front cover of SAA Sampler
SAA Sampler
Law & Ethics
Lisa A. Mix
Society of American Archivists, 2013
The SAA Sampler Series features collections of select chapters from authoritative books on archives published by the Society of American Archivists. Produced exclusively electronically, the samplers are designed to give readers an overview of a pertinent topic as well as a taste of the full publications. In this volume you'll discover three outstanding pieces on legal and ethical issues for archivists--one overview of copyright and two case studies dealing with privacy and access--drawn from three books published by the Society of American Archivists: NAVIGATING LEGAL ISSUES IN ARCHIVES, THE ETHICAL ARCHIVIST, and PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY PERSPECTIVES: ARCHIVISTS AND ARCHIVAL RECORDS.
[more]

front cover of Sacred Men
Sacred Men
Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam
Keith L. Camacho
Duke University Press, 2019
Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the Guantánamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.
[more]

front cover of Sacred Violence
Sacred Violence
Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty
Paul W. Kahn
University of Michigan Press, 2008

In Sacred Violence, the distinguished political and legal theorist Paul W. Kahn investigates the reasons for the resort to violence characteristic of premodern states. In a startling argument, he contends that law will never offer an adequate account of political violence. Instead, we must turn to political theology, which reveals that torture and terror are, essentially, forms of sacrifice. Kahn forces us to acknowledge what we don't want to see: that we remain deeply committed to a violent politics beyond law.

Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights.

Cover Illustration: "Abu Ghraib 67, 2005" by Fernando Botero. Courtesy of the artist and the American University Museum.

[more]

front cover of Saving the Neighborhood
Saving the Neighborhood
Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms
Richard R. W. Brooks and Carol M. Rose
Harvard University Press, 2013

Saving the Neighborhood tells the charged, still controversial story of the rise and fall of racially restrictive covenants in America, and offers rare insight into the ways legal and social norms reinforce one another, acting with pernicious efficacy to codify and perpetuate intolerance.

The early 1900s saw an unprecedented migration of African Americans leaving the rural South in search of better work and equal citizenship. In reaction, many white communities instituted property agreements—covenants—designed to limit ownership and residency according to race. Restrictive covenants quickly became a powerful legal guarantor of segregation, their authority facing serious challenge only in 1948, when the Supreme Court declared them legally unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer. Although the ruling was a shock to courts that had upheld covenants for decades, it failed to end their influence. In this incisive study, Richard Brooks and Carol Rose unpack why.

At root, covenants were social signals. Their greatest use lay in reassuring the white residents that they shared the same goal, while sending a warning to would-be minority entrants: keep out. The authors uncover how loosely knit urban and suburban communities, fearing ethnic mixing or even “tipping,” were fair game to a new class of entrepreneurs who catered to their fears while exacerbating the message encoded in covenants: that black residents threatened white property values. Legal racial covenants expressed and bestowed an aura of legitimacy upon the wish of many white neighborhoods to exclude minorities. Sadly for American race relations, their legacy still lingers.

[more]

front cover of Saying What the Law Is
Saying What the Law Is
The Constitution in the Supreme Court
Charles Fried
Harvard University Press, 2004

In a few thousand words the Constitution sets up the government of the United States and proclaims the basic human and political rights of its people. From the interpretation and elaboration of those words in over 500 volumes of Supreme Court cases comes the constitutional law that structures our government and defines our individual relationship to that government. This book fills the need for an account of that law free from legal jargon and clear enough to inform the educated layperson, yet which does not condescend or slight critical nuance, so that its judgments and analyses will engage students, practitioners, judges, and scholars.

Taking the reader up to and through such controversial recent Supreme Court decisions as the Texas sodomy case and the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Charles Fried sets out to make sense of the main topics of constitutional law: the nature of doctrine, federalism, separation of powers, freedom of expression, religion, liberty, and equality.

Fried draws on his knowledge as a teacher and scholar, and on his unique experience as a practitioner before the Supreme Court, a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and Solicitor General of the United States to offer an evenhanded account not only of the substance of constitutional law, but of its texture and underlying themes. His book firmly draws the reader into the heart of today's constitutional battles. He understands what moves today's Court and that understanding illuminates his analyses.

[more]

front cover of Scalia v. Scalia
Scalia v. Scalia
Opportunistic Textualism in Constitutional Interpretation
Catherine L. Langford
University of Alabama Press, 2018
An analysis of the discrepancy between the ways Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued the Constitution should be interpreted versus how he actually interpreted the law

Antonin Scalia is considered one of the most controversial justices to have been on the United States Supreme Court. A vocal advocate of textualist interpretation, Justice Scalia argued that the Constitution means only what it says and that interpretations of the document should be confined strictly to the directives supplied therein. This narrow form of constitutional interpretation, which limits constitutional meaning to the written text of the Constitution, is known as textualism.
 
Scalia v. Scalia:Opportunistic Textualism in Constitutional Interpretation examines Scalia’s discussions of textualism in his speeches, extrajudicial writings, and judicial opinions. Throughout his writings, Scalia argues textualism is the only acceptable form of constitutional interpretation. Yet Scalia does not clearly define his textualism, nor does he always rely upon textualism to the exclusion of other interpretive means.
 
Scalia is seen as the standard bearer for textualism. But when textualism fails to support his ideological aims (as in cases that pertain to states’ rights or separation of powers), Scalia reverts to other forms of argumentation. Langford analyzes Scalia’s opinions in a clear area of law, the cruel and unusual punishment clause; a contested area of law, the free exercise and establishment cases; and a silent area of law, abortion. Through her analysis, Langford shows that Scalia uses rhetorical strategies beyond those of a textualist approach, concluding that Scalia is an opportunistic textualist and that textualism is as rhetorical as any other form of judicial interpretation.
[more]

front cover of The Scandal of the State
The Scandal of the State
Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Duke University Press, 2003
The Scandal of the State is a revealing study of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women’s actual needs and lives. Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women’s identities and how, reciprocally, women and “women’s issues” affect the state’s role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the postcolonial state in implicit contrast with the “enlightened,” postfeminist neoliberal state in the West. Her analysis wrestles with complex social realities, taking into account the influence of age, ethnicity, religion, and class on individual and group identities as well as the shifting, heterogeneous nature of the state itself.

The Scandal of the State develops through a series of compelling case studies, each of which centers around an incident exposing the contradictory position of the Indian state vis-à-vis its female citizens and, ultimately, the inadequacy of its commitment to women’s rights. Sunder Rajan focuses on the custody battle over a Muslim child bride, the compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded women in state institutional care, female infanticide in Tamilnadu, prostitution as labor rather than crime, and the surrender of the female outlaw Phoolan Devi. She also looks at the ways the Uniform Civil Code presented many women with a stark choice between allegiance to their religion and community or the secular assertion of individual rights. Rich with theoretical acumen and activist passion, The Scandal of the State is a powerful critique of the mutual dependence of women and the state on one another in the specific context of a postcolonial modernity.

[more]

front cover of Science at the Bar
Science at the Bar
Law, Science, and Technology in America
Sheila Jasanoff
Harvard University Press, 1995

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

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

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

[more]

front cover of The Science of Gun Policy
The Science of Gun Policy
A Critical Synthesis of Research Evidence on the Effects of Gun Policies in the United States
RAND Corporation
RAND Corporation, 2018
This report synthesizes the available scientific evidence on the effects of various firearm policies on firearm deaths, violent crime, the gun industry, participation in hunting and sport shooting, and other outcomes. Based on this synthesis, the authors highlight policies whose effects are better supported by evidence and areas where more and better information could contribute to establishing fair and effective gun policies.
[more]

front cover of Science-Mart
Science-Mart
Privatizing American Science
Philip Mirowski
Harvard University Press, 2011

This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government amply funded basic research in science and medicine. Starting in the 1980s, however, this support began to decline and for-profit corporations became the largest funders of research. Philip Mirowski argues that a powerful neoliberal ideology promoted a radically different view of knowledge and discovery: the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized.

Consequently, patent and intellectual property laws were greatly strengthened, universities demanded patents on the discoveries of their faculty, information sharing among researchers was impeded, and the line between universities and corporations began to blur. At the same time, corporations shed their in-house research laboratories, contracting with independent firms both in the States and abroad to supply new products. Among such firms were AT&T and IBM, whose outstanding research laboratories during much of the twentieth century produced Nobel Prize–winning work in chemistry and physics, ranging from the transistor to superconductivity.

Science-Mart offers a provocative, learned, and timely critique, of interest to anyone concerned that American science—once the envy of the world—must be more than just another way to make money.

[more]

front cover of Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law
Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law
Ancheta, Angelo N
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Scientific and social scientific evidence has informed judicial decisions and the making of constitutional law for decades, but for much of U.S. history it has also served as a rhetorical device to justify inequality. It is only in recent years that scientific and statistical research has helped redress discrimination—but not without controversy.

Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law provides unique insights into the judicial process and scientific inquiry by examining major decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, civil rights advocacy, and the nature of science itself. Angelo Ancheta discusses leading equal protection cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and recent litigation involving race-related affirmative action, gender inequality, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. He also examines less prominent, but equally compelling cases, including McCleskey v. Kemp, which involved statistical evidence that a state’s death penalty was disproportionately used when victims were white and defendants were black, and Castaneda v. Partida, which established key standards of evidence in addressing the exclusion of Latinos from grand jury service. For each case, Ancheta explores the tensions between scientific findings and constitutional values. 

[more]

front cover of Scoundrels to the Hoosegow
Scoundrels to the Hoosegow
Perry Mason Moments and Entertaining Cases from the Files of a Prosecuting Attorney
Morley Swingle
University of Missouri Press, 2007

I closed my direct examination of narcotics officer Bill Bohnert by asking, "Detective Bohnert, do you see in the courtroom today the man we just saw on the tape, selling the crack cocaine to Darren Bullard?"

            Bohnert pointed to Robert Funt.

            "He's right there. . . ."

            I heard laughter in the courtroom. I glanced at the defendant, who had dutifully raised his hand.

            The prisoners seated behind him were laughing. They recognized a Perry Mason moment when they saw one. 

            Bohnert continued, "He's the one with his hand raised in the air."

            It has been said that the public prosecutor has more power over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person—a daunting proposition, but perhaps less intimidating when that official’s perspective is tempered by humor and compassion.

            In Scoundrels to the Hoosegow, a veteran prosecutor who is also a consummate storyteller shares more than thirty entertaining legal stories drawn from real life, re-creating, with verve and wit, villains, heroes, and ordinary citizens. In cases both tragic and hilarious, Morley Swingle offers a behind-the-scenes look at the justice system, taking readers from the scene of the crime to the courtroom as he explores the worlds of judges, attorneys, police officers, and criminals.

            Informed by a deep appreciation of Mark Twain, Swingle aims to do for his profession what Clemens did for riverboat piloting. He leads readers on an enjoyable romp through crime and punishment, while offering a clear exposition of legal points—from the subtleties of cross-examination to the role of plea bargaining.

            In cases ranging from indecent exposure to conspiracy to commit murder, Swingle considers the fine line between pornography and obscenity and discusses sensitive issues surrounding first-degree murder and the death penalty. Whether describing a drunken but well-meaning probationer who frees the dogs on “death row” or the woman who tries to hire a reluctant hit man to dispose of her husband, he combines true crime and legal analysis with a healthy dose of humor—and shares the occasional “Perry Mason moment” in which a trial dramatically shifts direction.

