a period of contradictory stuffiness and brilliance in Boston and through the splintering and passion of the Civil War, the young Holmes tested his beliefs and his strength against the world he found. Belief as a consequence became “that upon which a man is willing to act.” As a soldier on the edge of death, he proved to himself that he could face extinction with the grace and fortitude of those who had the support of a religion he had discarded. There was the dignity as well as the danger of arrogance in this aristocracy of doubt, but also, as Howe points out, “No discovery, in youth of maturity, had larger moment than that.”

Howe’s biography is of the stature of Holmes himself. Readers of this book will become participants in the making of greatness.

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Justice Outsourced
The Therapeutic Jurisprudence Implications of Judicial Decision-Making by Nonjudicial Officers
Edited by Michael L. Perlin and Kelly Frailing
Temple University Press, 2022

Nonjudicial officers (NJOs) permeate the criminal justice and the forensic mental health systems in hidden ways. But what are the impact and consequences of non-lawyers and non- “real judges” hearing cases? Across the nation, numerous cases are outsourced to administrative and other NJOs to decide issues ranging from family court cases involving custody disputes and foster care, to alcohol, substance abuse, as well as mental health and institutionalization issues. Moreover, NJOs may also deal with probation sentencing, conditions of confinement, release restrictions, and even capital punishment.

The editors and contributors to the indispensable Justice Outsourced examine the hidden role of these non-judicial officers in the courtroom and administrative settings, as well as the ethical and practical considerations of using NJOs. Written from the perspective of therapeutic jurisprudence by judges, criminologists, lawyers, law professors, psychologists, and sociologists, this volume provides a much-needed wake-up call that emphasizes why the removal of a judge weakens a defendant’s rights and dignity and corrupts the administration of justice. However, Justice Outsourced also suggests effective employments of NJOs, revealing the potential of therapeutic principles and procedures to enhance the practical knowledge supplied by nonjudicial decision-makers.

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Justice Scalia
Rhetoric and the Rule of Law
Edited by Brian G. Slocum and Francis J. Mootz III
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Justice Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) was the single most important figure in the emergence of the “new originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution, which sought to anchor the court’s interpretation of the Constitution to the ordinary meaning of the words at the time of drafting. For Scalia, the meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes was rigidly fixed by their original meanings with little concern for extratextual considerations. While some lauded his uncompromising principles, others argued that such a rigid view of the Constitution both denies and attempts to limit the discretion of judges in ways that damage and distort our system of law.

In this edited collection, leading scholars from law, political science, philosophy, rhetoric, and linguistics look at the ways Scalia framed and stated his arguments. Focusing on rhetorical strategies rather than the logic or validity of Scalia’s legal arguments, the contributors collectively reveal that Scalia enacted his rigidly conservative vision of the law through his rhetorical framing.
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Justifying Intellectual Property
Robert P. Merges
Harvard University Press, 2011

Why should a property interest exist in an intangible item? In recent years, arguments over intellectual property have often divided proponents—who emphasize the importance of providing incentives for producers of creative works— from skeptics who emphasize the need for free and open access to knowledge.

In a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis, Robert P. Merges establishes a sophisticated rationale for the most vital form of modern property: IP rights. His insightful new book answers the many critics who contend that these rights are inefficient, unfair, and theoretically incoherent. But Merges’ vigorous defense of IP is also a call for appropriate legal constraints and boundaries: IP rights are real, but they come with real limits.

Drawing on Kant, Locke, and Rawls as well as contemporary scholars, Merges crafts an original theory to explain why IP rights make sense as a reward for effort and as a way to encourage individuals to strive. He also provides a novel explanation of why awarding IP rights to creative people is fair for everyone else in society, by contributing to a just distribution of resources. Merges argues convincingly that IP rights are based on a solid ethical foundation, and—when subject to fair limits—these rights are an indispensable part of a well-functioning society.

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front cover of Justifying Law
Justifying Law
The Debate over Foundations, Goals, and Methods
Raymond Belliotti
Temple University Press, 1994
"A comprehensive assessment of traditional and contemporary legal thought, Mr. Belliotti's defense of 'critical pragmatism' is a significant contribution to the literature. This book takes on all the leading theories and takes them on seriously. It is one of the most ambitious and satisfying efforts in print at mediating the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between law's mainstream liberal analysts and its leftist critics." --Anita L. Allen, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center Entering the perennial debate about the role and definition of law, Raymond Belliotti presents a critical survey of a number of philosophical approaches to law and judicial decision-making. Confronting the conflicting orientations represented by legal formalism and legal realism, he discusses the relationship between law and society. For a decision such as Roe v. Wade, the differing justifications by formalists and realists can affect policy interpretations as well as legal challenges. The application of an implicit right to privacy versus the attempt to enact policy that deals with a social problem and the acceptance of judicial innovation demonstrates how sometimes opposing arguments can reach the same legal decision. While providing his own account of law, Belliotti takes seriously the legal critiques inspired by Marxism and feminism and illustrates how traditional philosophical problems and methods plague legal theory. He also shows the impasses to which our argumentation strategies lead and suggests ways we might transcend those dead ends. "The author brings a critical intelligence and a very impressive scholarship to traditional issues in law. The strength that jumps from the page is a very well informed contemporary reading that avoids clichés and the limits of much contemporary analysis." --John Brigham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of The Cult of the Court (Temple) "[A]n excellent survey and analysis of major theories in the philosophy of law. The book features intelligent discussions of such diverse approaches as natural law theory, legal positivism, law and economics, feminist jurisprudence, and Critical Legal Studies. Justifying Law is full of insight, clear reasoning, and common sense.... The wide-ranging examination reveals Belliotti's substantial scholarship and keen intelligence.... Through his presentation and commentary on several philosophies of law and individual legal theorists, Belliotti has enriched and advanced jurisprudential dialogue and inquiry." --Journal of Value Inquiry
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