            Not since the author of Anatomy of a Murder, Robert Traver,  wrote Small Town D.A. fifty years ago has an American prosecutor penned such a candid, revealing, and funny account of the job—an altogether satisfying book that sentences the reader to many hours of enjoyment.

[more]

front cover of Scrambling for Protection
Scrambling for Protection
The New Media and the First Amendment
Patrick M. Garry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
In our age of media revolutions, Patrick M. Garry offers guidelines for constitutionally redefining the press, and maintains that the First Amendment press clause must broaden the scope of its freedoms to include the communication activities of a much larger public.
[more]

front cover of Screwing the System and Making it Work
Screwing the System and Making it Work
Juvenile Justice in the No-Fault Society
Mark D. Jacobs
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Who is responsible for juvenile delinquency? Mark D. Jacobs uses ethnographic, statistical, and literary methods to uncover the many levels of disorganization in American juvenile justice. By analyzing the continuities betwen normal casework and exceptional cases, he reveals that probation officers must commonly contrive informal measures to circumvent a system which routinely obstructs the delivery of services to their clients. Jacobs defines the concept of the "no-fault society" to describe the larger context of societal disorder and interpersonal manipulation that the juvenile justice system at once reflects and exacerbates.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Scripta Minora
Xenophon
Harvard University Press

A miscellany of minor works.

Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the defeat of Cyrus, it fell to Xenophon to lead the Greeks from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands. Later he wrote the famous vivid account of this “March Up-Country” (Anabasis); but meanwhile he entered service under the Spartans against the Persian king, married happily, and joined the staff of the Spartan king, Agesilaus. But Athens was at war with Sparta in 394 and so exiled Xenophon. The Spartans gave him an estate near Elis where he lived for years, writing and hunting and educating his sons. Reconciled to Sparta, Athens restored Xenophon to honor, but he preferred to retire to Corinth.

Xenophon’s Anabasis is a true story of remarkable adventures. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362, begins as a continuation of Thucydides’ account. There are four works on Socrates (collected in LCL 168). In Memorabilia Xenophon adds to Plato’s picture of Socrates from a different viewpoint. The Apology is an interesting complement to Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense at his trial. Xenophon’s Symposium portrays a dinner party at which Socrates speaks of love; and Oeconomicus has him giving advice on household management and married life. Cyropaedia, a historical romance on the education of Cyrus (the Elder), reflects Xenophon’s ideas about rulers and government.

We also have his Hiero, a dialogue on government; Agesilaus, in praise of that king; Constitution of Lacedaemon (on the Spartan system); Ways and Means (on the finances of Athens); Manual for a Cavalry Commander; a good manual of Horsemanship; and a lively Hunting with Hounds—mostly hare hunting. The Constitution of the Athenians, though clearly not by Xenophon, is an interesting document on politics at Athens. These eight books are collected in the present volume.

[more]

front cover of Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe
Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe
Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris
Frans Camphuijsen
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people’s conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These “scripts of justice” took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.
[more]

front cover of The Search for Justice
The Search for Justice
Lawyers in the Civil Rights Revolution, 1950–1975
Peter Charles Hoffer
University of Chicago Press, 2019
The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and better nation.
           
The Search for Justice is a look the role of the lawyers throughout the period, focusing on one of the central issues of the time: school segregation. The most notable participants to address this issue were the public interest lawyers of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, whose counselors brought lawsuits and carried out appeals in state and federal courts over the course of twenty years. But also playing a part in the story were members of the bar who defended Jim Crow laws explicitly or implicitly and, in some cases, also served in state or federal government; lawyers who sat on state and federal benches and heard civil rights cases; and, finally, law professors who analyzed the reasoning of the courts in classrooms and public forums removed from the fray. With rich, copiously researched detail, Hoffer takes readers through the interactions of these groups, setting their activities not only in the context of the civil rights movement but also of their full political and legal legacies, including the growth of corporate private legal practice after World War II and the expansion of the role of law professors in public discourse, particularly with the New Deal. Seeing the civil rights era through the lens of law enables us to understand for the first time the many ways in which lawyers affected the course and outcome of the movement.
 
[more]

front cover of The Second Amendment on Trial
The Second Amendment on Trial
Critical Essays on District of Columbia v. Heller
Saul A. Cornell
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
On the final day of its 2008 term, a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-to-4 decision striking down the District of Columbia's stringent gun control laws as a violation of the Second Amendment. Reversing almost seventy years of settled precedent, the high court reinterpreted the meaning of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" to affirm an individual right to own a gun in the home for purposes of self-defense. The landmark ruling not only opened a new chapter in the contentious history of gun rights and gun control but also revealed both the strengths and problems of originalist constitutional theory and jurisprudence.

This volume brings together some of the best scholarship on the Heller case, with essays by legal scholars and historians representing a range of ideological viewpoints and applying different interpretive frameworks. Following the editors' introduction, which describes the issues involved and the arguments on each side, the essays are organized into four sections. The first includes two of the most important historical briefs filed in the case, while the second offers different views of the role of originalist theory. Section three presents opposing interpretations of the ruling and its relationship to modern constitutional doctrine. The final section explores historical research post-Heller, including new findings on patterns of gun ownership in colonial and Revolutionary America.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Nelson Lund, Joyce Lee Malcolm, Jack Rakove, Reva B. Siegel, Cass R. Sunstein, Kevin M. Sweeney, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III.
[more]

front cover of The Second Creation
The Second Creation
Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era
Jonathan Gienapp
Harvard University Press, 2018

A stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our Constitution?

Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the Founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation.

When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.

[more]

front cover of Second-Best Justice
Second-Best Justice
The Virtues of Japanese Private Law
J. Mark Ramseyer
University of Chicago Press, 2015
It’s long been known that Japanese file fewer lawsuits per capita than Americans do. Yet explanations for the difference have tended to be partial and unconvincing, ranging from circular arguments about Japanese culture to suggestions that the slow-moving Japanese court system acts as a deterrent.

With Second-Best Justice, J. Mark Ramseyer offers a more compelling, better-grounded explanation: the low rate of lawsuits in Japan results not from distrust of a dysfunctional system but from trust in a system that works—that sorts and resolves disputes in such an overwhelmingly predictable pattern that opposing parties rarely find it worthwhile to push their dispute to trial. Using evidence from tort claims across many domains, Ramseyer reveals a court system designed not to find perfect justice, but to “make do”—to adopt strategies that are mostly right and that thereby resolve disputes quickly and economically.

An eye-opening study of comparative law, Second-Best Justice will force a wholesale rethinking of the differences among alternative legal systems and their broader consequences for social welfare. 
[more]

front cover of The Secret Lives of Citizens
The Secret Lives of Citizens
Pursuing the Promise of American Life
Thomas Geoghegan
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In this witty combination of memoir and observation, Thomas Geoghegan addresses the widespread cynicism about our government and explores what it means to be a "national" civil servant and a "local" citizen.

"This is unlike any public-policy book I've ever read: part Catcher in the Rye, part The Road to Wigan Pier, part The Federalist Papers, it is mesmerizing, rueful, painfully honest, and never, ever dull."—Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test

"Extraordinary. It has the essential trait of a memorable book, in that after reading it you look at daily life in a lastingly different way." —James Fallows, author of Breaking the News

"[Geoghegan] has written a book that is not only compelling to read but that provokes us to seriously reflect on the choices we make and how we spend our time." —Jonathan Coleman, Washington Post Book World

"Geoghegan's language is playful. . . . Personal reminiscence mixing with historical anecdote, dipping into complex themes . . . shifting from wistful nostalgia to dark comedy." —Robert B. Reich, New York Times Book Review

"A truly strange and wonderful book." — William Finnegan
[more]

front cover of Secret Power
Secret Power
WikiLeaks and Its Enemies
Stefania Maurizi
Pluto Press, 2022
An uncovering of the terrifying depths of authoritarian power that hide behind the infamous story of WikiLeaks

*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism 2021*
*Winner of the Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award for Investigative Journalism 2022*
*Winner of the Premio Angelo Vassallo Award 2022*

'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.'

It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power.

Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks.

With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi’s tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups.

At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers.
[more]

front cover of Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle
Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle
The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States
Mark D. West
University of Chicago Press, 2006

A leader of a global superpower is betrayed by his mistress, who makes public the sordid details of their secret affair. His wife stands by as he denies the charges. Debates over definitions of moral leadership ensue. Sound familiar? If you guessed Clinton and Lewinsky, try again. This incident involved former Japanese prime minister Sosuke Uno and a geisha.

In Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, Mark D. West organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal—from corporate fraud to baseball cheaters, political corruption to celebrity sexcapades—to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society. In Japan and the United States, legal and organizational rules tell us what kind of behavior is considered scandalous. When Japanese and American scandal stories differ, those rules—rules that define what’s public and what’s private, rules that protect injuries to dignity and honor, and rules about sex, to name a few—often help explain the differences. In the cases of Clinton and Uno, the rules help explain why the media didn’t cover Uno’s affair, why Uno’s wife apologized on her husband’s behalf, and why Uno—and not Clinton—resigned.

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle offers a novel approach to viewing the phenomenon of scandal—one that will be applauded by anyone who has obsessed over (or ridiculed) these public episodes.

[more]

front cover of Securing Constitutional Democracy
Securing Constitutional Democracy
The Case of Autonomy
James E. Fleming
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Famously described by Louis Brandeis as "the most comprehensive of rights" and 'the right most valued by civilized men," the right of privacy or autonomy is more embattled during modern times than any other. Debate over its meaning, scope, and constitutional status is so widespread that it all but defines the post-1960s era of constitutional interpretation. Conservative Robert Bork called it "a loose canon in the law," while feminist Catharine MacKinnon attacked it as the “right of men to be left alone to oppress women.” Can a right with such prominent critics from across the political spectrum be grounded in constitutional law?

In this book, James Fleming responds to these controversies by arguing that the right to privacy or autonomy should be grounded in a theory of securing constitutional democracy. His framework seeks to secure the basic liberties that are preconditions for deliberative democracy—to allow citizens to deliberate about the institutions and policies of their government—as well as deliberative autonomy—to enable citizens to deliberate about the conduct of their own lives. Together, Fleming shows, these two preconditions can afford everyone the status of free and equal citizenship in our morally pluralistic constitutional democracy.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Securing Religious Liberty
Principles for Judicial Interpretation of the Religion Clauses
Jesse H. Choper
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Although the Constitution of the United States states that there shall be no laws that either establish or prohibit religion, the application of the Religion Clauses throughout United States history has been fraught with conflict and ambiguity. In this book, a leading constitutional scholar proposes a set of guidelines meant to provide for the consistent application of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses.

Choper's guidelines are designed to provide maximum protection for religious freedom without granting anyone an advantage, inflicting a disadvantage, or causing an unfair burden. Though not calling for the wholesale overturning of judicial precedents or established social practices, the standards he proposes would result in significant—and controversial—modifications to existing doctrines and customs. Choper argues, for instance, that while vocal prayer and Bible reading in public schools should continue to be prohibited, we can and should allow for silent prayer and objective courses in creation science. His standards would also, among other things, eliminate the tax exemption on property used exclusively for religious purposes while allowing parochial schools to receive public funds for the non-religious component of their education.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Security in Paraguay
Analysis and Responses in Comparative Perspective
James L. Cavallaro, Jacob Kopas, Yukyan Lam, Timothy Mayhle, and Soledad Villagra de Biedermann
Harvard University Press
The perception of rising insecurity has plagued Paraguay over the past decade as the country has continued its transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. At the same time, reforms of the penal code and the code of criminal procedure have been implemented, leading many to attribute the rising sense of insecurity to the new, rights-based approach to criminal justice. In Security in Paraguay: Analysis and Responses in Comparative Perspective, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School assesses the disparity between the sensation of insecurity and actual levels of urban crime. The book further analyzes the impact of political actors and the media in heightening public fear of crime. Security in Paraguay draws upon comparative case studies and the latest research on criminal justice policy in Latin America to situate Paraguay’s experience in a broader regional context and to offer recommendations to guide future policymaking.
[more]

front cover of The Seductions of Quantification
The Seductions of Quantification
Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking
Sally Engle Merry
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We live in a world where seemingly everything can be measured. We rely on indicators to translate social phenomena into simple, quantified terms, which in turn can be used to guide individuals, organizations, and governments in establishing policy. Yet counting things requires finding a way to make them comparable. And in the process of translating the confusion of social life into neat categories, we inevitably strip it of context and meaning—and risk hiding or distorting as much as we reveal.

With The Seductions of Quantification, leading legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry investigates the techniques by which information is gathered and analyzed in the production of global indicators on human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. Although such numbers convey an aura of objective truth and scientific validity, Merry argues persuasively that measurement systems constitute a form of power by incorporating theories about social change in their design but rarely explicitly acknowledging them. For instance, the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries in terms of their compliance with antitrafficking activities, assumes that prosecuting traffickers as criminals is an effective corrective strategy—overlooking cultures where women and children are frequently sold by their own families. As Merry shows, indicators are indeed seductive in their promise of providing concrete knowledge about how the world works, but they are implemented most successfully when paired with context-rich qualitative accounts grounded in local knowledge.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Select Papyri, Volume I
Private Documents
A. S. Hunt
Harvard University Press

Personal records from the sands of Egypt.

This is the first of two volumes giving a selection of Greek papyri relating to private and public business. They cover a period from before 300 BC to the eighth century AD. Most were found in rubbish heaps or remains of ancient houses or in tombs in Egypt. From such papyri we get much information about administration and social and economic conditions in Egypt, and about native Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine law, as well as glimpses of ordinary life.

This volume contains: Agreements, 71 examples; these concern marriage, divorce, adoption, apprenticeship, sales, leases, employment of laborers. Receipts, 10. Wills, 6. Deed of disownment. Personal letters from men and women, young and old, 82. Memoranda, 2. Invitations, 5. Orders for payment, 2. Agenda, 2. Accounts and inventories, 12. Questions of oracles, 3. Christian prayers, 2. A Gnostic charm. Horoscopes, 2.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Select Papyri, Volume II
Public Documents
A. S. Hunt
Harvard University Press

Official records from the sands of Egypt.

This volume presents papyri relating to public business of various kinds in Egypt from the middle of the 3rd century BC to AD 710, thus including affairs in that country first when it was ruled by the Greek Ptolemaic kings, secondly when it was a Roman province. The earliest examples date from the reign of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the latest from the government by the Arabs after their conquest of Egypt in AD 639–641.

The papyri chosen were all sent by persons in office (from king, Roman emperor, or governor downwards) or addressed to them or sent for their information: Codes and Regulations, 6 examples. Edicts and Orders, 26. Public Announcements, 6. Reports of Meetings, 3. Official Acts and Inquiries, 5. Judicial Business, 18. Petitions and Applications, 44. Declarations to Officials, 30. Appointments and Nominations, 7. Tenders and Contracts, 19. Receipts, 26. Orders for Payment, 6. Accounts and Registers or Lists, 12. Letters, 16. Notes on the systems of dating and of money in Egypt as well as a glossary of technical terms are provided.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry and one of private documents.

[more]

front cover of Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies
Self-Determination and Women’s Rights in Muslim Societies
Edited by Chitra Raghavan and James P. Levine
Brandeis University Press, 2012
Contradicting the views commonly held by westerners, many Muslim countries in fact engage in a wide spectrum of reform, with the status of women as a central dimension. This anthology counters the myth that Islam and feminism are always or necessarily in opposition. A multidisciplinary group of scholars examine ideology, practice, and reform efforts in the areas of marriage, divorce, abortion, violence against women, inheritance, and female circumcision across the Islamic world, illuminating how religious and cultural prescriptions interact with legal norms, affecting change in sometimes surprising ways.
[more]

front cover of Semblances of Sovereignty
Semblances of Sovereignty
The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship
T. Alexander Aleinikoff
Harvard University Press, 2002

In a set of cases decided at the end of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court declared that Congress had "plenary power" to regulate immigration, Indian tribes, and newly acquired territories. Not coincidentally, the groups subject to Congress' plenary power were primarily nonwhite and generally perceived as "uncivilized." The Court left Congress free to craft policies of assimilation, exclusion, paternalism, and domination.

Despite dramatic shifts in constitutional law in the twentieth century, the plenary power case decisions remain largely the controlling law. The Warren Court, widely recognized for its dedication to individual rights, focused on ensuring "full and equal citizenship"--an agenda that utterly neglected immigrants, tribes, and residents of the territories. The Rehnquist Court has appropriated the Warren Court's rhetoric of citizenship, but has used it to strike down policies that support diversity and the sovereignty of Indian tribes.

Attuned to the demands of a new century, the author argues for abandonment of the plenary power cases, and for more flexible conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. The federal government ought to negotiate compacts with Indian tribes and the territories that affirm more durable forms of self-government. Citizenship should be "decentered," understood as a commitment to an intergenerational national project, not a basis for denying rights to immigrants.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana
Law and Public Affairs, from TR to FDR
J. Leonard Bates
University of Illinois Press, 1999
This is the first comprehensive biography of Thomas J. Walsh, the Democratic senator from Montana from 1913 to 1933 who was best known for his role in uncovering the Teapot Dome scandal. J. Leonard Bates places Walsh in his colorful and tumultuous times, illuminating Montana history and politics as well as national movements including Progressivism, internationalism, Prohibition, war, and so-called normalcy.
 
Walsh fought throughout his long career against corruption and monopoly power. During his early years as a lawyer-politician in Helena, he was often in conflict with the "Copper Kings" and other powerful figures. As a senator, he became an internationalist, working throughout the 1920s for naval disarmament, the World Court, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact for the "outlawry" of war.
 
In his most celebrated coup, breaking open the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923-24, Walsh revealed that the secretary of the interior had accepted "loans" from oil men in return for leases of U.S. naval oil reserves. Working through the Public Lands Committee of the Senate, Walsh enjoyed support for his investigation from members of both parties, and the Supreme Court endorsed his interpretation of the scandal in 1927. Shortly before his death, he presided over the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt and served for a brief time as a key figure in the new leader's circle.
 
Drawing on archival sources of unprecedented depth, including personal letters between Walsh and his first wife, Elinor McClements Walsh, Bates's expansive study paints a richly detailed portrait of an influential and principled figure whose political career spanned world war, depression, and the administrations of six presidents.
 
[more]

front cover of Sentencing in Time
Sentencing in Time
Linda Ross Meyer
Amherst College Press, 2017
Exactly how is it we think the ends of justice are accomplished by sentencing someone to a term in prison? How do we relate a quantitative measure of time—months and years—to the objectives of deterring crime, punishing wrongdoers, and accomplishing justice for those touched by a criminal act? Linda Ross Meyer investigates these questions, examining the disconnect between our two basic modes of thinking about time—chronologically (seconds, minutes, hours), or phenomenologically (observing, taking note of, or being aware of the passing of time). In Sentencing in Time, Meyer asks whether—in overlooking the irreconcilability of these two modes of thinking about time—we are failing to accomplish the ends we believe the criminal justice system is designed to serve. Drawing on work in philosophy, legal theory, jurisprudence, and the history of penology, Meyer explores how, rather than condemning prisoners to an experience of time bereft of meaning, we might instead make the experience of incarceration constructively meaningful—and thus better aligned with social objectives of deterring crime, reforming offenders, and restoring justice.
[more]

front cover of Sentencing without Guidelines
Sentencing without Guidelines
Rhys Hester
Temple University Press, 2024
Sentencing matters. Reform initiatives hope to impart more uniformity and fairness in sentencing. Tough-on-crime laws like “three strikes” and mandatory minimum provisions deprive judges of sentencing discretion. While sentencing guidelines have been adopted by approximately 20 states since the early 1980s, many judges operate without guidelines.

Sentencing without Guidelines is Rhys Hester’s deep dive into how South Carolina, which never passed sentencing guideline legislation, nonetheless created meaningful punishment reform. It achieved uniformity in sentencing with a traveling circuit of judges, informal norms among judges, and the unique phenomenon of the “Plea Judge” to manage cases.

Hester examines how prior convictions, race, and geographical differences impact sentences to explain why individuals get the criminal sentences they do. He also explores how legal reform mechanisms can influence punishment goals and policy. Sentencing without Guidelines shows the benefits and drawbacks South Carolina experienced as it met sentencing reform goals. These lessons can be translated into policy for other jurisdictions.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Separating Power
Essays on the Founding Period
Gerhard Casper
Harvard University Press, 1997

The separation of powers along functional lines--legislative, executive, and judicial--has been a core concept of American constitutionalism ever since the Revolution. As noted constitutional law scholar Gerhard Casper points out in this collection of essays, barren assertions of the importance of keeping the powers separate do not capture the complexity of the task when it is seen as separating power flowing from a single source--the people. Popular sovereignty did not underlie earlier versions of the separation of powers doctrine.

Casper vividly illustrates some of the challenges faced by Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Gallatin, Jefferson, and many others in Congress and the executive branch as they guided the young nation, setting precedents for future generations. He discusses areas such as congressional-executive relations, foreign affairs, appropriations, and the Judiciary Act of 1789 from the separation of powers vantage point.

The picture of our government's formative years that emerges here, of a rich and overlapping understanding of responsibilities and authority, runs counter to rigid, syllogistic views. Separating Power gives us a clear portrait of the issues of separation of power in the founding period, as well as suggesting that in modern times we should be reluctant to tie separation of powers notions to their own procrustean bed.

[more]

front cover of Separation of Church and State
Separation of Church and State
Philip Hamburger
Harvard University Press, 2004

In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later.

Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Service and Procedures in Bureaucracy
A Case Study
Roy G. Francis and Robert C. Stone
University of Minnesota Press, 1956

Service and Procedures in Bureaucracy was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Large, complex systems of organization, such as government bureaus, giant corporations, and massive trade unions, play a decisive role in the daily lives of millions of people and exert an important influence upon national and even international affairs. This gives major sociological significance to the bureaucratic organizations of such groups.

The research reported here was undertaken to test two widespread beliefs about modern, largescale organizations, and the findings point to modifications in what has been regarded as the classic sociological concept of bureaucracy.

Does the personnel in bureaucracies commonly substitute rule-following, preoccupation with procedure, for the intended service purpose of the organization? And are bureaucracies characterized by impersonality, that is, detachment of office from individual, so that relations are between offices rather than between individuals? These are the questions the authors sought to answer in their study of the Louisiana Division of Employment Security. They observed employees working at their jobs, conducted interviews, administered questionnaires, and studied the official documents and records of the organization.

Here is a picture of bureaucracy in real life that will provide valuable insight to those actively concerned with administration and personnel problems, as well as to students in the social sciences.

[more]

front cover of Settler Sovereignty
Settler Sovereignty
Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836
Lisa Ford
Harvard University Press, 2010

In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.

This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilization were in rapid, global flux. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places before 1820, most settlers and indigenous people understood their conflicts as war, resolved disputes with diplomacy, and relied on shared notions like reciprocity and retaliation to address frontier theft and violence. This legal pluralism, however, was under stress as new, global statecraft linked sovereignty to the exercise of perfect territorial jurisdiction. In Georgia, New South Wales, and elsewhere, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.

[more]

front cover of Sex and Reason
Sex and Reason
Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 1992

Sexual drives are rooted in biology, but we don’t act on them blindly. Indeed, as the eminently readable judge and legal scholar Richard Posner shows, we make quite rational choices about sex, based on the costs and benefits perceived.

Drawing on the fields of biology, law, history, religion, and economics, this sweeping study examines societies from ancient Greece to today’s Sweden and issues from masturbation, incest taboos, date rape, and gay marriage to Baby M. The first comprehensive approach to sexuality and its social controls, Posner’s rational choice theory surprises, explains, predicts, and totally absorbs.

[more]

front cover of Sexual Blackmail
Sexual Blackmail
A Modern History
Angus McLaren
Harvard University Press, 2002

Sexual blackmail first reached public notice in the late eighteenth century when laws against sodomy were exploited by the unscrupulous to extort money from those they could entrap. Angus McLaren chronicles this parasitic crime, tracing its expansion in England and the United States through the Victorian era and into the first half of the twentieth century. The labeling of certain sexual acts as disreputable, if not actually criminal--abortion, infidelity, prostitution, and homosexuality--armed would-be blackmailers and led to a crescendo of court cases and public scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. As the importance of sexual respectability was inflated, so too was the spectacle of its loss.

Charting the rise and fall of sexual taboos and the shifting tides of shame, McLaren enables us to survey evolving sexual practices and discussions. He has mined the archives to tell his story through a host of fascinating characters and cases, from male bounders to designing women, from badger games to gold diggers, from victimless crimes to homosexual outing. He shows how these stories shocked, educated, entertained, and destroyed the lives of their victims. He also demonstrates how muckraking journalists, con men, and vengeful women determined the boundaries of sexual respectability and damned those considered deviant. Ultimately, the sexual revolution of the 1960s blurred the long-rigid lines of respectability, leading to a rapid decline of blackmail fears. This fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.

[more]

front cover of Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers
Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers
Adolescent Development, Discrimination, and Consent Law
Jennifer Ann Drobac
University of Chicago Press, 2016
When we consider the concept of sexual abuse and harassment, our minds tend to jump either towards adults caught in unhealthy relationships or criminals who take advantage of children. But the millions of maturing teenagers who also deal with sexual harassment can fall between the cracks.
 
When it comes to sexual relationships, adolescents pose a particular problem. Few teenagers possess all of the emotional and intellectual tools needed to navigate these threats, including the all too real advances made by supervisors, teachers, and mentors. In Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers, Jennifer Drobac explores the shockingly common problem of maturing adolescents who are harassed and exploited by adults in their lives. Reviewing the neuroscience and psychosocial evidence of adolescent development, she explains why teens are so vulnerable to adult harassers. Even today, in an age of increasing public awareness, criminal and civil law regarding the sexual abuse of minors remains tragically inept and irregular from state to state. Drobac uses six recent cases of teens suffering sexual harassment to illuminate the flaws and contradictions of this system, skillfully showing how our current laws fail to protect youths, and offering an array of imaginative legal reforms that could achieve increased justice for adolescent victims of sexual coercion. 
[more]

front cover of Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts
Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts
Allison Glazebrook
University of Texas Press, 2021

Oratory is a valuable source for reconstructing the practices, legalities, and attitudes surrounding sexual labor in classical Athens. It provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, sex slaves, brothels, sex traffickers, the cost of sex, contracts for sexual labor, and manumission practices for sex slaves. Yet the witty, wealthy, and independent hetaira, well-known from other genres, does not feature. Its detailed narratives and character portrayals provide a unique discourse on sexual labor and reveal the complex relationship between such labor and Athenian society.

Through a holistic examination of five key speeches, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts considers how portrayals of sex laborers intersected with gender, the body, sexuality, the family, urban spaces, and the polis in the context of the Athenian courts. Drawing on gender theory and exploring questions of space, place, and mobility, Allison Glazebrook shows how sex laborers represented a diverse set of anxieties concerning social legitimacy and how the public discourse about them is in fact a discourse on Athenian society, values, and institutions.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sexual Orientation and the Law
Harvard Law Review
Harvard University Press, 1990

Attitudes toward homosexuality range from condemnation to pity to indifference to respect. This range of viewpoints also appears in the legal community, reflected in legislation, legal decisionmaking, and legal scholarship. Sexual Orientation and the Law examines the legal problems faced by gay men and lesbians: the interaction between gays and the criminal justice system; discrimination in public and private employment; first amendment issues posed by gay students and teachers in public schools and universities; legal problems faced in same-sex relationships; child custody and visitation rights, as well as the ability to become foster and adoptive parents; and other contexts, including immigration, insurance, incorporation of gay rights organizations, and local legislation to prevent sexual orientation discrimination.

The Introduction establishes a theoretical framework for approaching gay and lesbian legal issues, and an Afterword updates the comprehensive coverage of all legal developments through the summer of 1989. This review and analysis of the current state of the law is an important part of the discussion and debate that will make antigay discrimination recognized as a legitimate issue and gay concerns part of the mainstream of legal discourse.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sexual Science and the Law
Richard Green
Harvard University Press, 1992

A rape victim charges that pornography caused her attacker to become a sex offender. A lesbian mother fights for custody of her child. A transsexual pilot is fired by a commercial airline after undergoing sex change and sues for sex discrimination. A homosexual is denied employment because of sexual orientation. A woman argues that her criminal behavior should be excused because she suffers from premenstrual syndrome. The law has much to say about sexual behavior, but what it says is rarely influenced by the findings of social science research over recent decades. This book focuses for the first time on the dynamic interplay between sexual science and legal decisionmaking.

Reflecting the author's wide experience as a respected sex researcher, expert witness, and lawyer, Sexual Science and the Law provides valuable insights into some of the most controversial social and sexual topics of our time. Drawing on an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research and citing extensively from case law and court transcripts, Richard Green demonstrates how the work of sexual science could bring about a transformation in jurisprudence, informing the courts in their deliberations on issues such as sexual privacy, homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, pornography, and sexual abuse.

In each case he considers, Green shows how the law has been shaped by social science or impoverished by reliance on conjecture and received wisdom. He examines the role of sexual science in legal controversy, its analysis of human motivation and behavior, and its use by the courts in determining the relative weight to be given the desires of the individual, the standards of society, and the power of the state in limiting sexual autonomy. Unprecedented in its portrayal of sexuality in a legal context, this scholarly but readable book will interest and educate professional and layperson alike—those lawyers, judges, sex educators, therapists, patients, and citizens who find themselves standing nonplussed at the meeting place of morality and behavior.

[more]

front cover of Sexy Dressing Etc.
Sexy Dressing Etc.
Duncan Kennedy
Harvard University Press, 1993
Duncan Kennedy argues that an American radicalism is both possible and desirable. One base for radical politics is the big institutional workplace; another is popular culture—whence his emphasis on phenomena like sexy dressing. Kennedy’s aim is to wed the rebelliousness, irony, and irrationalism of cultural modernism and postmodernism to the earnestness of political correctness.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Shadow Lives
The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror
Victoria Brittain
Pluto Press, 2013

Shadow Lives reveals the unseen side of the '9/11 wars': their impact on the wives and families of men incarcerated in Guantanamo, or in prison or under house arrest in Britain and the US. Victoria Brittain shows how these families have been made socially invisible and a convenient scapegoat for the state in order to exercise arbitrary powers under the cover of the 'War on Terror'.

A disturbing exposé of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services’ unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.

Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.

[more]

front cover of Shadows of Doubt
Shadows of Doubt
Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice
Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
Harvard University Press, 2019

Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system.

If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this provocative, pioneering book, economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined.

Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O’Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it’s simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: “If he thinks I’m dangerous, he might shoot. I’ll shoot first.”

Shadows of Doubt shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

[more]

front cover of Shakespeare and the Law
Shakespeare and the Law
A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions
Edited by Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier
University of Chicago Press, 2013
William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life, and trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare’s thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law’s technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects.

The book’s opening essays offer perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and contrasts between the two fields. The second section considers Shakespeare’s awareness of common law thinking and common law practice, while the third inquires into Shakespeare’s general attitudes toward legal systems. The fourth part of the book looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, whether in the plays, in Shakespeare’s world, or in our own world. Finally, a colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Richard Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion.
[more]

front cover of Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Law and Distributed Selfhood
Kevin Curran
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices.
 
At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts.
 
The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource. 
 
[more]

front cover of Shamans, Software, and Spleens
Shamans, Software, and Spleens
Law and the Construction of the Information Society
James Boyle
Harvard University Press, 1996

Who owns your genetic information? Might it be the doctors who, in the course of removing your spleen, decode a few cells and turn them into a patented product? In 1990 the Supreme Court of California said yes, marking another milestone on the information superhighway. This extraordinary case is one of the many that James Boyle takes up in Shamans, Software, and Spleens, a timely look at the infinitely tricky problems posed by the information society. Discussing topics ranging from blackmail and insider trading to artificial intelligence (with good-humored stops in microeconomics, intellectual property, and cultural studies along the way), Boyle has produced a work that can fairly be called the first social theory of the information age.

Now more than ever, information is power, and questions about who owns it, who controls it, and who gets to use it carry powerful implications. These are the questions Boyle explores in matters as diverse as autodialers and direct advertising, electronic bulletin boards and consumer databases, ethno-botany and indigenous pharmaceuticals, the right of publicity (why Johnny Carson owns the phrase "Here's Johnny!"), and the right to privacy (does J. D. Salinger "own" the letters he's sent?). Boyle finds that our ideas about intellectual property rights rest on the notion of the Romantic author--a notion that Boyle maintains is not only outmoded but actually counterproductive, restricting debate, slowing innovation, and widening the gap between rich and poor nations. What emerges from this lively discussion is a compelling argument for relaxing the initial protection of authors' works and expanding the concept of the fair use of information. For those with an interest in the legal, ethical, and economic ramifications of the dissemination of information--in short, for every member of the information society, willing or unwilling--this book makes a case that cannot be ignored.

[more]

front cover of Shaming the Constitution
Shaming the Constitution
The Detrimental Results of Sexual Violent Predator Legislation
Michael L. Perlin
Temple University Press, 2017

Convicted sexually violent predators are more vilified, more subject to media misrepresentation, and more likely to be denied basic human rights than any other population. Shaming the Constitution authors Michael Perlin and Heather Cucolo question the intentions of sex offender laws, offering new approaches to this most complex (and controversial) area of law and social policy.

The authors assert that sex offender laws and policies are unconstitutional and counter-productive. The legislation largely fails to add to public safety—even ruining lives for what are, in some cases, trivial infractions. Shaming the Constitution draws on law, behavioral sciences, and other disciplines to show that many of the “solutions” to penalizing sexually violent predators are “wrong,” as they create the most repressive and useless laws.

In addition to tracing the history of sex offender laws, the authors address the case of Jesse Timmendequas, whose crime begat “Megan’s Law;” the media’s role in creating a “moral panic;” recidivism statistics and treatments, as well as international human rights laws. Ultimately, they call attention to the flaws in the system so we can find solutions that contribute to public safety in ways that do not mock Constitutional principles.

[more]

front cover of Sharia Incorporated
Sharia Incorporated
A Comparative Overview of the Legal Systems of Twelve Muslim Countries in Past and Present
Edited by Jan Michiel Otto
Leiden University Press, 2010
The aim of Sharia Incorporated is to provide unbiased and contextual information about a topic that has of late been hijacked by politics in the Muslim world as well as in the West. Sharia Incorporated, written by laudable international scholars, is an ambitious study of the incorporation of Islamic law traditions into national legal systems. The book also explores the sensitive topic of ‘Western’ human rights and other rule of law standards in a Muslim world. It provides an in-depth analysis of the role of sharia in the historical and legal formation of twelve representative Muslim states, with a unique comparison of key issues raised by the ‘Islamic awakening’ of recent decades. In the preface Jan Michiel Otto goes to the heart of the prevailing environment in which Western discourses tend to oversimplify the substance and effect of Islam and sharia.
[more]

front cover of Sharpening the Legal Mind
Sharpening the Legal Mind
How to Think Like a Lawyer
William Powers Jr, edited by John Deigh
University of Texas Press, 2023

The way lawyers think about the law can seem deeply mysterious. They see nuance and meaning in statutes and implications in judicial opinions that are opaque to the rest of us. Accessible and thought provoking, Sharpening the Legal Mind explains how lawyers analyze the cases and controversies that come before the courts.

Written by William Powers Jr., the former president of the University of Texas at Austin, this book is an authoritative introduction to the academic study of law and legal reasoning, including insights into the philosophy of law and the intellectual history of legal thought. Powers discusses the methods lawyers use to interpret the law, the relation between law and morals, and the role of courts in shaping the law. In eight chapters, he follows the historical debate on these issues and others through different generations and movements in American legal thought—formalism, realism, positivism—to critical legal studies and postmodern theory. The perfect read for anyone looking for a primer on legal reasoning, Sharpening the Legal Mind demystifies the debates and approaches to thinking like a lawyer that profoundly influence the rule of law in our lives.

[more]

front cover of Shattered Justice
Shattered Justice
Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations
Kimberly J. Cook
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Shattered Justice presents original crime victims' experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Using in-depth interviews with 21 crime victims across the United States, Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations. Important lessons and analyses are shared related to grief and loss, and healing and repair. Using restorative justice practices to develop and deliver healing retreats for survivors also expands the practice of restorative justice. Finally, policy reforms aimed at preventing, mitigating, and repairing the harms of wrongful convictions is covered.
[more]

front cover of A Short History of European Law
A Short History of European Law
The Last Two and a Half Millennia
Tamar Herzog
Harvard University Press, 2018

A Short History of European Law brings to life 2,500 years of legal history, tying current norms to the circumstances of their conception. Tamar Herzog describes how successive legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was used and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.

“A remarkable achievement, sure to become a go-to text for scholars and students alike… A must-read for anyone eager to understand the origins of core legal concepts and institution—like due process and rule of law—that profoundly shape the societies in which we live today.”
—Amalia D. Kessler, Stanford University

“A fundamental and timely contribution to the understanding of Europe as seen through its legal systems. Herzog masterfully shows the profound unity of legal thinking and practices across the Continent and in England.”
—Federico Varese, Oxford University

“Required reading for Americanists North and South, and indeed, for all of us inhabiting a postcolonial world deeply marked by the millennia of legal imaginings whose dynamic transformations it so lucidly charts.”
—David Nirenberg, University of Chicago

[more]

front cover of Shouting Softly
Shouting Softly
Lines on Law, Literature, and Culture
Allen Mendenhall
St. Augustine's Press, 2020
In Shouting Softly, literary lawyer and proud Southerner Allen Mendenhall provides valuable insights into perennial questions about the fundamental features of civil society. His expansive commentaries and criticism on law, literature, and culture reveal an abiding commitment to ordered liberty, the decentralization and diffusion of power, bottom-up and localized forms of voluntary governance, time-tested wisdom, and aesthetic sensibility. This vigorous work cautions against hubris and misguided certitude, predicating its arresting arguments on the proposition that human reason, however awesome and inspiring, is limited and fallible. Covering a wide range of issues and historical figures, Mendenhall espouses conservative yet melioristic approaches to complex subjects, rebutting the hollow claims and fashionable theories that captivate ‘purposefully’ leftist law and humanities faculties across the United States. His is the measured voice of a book-loving polymath who appreciates beauty, imagination, humility, clarity, cooperation, and sound argumentation.

The work is given in three parts. The first section on law explores legal minds, rules and commentary on seminal jurisprudence. The second part explores literature and the influence of the writer and the disconcerting truths stories often seek to convey. Thirdly, Mendenhall delves into culture and the more obvious situations wherein we gain insight into our manner of living, and here Mendenhall exudes a Southern accent that in no way compromises his universal bearings. One of the highlights is his echo of Larry Seidentop’s question: “If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?” This is all the more meaningful given that Mendenhall is a member of the Millennial generation, and part of the intellectual minority who sees the urgency of “a studied appreciation for nuanced story and linguistic narrative.” 
[more]

front cover of Shylock on Trial
Shylock on Trial
The Appellate Briefs
Richard A. Posner and Charles Fried
University of Chicago Press, 2013
William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law, his plays rich in its terms, settings, and thought processes. In Shylock on Trial: The Appellate Briefs, the Hon. Richard A. Posner and Charles Fried rule on Shakespeare’s classic drama The Merchant of Venice. Framed as a decision argued by two appellate judges of the period in a trial following Shylock’s sentencing by the Duke of Venice, these essays playfully walk the line between law and culture, dissecting the alleged legal inconsistencies of Shylock’s trial while engaging in an artful reading of the play itself. The resultant opinions shed fresh light on the relationship between literary and legal scholarship, demonstrating how Shakespeare’s thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law’s technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects.

[more]

front cover of The Signature in Law
The Signature in Law
From the Thirteenth Century to the Facsimile
Stephen Mason
University of London Press, 2022
This book considers the judicial development of the signature—its definition, purpose, and legal functions.

Since the thirteenth century, the signature has been used to demonstrate proof of intent. This book puts the concept of the signature into a broad legal context, setting out the purposes and functions of a signature. Drawing on cases from common law jurisdictions across the world, this book demonstrates that judges expanded the meaning of the signature as technologies developed and were used in unanticipated ways.

Following an overview of the historical methods used to demonstrate proof of intent and authentication, the book considers the judicial response to the variations in form that signatures have been subject to over the past two hundred years, from initials, partial signatures, and fingerprints to rubber stamps and typewriting. Past judicial decision-making not only demonstrates the flexibility of the form a signature can take but also confirms that judges had the flexibility of mind to accept the first forms of electronic signature (telex, facsimile transmission) without the aid of special legislation. In this way, the signature is a prime example of the inherent flexibility of the English common law.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Silent Revolution
The Transformation of Divorce Law in the United States
Herbert Jacob
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Conflict and controversy usually accompany major social changes in America. Such issues as civil rights, abortion, and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment provoke strong and divisive reactions, attract extensive media coverage, and generate heated legislative debate. Some theorists even claim that only mobilization and publicity can stimulate significant legislative change. How is it possible, then, that a wholesale revamping of American divorce law occurred with scarcely a whisper of controversy and without any national debate? This is the central question posed—and authoritatively answered—in Herbert Jacob's Silent Revolution.

Since 1966, divorce laws in the United States have undergone a radical transformation. No-fault divorce is now universally available. Alimony functions simply as a brief transitional payment to help a dependent spouse become independent. Most states divide assets at divorce according to a community property scheme, and, whenever possible, many courts prefer to award custody of children to the mother and the father jointly.

These changes in policy represent a profound departure from traditional American values, and yet the legislation by which they were enacted was treated as a technical correction of minor problems. No-fault divorce, for example, was a response to the increasing number of fraudulent divorce petitions. Since couples were often forced to manufacture the evidence of guilt that many states required, and since judges frequently looked the other way, legal reformers sought no more than to bring divorce statutes into line with current practice.

On the basis of such observations, Jacob formulates a new theory of routine—as opposed to conflictual—policy-making processes. Many potentially controversial policies—divorce law reforms among them—pass unnoticed in America because legislators treat them as matters of routine. Jacob's is indeed the most plausible account of the enormous number and steady flow of policy decisions made by state legislatures. It also explains why no attention was paid to the effect divorce reform would have on divorced women and their children, a subject that has become increasingly controversial and that, consequently, is not likely to be handled by the routine policy-making process in the future.
[more]

front cover of Simple Rules for a Complex World
Simple Rules for a Complex World
Richard A. Epstein
Harvard University Press, 1995

Too many laws, too many lawyers--that's the necessary consequence of a complex society, or so conventional wisdom has it. Countless pundits insist that any call for legal simplification smacks of nostalgia, sentimentality, or naiveté. But the conventional view, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein tells us, has it exactly backward. The richer texture of modern society allows for more individual freedom and choice. And it allows us to organize a comprehensive legal order capable of meeting the technological and social challenges of today on the basis of just six core principles. In this book, Epstein demonstrates how.

The first four rules, which regulate human interactions in ordinary social life, concern the autonomy of the individual, property, contract, and tort. Taken together these rules establish and protect consistent entitlements over all resources, both human and natural. These rules are backstopped by two more rules that permit forced exchanges on payment of just compensation when private or public necessity so dictates. Epstein then uses these six building blocks to clarify many intractable problems in the modern legal landscape. His discussion of employment contracts explains the hidden virtues of contracts at will and exposes the crippling weaknesses of laws regarding collective bargaining, unjust dismissal, employer discrimination, and comparable worth. And his analysis shows how laws governing liability for products and professional services, corporate transactions, and environmental protection have generated unnecessary social strife and economic dislocation by violating these basic principles.

Simple Rules for a Complex World offers a sophisticated agenda for comprehensive social reform that undoes much of the mischief of the modern regulatory state. At a time when most Americans have come to distrust and fear government at all levels, Epstein shows how a consistent application of economic and political theory allows us to steer a middle path between too much and too little.

[more]

front cover of Since Time Immemorial
Since Time Immemorial
Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico
Yanna Yannakakis
Duke University Press, 2023
In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.
[more]

front cover of Sincerely Held
Sincerely Held
American Secularism and Its Believers
Charles McCrary
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A novel account of the relationship between sincerity, religious freedom, and the secular in the United States.
 
“Sincerely held religious belief” is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The “sincerity test” of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion.
 
McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn’t entitle a person to receive protections from the state.
 
This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly “post-truth” era.
 
[more]

front cover of Sisters In Law
Sisters In Law
Women Lawyers in Modern American History
Virginia G. Drachman
Harvard University Press, 1998

More than any other profession women entered in the nineteenth century, law was the most rigidly engendered. Access to courts, bar associations, and law schools was controlled by men, while the very act of gaining admission to practice law demanded that women reinterpret the male-constructed jurisprudence that excluded them. This history of women lawyers--from the 1860s to the 1930s--defines the contours of women's integration into the modern legal profession.

Nineteenth-century women built a women lawyers' movement through which they fought to gain entrance to law schools and bar associations, joined the campaign for women suffrage, and sought to balance marriage and career. By the twentieth century, most institutional barriers crumbled and younger women entered the law confident that equal opportunity had replaced sexual discrimination. Their optimism was misplaced as many women lawyers continued to encounter discrimination, faced limited opportunities for professional advancement, and struggled to balance gender and professional identity.

Based on rich and diverse archival sources, this book is the landmark study of the history of women lawyers in America.

[more]

front cover of The Sit-Ins
The Sit-Ins
Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era
Christopher W. Schmidt
University of Chicago Press, 2018
On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality.

The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.
 
[more]

front cover of Six Faces of Globalization
Six Faces of Globalization
Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters
Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A Fortune Best Book of the Year
A ProMarket Best Political Economy Book of the Year


An essential guide to the intractable public debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization, cutting through the complexity to reveal the fault lines that divide us and the points of agreement that might bring us together.

Globalization has lifted millions out of poverty. Globalization is a weapon the rich use to exploit the poor. Globalization builds bridges across national boundaries. Globalization fuels the populism and great-power competition that is tearing the world apart.

When it comes to the politics of free trade and open borders, the camps are dug in, producing a kaleidoscope of claims and counterclaims, unlikely alliances, and unexpected foes. But what exactly are we fighting about? And how might we approach these issues more productively? Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp cut through the confusion with an indispensable survey of the interests, logics, and ideologies driving these intractable debates, which lie at the heart of so much political dispute and decision making. The authors expertly guide us through six competing narratives about the virtues and vices of globalization: the old establishment view that globalization benefits everyone (win-win), the pessimistic belief that it threatens us all with pandemics and climate change (lose-lose), along with various rival accounts that focus on specific winners and losers, from China to America’s Rust Belt.

Instead of picking sides, Six Faces of Globalization gives all these positions their due, showing how each deploys sophisticated arguments and compelling evidence. Both globalization’s boosters and detractors will come away with their eyes opened. By isolating the fundamental value conflicts—growth versus sustainability, efficiency versus social stability—driving disagreement and showing where rival narratives converge, Roberts and Lamp provide a holistic framework for understanding current debates. In doing so, they showcase a more integrative way of thinking about complex problems.

[more]

front cover of Six Faces of Globalization
Six Faces of Globalization
Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters
Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp
Harvard University Press

A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Fortune Book of the Year


“This book compels us to change our position, move out of our comfort zone, and see the world differently.”—Branko Milanovic, author of Capitalism, Alone

“A very smart book…not just about globalization, but also about the power and importance of narrative…Highly recommended.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America

“An indispensable guide to how and why many people have abandoned the old, time-tested ways of thinking about politics and the economy. This is the book the world needs to read now.”—Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence

When it comes to the politics of free trade and open borders, the camps are clear, producing a kaleidoscope of claims and counterclaims. But what exactly are we fighting about? Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp cut through the confusion and mudslinging with an indispensable survey of the interests, logics, and ideologies driving these seemingly intractable arguments.

Instead of picking sides, Six Faces of Globalization guides us through six competing narratives about the virtues and vices of globalization, giving each position its due and showing how each deploys sophisticated arguments and compelling evidence. Both globalization’s boosters and detractors will come away with their eyes opened. By isolating the fundamental value conflicts driving disagreement—growth versus sustainability, efficiency versus social stability—and showing where rival narratives converge, this book provides an invaluable framework for understanding ongoing debates and finding a way forward.

[more]

front cover of Skepticism and Freedom
Skepticism and Freedom
A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism
Richard A. Epstein
University of Chicago Press, 2003
With this book, Richard A. Epstein provides a spirited and systematic defense of classical liberalism against the critiques mounted against it over the past thirty years. One of the most distinguished and provocative legal scholars writing today, Epstein here explains his controversial ideas in what will quickly come to be considered one of his cornerstone works.

He begins by laying out his own vision of the key principles of classical liberalism: respect for the autonomy of the individual, a strong system of private property rights, the voluntary exchange of labor and possessions, and prohibitions against force or fraud. Nonetheless, he not only recognizes but insists that state coercion is crucial to safeguarding these principles of private ordering and supplying the social infrastructure on which they depend. Within this framework, Epstein then shows why limited government is much to be preferred over the modern interventionist welfare state.

Many of the modern attacks on the classical liberal system seek to undermine the moral, conceptual, cognitive, and psychological foundations on which it rests. Epstein rises to this challenge by carefully rebutting each of these objections in turn. For instance, Epstein demonstrates how our inability to judge the preferences of others means we should respect their liberty of choice regarding their own lives. And he points out the flaws in behavioral economic arguments which, overlooking strong evolutionary pressures, claim that individual preferences are unstable and that people are unable to adopt rational means to achieve their own ends. Freedom, Epstein ultimately shows, depends upon a skepticism that rightly shuns making judgments about what is best for individuals, but that also avoids the relativistic trap that all judgments about our political institutions have equal worth.

A brilliant defense of classical liberalism, Skepticism and Freedom will rightly be seen as an intellectual landmark.
[more]

front cover of Slandering the Sacred
Slandering the Sacred
Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India
J. Barton Scott
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law.
 
Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.
[more]

logo for Temple University Press
SLAPPs
Getting Sued for Speaking Out
George Pring
Temple University Press, 1996

In a democracy that for over 200 years has prided itself on public participation and citizen involvement in government, thousands have been and will be the targets of multi-million-dollar lawsuits. They will be sued for such "all-American" activities as circulating a petition, writing a letter to the editor, testifying at a public hearing, reporting violations of the law, filing an official complaint, lobbying for legislation, or otherwise communicating their views. Such cases, named "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation," with their apropos acronym, SLAPPs, are a shocking abuse of one of our most basic political rights—the Right to Petition. So extensive and grievous is the phenomenon that Justice Nicholas Colabella remarked, "Short of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression can scarcely be imagined."

George W. Pring and Penelope Canan explore the full range of SLAPP stories in this first study of SLAPPs— retaliatory lawsuits by real estate developers; teachers; police; politicians; opponents of civil rights; consumers' rights; women's rights; and many others. This comprehensive book examines what happens to the targets of SLAPPs and what is happening to public participation in American politics. Addressing the ultimate dilemma—what can be done to turn the tables and fight back—Pring and Canan offer concrete, well-supported, balanced solutions for preventing, managing, and curing SLAPPs at all levels of government.

[more]

front cover of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World
Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World
Edward B. Rugemer
Harvard University Press, 2018

Winner of the Jerry H. Bentley Book Prize, World History Association

The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other.

In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament.

Rugemer’s comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.

[more]

front cover of Slave Patrols
Slave Patrols
Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
Sally E. Hadden
Harvard University Press, 2003

Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.

Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of "respectable" members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post-Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality.

[more]

front cover of Slavish Shore
Slavish Shore
The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Jeffrey L. Amestoy
Harvard University Press, 2015

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, quickly became an American classic. But literary acclaim could not erase the young lawyer’s memory of the brutal floggings he had witnessed aboard ship or undermine the vow he had made to combat injustice. In Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s unflagging determination to keep that vow in the face of nineteenth-century America’s most exclusive establishment: the Boston society in which he had been born and bred.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from the unresolved tension between the Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and his extraordinary advocacy put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court, and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason. Yet Dana’s own promising political career remained unfulfilled as he struggled to reconcile his rigorous conscience with his restless spirit in public controversy and private life.

The first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, Slavish Shore reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

[more]

front cover of Slices and Lumps
Slices and Lumps
Division and Aggregation in Law and Life
Lee Anne Fennell
University of Chicago Press, 2019
How things are divided up or pieced together matters. Half a bridge is of no use at all. Conversely, many things would do more good if they could be divided up differently: Perhaps you would prefer a job that involves a third less work and a third less pay or a car that materializes only when needed and is priced accordingly? Difficulties in “slicing” and “lumping” shape nearly every facet of how we live and work—and a great deal of law and policy as well.

Lee Anne Fennell explores how both types of challenges—carving out useful slices and assembling useful lumps—surface in myriad contexts, from hot button issues like conservation and eminent domain to developments in the sharing economy to personal struggles over work, money, time, diet, and exercise. Yet the significance of configuration is often overlooked, leading to missed opportunities for improving our lives. With a technology-fueled entrepreneurial explosion underway that is dividing goods, services, and jobs in novel ways, and as urbanization and environmental threats raise the stakes for assembling resources and cooperation, this is an especially exciting and crucial time to confront questions of slicing and lumping. The future of the city, the workplace, the marketplace, and the environment all turn on matters of configuration, as do the prospects for more effective legal doctrines, for better management of finances and health, and more.  This book reveals configuration’s power and potential—as a unifying concept and as a focus of public and private innovation. 
 
[more]

front cover of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon
Harvard University Press, 2011

“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.

In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

[more]

front cover of Small Change
Small Change
Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform
Raymond J. La Raja
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Reformers lament that, with every effort to regulate the sources of campaign funding, candidates creatively circumvent the new legislation. But in fact, political fundraisers don't need to look for loopholes because, as Raymond J. La Raja proves, legislators intentionally design regulations to gain advantage over their partisan rivals.

La Raja traces the history of the U.S. campaign finance system from the late nineteenth century through the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. Then, using the 2004 presidential election as a case study, he compares the ways in which Democrats and Republicans adapted their national fund-raising and campaigning strategies to satisfy BCRA regulations. Drawing upon this wealth of historical and recent evidence, he concludes with recommendations for reforming campaign finance in ways that promote fair competition among candidates and guarantee their accountability to voters.

Small Change offers an engaging account of campaign finance reforms' contradictory history; it is a must-read for anyone concerned about influence of money on democratic elections.

[more]

front cover of Smart Citizens, Smarter State
Smart Citizens, Smarter State
The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing
Beth Simone Noveck
Harvard University Press, 2015

Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the governing equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age. They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges.

Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decisionmaking could be more effective and legitimate if government were smarter—if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise. Just as individuals use only part of their brainpower to solve most problems, governing institutions make far too little use of the skills and experience of those inside and outside of government with scientific credentials, practical skills, and ground-level street smarts. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match the supply of citizen expertise to the demand for it in government.

Drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on institutional innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. In so doing, she puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing but in people’s knowledge and know-how.

[more]

front cover of Smoke-Filled Rooms
Smoke-Filled Rooms
A Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal
W. Kip Viscusi
University of Chicago Press, 2002
The 1998 out-of-court settlements of litigation by the states against the cigarette industry totaled $243 billion, making it the largest payoff ever in our civil justice system. Two key questions drove the lawsuits and the attendant settlement: Do smokers understand the risks of smoking? And does smoking impose net financial costs on the states?

With Smoke-Filled Rooms,W. Kip Viscusi provides unexpected answers to these questions, drawing on an impressive range of data on several topics central to the smoking policy debate. Based on surveys of smokers in the United States and Spain, for instance, he demonstrates that smokers actually overestimate the dangers of smoking, indicating that they are well aware of the risks involved in their choice to smoke. And while smoking does increase medical costs to the states, Viscusi finds that these costs are more than financially balanced by the premature mortality of smokers, which reduces their demands on state pension and health programs, so that, on average, smoking either pays for itself or generates revenues for the states.

Viscusi's eye-opening assessment of the tobacco lawsuits also includes policy recommendations that could frame these debates in a more productive way, such as his suggestion that the FDA should develop a rating system for cigarettes and other tobacco products based on their relative safety, thus providing an incentive for tobacco manufacturers to compete among themselves to produce safer cigarettes. Viscusi's hard look at the facts of smoking and its costs runs against conventional thinking. But it is also necessary for an informed and realistic debate about the legal, financial, and social consequences of the tobacco lawsuits.

People making $50,000 or more pay .08 percent of their income in cigarette taxes, but people with incomes of less than $10,000 pay 1.62 percenttwenty times as much. The maintenance crew at the Capitol will bear more of the "sin tax" levied on cigarettes than will members of Congress who voted to boost it.

Cigarettes are not a financial drain to the U.S. In fact, they are self-financing, as a consequence of smokers' premature mortality.

The general public estimates that 47 out of 100 smokers will die from lung cancer because they smoke. Smokers believe that 40 out of 100 will die of the disease. Scientists estimate the actual number of 100 smokers who will die from lung cancer to be between 7 and 13.
[more]

front cover of Snarl
Snarl
In Defense of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks
Ruth A. Miller
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Ruth A. Miller excavates a centuries-old history of nonhuman and nonbiological constitutional engagement and outlines a robust mechanical democracy that challenges existing theories of liberal and human political participation. Drawing on an eclectic set of legal, political, and automotive texts from France, Turkey, and the United States, she proposes a radical mechanical re-articulation of three of the most basic principles of democracy: vitality, mobility, and liberty.

Rather than defending a grand theory of materialist or posthumanist politics, or addressing abstract concepts or “things” writ large, Miller invites readers into a self-contained history of constitutionalism situated in a focused discussion of automobile traffic congestion in Paris, Istanbul, and Boston. Within the mechanical public sphere created by automotive space, Snarl finds a model of democratic politics that transforms our most fundamental assumptions about the nature, and constitutional potential, of life, movement, and freedom.

[more]

front cover of The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures
The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures
Edited by Jonathan Alderman and Geoff Goodwin
University of London Press, 2022
Understanding Latin American identity, history, and politics through its infrastructure and architecture.

From roads, railways, statues, and bridges, infrastructure provides a unique lens through which to view our own national histories and societies. Serving as an important conduit between individuals and the state, infrastructure can help mediate citizenship, reshape social relations between people both within and across communities, and has the capacity to underpin—or indeed, undermine—nation-building.

Over the last century, infrastructure has transformed Latin America. Roads, railways, and airports have increased connectivity between spaces, peoples, and markets. Cables, switches, and tunnels have connected households to electricity grids, water systems, and digital technology. Public buildings, parks, and monuments have reshaped towns and cities and emerged as sites to construct and contest citizenship. Infrastructure has been welcomed and celebrated in Latin America, but it has also been resisted and destroyed.

Based on recent, original research, the essays in this collection cover a range of pressing infrastructural considerations, including sustainability, water conflict, extractive mining, and public housing in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico to better understand how infrastructure has reshaped Latin America over the past century.
[more]

front cover of Social Justice for Women
Social Justice for Women
The International Labor Organization and Women
Carol Riegelman Lubin and Anne Winslow
Duke University Press, 1990
The International Labor Organization (ILO), founded in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, was the first international organization established prior to World War II to mention women in its constitution. Organized to promote the “protection of young children, young persons and women,” its original Labor Charter stood by the principle that “men and women should receive equal renumeration for work of equal value.” Social Justice for Women provides the first comprehensive and analytical history of the ILO with respect to women, examining the origins, operations, and successes and weaknesses of its policies.
Carol Riegelman Lubin, a staff member of ILO for seventeen years, and Anne Winslow, for twenty-two years editor for the Carnegie Endowment, explore the important role played by women of the American and British trade union movement in the founding of the ILO. In surveying the organization’s history and structure, they ask how the ILO’s concern with women has manifested over the years, if it was faithful to its constitution, how it dealt with conflicting needs of women from industrialized nations and Third World countries, and what its relationship was to the international feminist movement. Drawing on case studies and analyses of literature on women and work, the authors identify the role of other international organizations in response to the ILO in fostering, or sometimes hindering, women’s development in the labor area.
[more]

front cover of Social Science, Social Policy, and the Law
Social Science, Social Policy, and the Law
Patricia Ewick
Russell Sage Foundation, 1999
Social science has been an important influence on legal thought since the legal realists of the1930s began to argue that laws should be socially workable as well as legally valid. With the expansion of legal rights in the 1960s, the law and social science were bound together by an optimistic belief that legal interventions, if fully informed by social science, could become an effective instrument of social improvement. Legal justice, it was hoped, could translate directly into social justice. Though this optimism has receded in both disciplines, social science and the law have remained intimately connected. Social Science, Social Policy, and the Law maps out this new relationship, applying social science to particular legal issues and reflecting upon the role of social science in legal thought. Several case studies illustrate the way that the law is embedded within the tangled interests and incentives that drive the social world. One study examines the entrepreneurialism that has shaped our systems of punishment from the colonial practice of deportation to today's privatized jails. Another case shows how many of those who do not qualify for legal aid cannot afford an effective legal defense with the consequence that economic inequality leads to inequality before the law. Two other studies look at the mixed results of legal regulation: the failure of legal safeguards to stop NASA's fatal 1986 Challenger launch decision, and the complicated effects of regulations to curb conflicts of interest in law firms. These two cases demonstrate that the law's effectiveness can depend, not only on how it is drafted, but also on how well it harmonizes with pre-existing social norms and patterns of self-regulation. The contributors to this volume share the belief that social science can and should influence legal policymaking. Empirical research is necessary to offset anecdotal evidence and untested assertions. But research that is acceptable to the academy may not stand up in court, and, as a result, social science does not always get a sympathetic hearing from legal decision makers. The relationship between social science and the law will always be complex; this volume takes a lead in showing how it can nonetheless be productive.
[more]

front cover of Society And Legal Change 2Nd Ed
Society And Legal Change 2Nd Ed
Alan Watson, foreword by Paul Finkelman
Temple University Press, 2001

In this first U.S. edition of a classic work of comparative legal scholarship, Alan Watson argues that law fails to keep step with social change, even when that change is massive. To illustrate the ways in which law is dysfunctional, he draws on the two most innovative western systems, of Rome and England, to show that harmful rules continue for centuries. To make his case, he uses examples where, in the main, "the law benefits no recognizable group or class within the society (except possibly lawyers who benefit from confusion) and is generally inconvenient or positively harmful to society as a whole or to large or powerful groups within the society."

Widely respected for his "fearless challenge of the accepted or dominant view and his own encyclopedic knowledge of Roman law" (The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing), Watson considers the development of law in global terms and across the centuries. His arguments centering on how societies borrow from other legal systems and the continuity of legal systems are particularly instructive for those interested in legal development and the development of a common law for the European Union.

postamble();
[more]

front cover of Soldiers on the Home Front
Soldiers on the Home Front
The Domestic Role of the American Military
William C. Banks and Stephen Dycus
Harvard University Press, 2016

When crisis requires American troops to deploy on American soil, the country depends on a rich and evolving body of law to establish clear lines of authority, safeguard civil liberties, and protect its democratic institutions and traditions. Since the attacks of 9/11, the governing law has changed rapidly even as domestic threats—from terror attacks, extreme weather, and pandemics—mount. Soldiers on the Home Front is the first book to systematically analyze the domestic role of the military as it is shaped by law, surveying America’s history of judicial decisions, constitutional provisions, statutes, regulations, military orders, and martial law to ask what we must learn and do before the next crisis.

America’s military is uniquely able to save lives and restore order in situations that overwhelm civilian institutions. Yet the U.S. military has also been called in for more coercive duties at home: breaking strikes, quelling riots, and enforcing federal laws in the face of state resistance. It has spied on and overseen the imprisonment of American citizens during wars, Red scares, and other emergencies. And while the fears of the Republic’s founders that a strong army could undermine democracy have not been realized, history is replete with reasons for concern.

At a time when the military’s domestic footprint is expanding, Banks and Dycus offer a thorough analysis of the relevant law and history to challenge all the stakeholders—within and outside the military—to critically assess the past in order to establish best practices for the crises to come.

[more]

front cover of The Solemn Sentence of Death
The Solemn Sentence of Death
Capital Punishment in Connecticut
Lawrence B. Goodheart
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
The first case study of its kind, this book addresses a broad range of questions about the rationale for and application of judicial execution in Connecticut since the seventeenth century. In addition to identifying the 158 people who have been put to death for crimes during the state's history, Lawrence Goodheart analyzes their social status in terms of sex, race, class, religion, and ethnicity. He looks at the circumstances of the crimes, the weapons that were used, and the victims. He reconstructs the history of Connecticut's capital laws, its changing rituals of execution, and the growing debate over the legitimacy of the death penalty itself. Although the focus is on the criminal justice system, the ethical values of New England culture form the larger context. Goodheart shows how a steady diminution in types of capital crimes, including witchcraft and sexual crimes, culminated in an emphasis on proportionate punishment during the Enlightenment and eventually led to a preference for imprisonment for all capital crimes except first-degree murder. Goodheart concludes by considering why Connecticut, despite its many statutory restrictions on capital punishment and lengthy appeals process, has been the only state in New England to have executed anyone since 1960.
[more]

front cover of Some Measure of Justice
Some Measure of Justice
The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s
Michael R. Marrus; Foreword by William A. Schabas
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
Can there ever be justice for the Holocaust? During the 1990s—triggered by lawsuits in the United States against Swiss banks, German corporations, insurance companies, and owners of valuable works of art—claimants and their lawyers sought to rectify terrible wrongs committed more than a half century earlier. Some Measure of Justice explores this most recent wave of justice-seeking for the Holocaust: what it has been, why it emerged when it did, how it fits with earlier reparation to the Jewish people, its significance for the historical representation of the Holocaust, and its implications for justice-seeking in our time.
    Writings on the subject of Holocaust reparations have largely come from participants, lawyers, philosophers, journalists, and social scientists specializing in restitution. In Some Measure of Justice Michael Marrus takes up the issue as a historian deeply involved with legal issues. He engages with larger questions about historical understanding and historical interpretation as they enter the legal arena. Ultimately this book asks, What constitutes justice for a great historic wrong? And, Is such justice possible?
 
 
Winner, Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature
[more]

front cover of Some Reflections Upon Marriage
Some Reflections Upon Marriage
Mary Astell. Introduction by John A. Dussinger
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Published anonymously in 1700, Some Reflections upon Marriage lamented the inequities of the institution of marriage and reasoned against it with both traditional and innovative arguments. Mary Astell's tract, written in response to an infamous divorce case, forcefully argued against the grim but all-too-common prospect of a marriage of necessity to a man in search of power, money, or a trophy wife. Astell proposed education as the solution to women's second-class status, stating that knowledge alone could lead to a partnership based on friendship and respect. "Let us learn to pride ourselves in something more excellent than the invention of a fashion," she wrote, and her well-reasoned arguments soon won her a wide readership.
 
[more]

front cover of Someday All This Will Be Yours
Someday All This Will Be Yours
A History of Inheritance and Old Age
Hendrik Hartog
Harvard University Press, 2011

We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life’s most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.

Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.

From one of the bedrocks of the human condition—the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young—emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.

[more]

front cover of Sorting Sexualities
Sorting Sexualities
Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification
Stefan Vogler
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In Sorting Sexualities, Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement—two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality?

In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize. 
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
The Southern Debate over Slavery
Volume 1: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1778-1864
Edited by Loren Schweninger
University of Illinois Press, 2001
An incomparably rich source of period information, The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to their state legislatures between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
 
These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. Petitioners were compelled to present the most accurate and fully documented case they could, since their claims would be subject to public scrutiny and legal verification. Unlike the many reminiscences and autobiographies of the period, these petitions record with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics, common understandings, and legal restrictions and parameters that shaped southern society during this period.
 
Arranged chronologically, with their original spelling and idiosyncratic phraseology intact, these documents reveal the grim and brutal nature of human bondage, the fears of whites who lived among large concentrations of blacks, and the workings of the complicated legal system designed to control blacks. They tell about the yearning of bondspeople to gain their freedom, the attitudes of freed blacks who were forced to leave the South, and the efforts of African Americans to overcome harsh and restrictive laws. They also underscore the unique situation of free women of color and the reliance of manumitted (formally freed) blacks on their former owners for protection, travel passes, guardianship papers, and reference letters.
 
Astonishingly intimate and frank,The Southern Debate over Slavery illuminates how slavery penetrated nearly every aspect of southern life and how various groups of southerners responded to the difficulties they confronted as a result of living in a slave society.
 
[more]

front cover of The Southern Debate over Slavery
The Southern Debate over Slavery
Volume 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775-1867
Edited by Loren Schweninger
University of Illinois Press, 2007

An incomparably rich source of period information, the second volume of The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative and extraordinary sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to county courts between the American Revolution and Civil War. These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. The collection records with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics and legal restrictions that shaped southern society.

[more]

front cover of Sovereign Selves
Sovereign Selves
American Indian Autobiography and the Law
David J. Carlson
University of Illinois Press, 2005
This book is an exploration of how American Indian autobiographers' approaches to writing about their own lives have been impacted by American legal systems from the Revolutionary War until the 1920s. Historically, Native American autobiographers have written in the shadow of "Indian law," a nuanced form of natural law discourse with its own set of related institutions and forms (the reservation, the treaty, etc.). In Sovereign Selves, David J. Carlson develops a rigorously historicized argument about the relationship between the specific colonial model of "Indian" identity that was developed and disseminated through U.S. legal institutions, and the acts of autobiographical self-definition by the "colonized" Indians expected to fit that model.

Carlson argues that by drawing on the conventions of early colonial treaty-making, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian autobiographers sought to adapt and redefine the terms of Indian law as a way to assert specific property-based and civil rights. Focusing primarily on the autobiographical careers of two major writers (William Apess and Charles Eastman), Sovereign Selves traces the way that their sustained engagement with colonial legal institutions gradually enabled them to produce a new rhetoric of "Indianness."

[more]

front cover of Sovereign Virtue
Sovereign Virtue
The Theory and Practice of Equality
Ronald Dworkin
Harvard University Press, 2000

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution.

What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, Volume 110
Eric Cheyfitz
Duke University Press
Although Indigenous groups include diverse cultures and colonial experiences, Indigenous communities around the globe are united by a common struggle: to achieve self-determination and land rights as original occupants of the land prior to colonization. Historically, Western law has served both as an instrument of colonial control and as a means for Indigenous peoples to assert their claims to sovereignty and territory against those of nation-states. The essays in this issue of SAQ consider historical and contemporary colonial conflicts and explore key topics in Indigenous studies, including land rights, human rights, legal jurisdiction, Indigenous governance, and questions of language, culture, and the environment.

This wide-ranging collection addresses the political possibilities of Western law and the international meanings of sovereignty and Indigeneity. One essay analyzes the autonomous government through which local citizens in Indigenous Zapatista communities in Mexico hope to dissolve systems of top-down sovereignty altogether. Another explores narratives of Native American law and the treatment of sovereignty in contemporary Mohawk visual culture. Several essays discuss the legal and political implications of the field’s pivotal public documents, including the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters in the Department of English at Cornell University. N. Bruce Duthu is the Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies and Chair of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Shari M. Huhndorf is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

Contributors: Christine Black, Eric Cheyfitz, Gordon Christie, Chris Cunneen, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Lorie M. Graham, Roy M. Huhndorf, Shari M. Huhndorf, Forrest Hylton, Mara Kaufman, Alvaro Reyes, Jolene Rickard, Carlos Salinas, Noenoe K. Silva, Cheryl Suzack, Siegfried Wiessner

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Soviet Criminal Law and Procedure
The RSFSR Codes, Second Edition
Harold J. Berman
Harvard University Press

There is no better key to the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet social system than Soviet law. Here in English translation is the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure of the largest of the fifteen Soviet Republics—containing the basic criminal law of the Soviet Union and virtually the entire criminal law applicable in Russia—and the Law on Court Organization. These two codes and the Law, which went into effect o January 1, 1961, are among the chief products of the Soviet law reform movement which began after Stalin’s death, and are a concrete reflection of the effort to establish legality and prevent a return to Stalinist arbitrariness and terror.

In a long introductory essay Harold Berman, a leading authority on Soviet law, stresses the extent to which the codes are expressed in authentic soviet legal language, based in part on the pre-Revolutionary Russian past but oriented to Soviet concepts, conditions, and policies. He outlines the historical background of the new codes, with a detailed listing of the major changes reflected in them, interprets their significance, places them within the system of Soviet law as a whole, and discusses some of the principal similarities and differences between Soviet criminal law and procedure and that of Western Europe and of the United States.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Soviet Legal Bibliography
A Classified and Annotated Listing of Books and Serials Published in the Soviet Union since 1917 as Represented in the Collection of the Harvard Law School as of January 1, 1965
William E. Butler
Harvard University Press
This volume contains a classified and annotated listing of books and serials published in the Soviet Union since 1917 as represented in the collection of the Harvard Law School Library as of January 1, 1965.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Spain at the Crossroads
Civil Society, Politics, and the Rule of Law
Víctor Pérez-Díaz
Harvard University Press, 1999

This book explores the trials of Spanish democracy from the death of Franco to the present. But the heart of the story is the generation that came of age in the 1960s, assumed political power, and formed the first Socialist government in 1982 with Felipe González as Prime Minister, which was returned to power in four consecutive elections. Starting in 1993, however, the government came under siege. High officials were accused of authorizing the assassination of as many as twenty-eight Basque nationalists suspected of terrorism over the years, and of covering up these crimes. This scandal, along with other disclosures of corruption and serious law-breaking, shook the country's confidence in its legal and political institutions and in its ability to hold its leaders to the rule of law.

The author probes for the roots of these events in the character of the generation that assumed power and in the immature nature of the civil society it inherited. Facing unusually high unemployment, internal economic and social pressures, the stringent requirements for joining the European Union, and the demands of Catalan and Basque nationalists, the government lost its way and was eventually voted out of office.

Using Spain as the example, the book examines issues of governance, social change, and internal nationalist movements as they relate to the civil society and the wider polity everywhere.

[more]

front cover of The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law
The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law
By Betty Eakle Dobkins
University of Texas Press, 1959

The Spanish element in Texas water law is a matter of utmost importance to many landholders whose livelihood is dependent on securing water for irrigation and to many communities particularly concerned about water supply.

Titles to some 280,000 acres of Texas land originated in grants made by the Crown of Spain or by the Republic of Mexico. For these lands, the prevailing law, even today, is the Hispanic American civil law. Thus the question of determining just what water rights were granted by the Spanish Crown in disposing of lands in Texas is more than a matter of historical interest. It is a subject of great practical importance.

Spanish law enters directly into the question of these lands, but its influence is by no means confined to them. Texas water law in general traces its roots primarily to the Spanish law, not to the English common law doctrine of riparian rights or to the Western doctrine of prior appropriation (both of which were, however, eventually incorporated in Texas law). A clear understanding of this background might have saved the state much of the current confusion and chaos regarding its water law.

Dobkins’s book offers an intensive and unusually readable study of the subject. The author has traced water law from its origin in the ancient world to the mid-twentieth century, interpreting the effect of water on the counties concerned, setting forth in detail the development of water law in Spain, and explaining its subsequent adoption in Texas. Copious notes and a complete bibliography make the work especially valuable.

The idea for this book came in the midst of the great seven-year drought in Texas, from 1950 to 1957. The author gave two reasons for her study: “One was my belief that the water problems, crucial to all Texas, can be solved only when Texans become conscious of their imperative needs and only if they become informed and aroused enough to act.

“The second reason came from a realization that water—common, universal, and ordinary as it is—had been overlooked by the historian. It is high time that this oversight be corrected. In American history the significance of land, especially in terms of the frontier, has been spelled out in large letters. The importance of water has been recognized by few.”

[more]

front cover of Speak No Evil
Speak No Evil
The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation
Jon B. Gould
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Opponents of speech codes often argue that liberal academics use the codes to advance an agenda of political correctness. But Jon B. Gould's provocative book, based on an enormous amount of empirical evidence, reveals that the real reasons for their growth are to be found in the pragmatic, almost utilitarian, considerations of college administrators. Instituting hate speech policy, he shows, was often a symbolic response taken by university leaders to reassure campus constituencies of their commitment against intolerance. In an academic version of "keeping up with the Joneses," some schools created hate speech codes to remain within what they saw as the mainstream of higher education. Only a relatively small number of colleges crafted codes out of deep commitment to their merits.

Although college speech codes have been overturned by the courts, Speak No Evil argues that their rise has still had a profound influence on curtailing speech in other institutions such as the media and has also shaped mass opinion and common understandings of constitutional norms. Ultimately, Gould contends, this kind of informal law can have just as much power as the Constitution.
[more]

front cover of Speaking for the Dying
Speaking for the Dying
Life-and-Death Decisions in Intensive Care
Susan P. Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Seven in ten Americans over the age of age of sixty who require medical decisions in the final days of their life lack the capacity to make them. For many of us, our biggest, life-and-death decisions—literally—will therefore be made by someone else. They will decide whether we live or die; between long life and quality of life; whether we receive heroic interventions in our final hours; and whether we die in a hospital or at home. They will determine whether our wishes are honored and choose between fidelity to our interests and what is best for themselves or others. Yet despite their critical role, we know remarkably little about how our loved ones decide for us.
             
Speaking for the Dying
tells their story, drawing on daily observations over more than two years in two intensive care units in a diverse urban hospital. From bedsides, hallways, and conference rooms, you will hear, in their own words, how physicians really talk to families and how they respond. You will see how decision makers are selected, the interventions they weigh in on, the information they seek and evaluate, the values and memories they draw on, the criteria they weigh, the outcomes they choose, the conflicts they become embroiled in, and the challenges they face. Observations also provide insight into why some decision makers authorize one aggressive intervention after the next while others do not—even on behalf of patients with similar problems and prospects. And they expose the limited role of advance directives in structuring the process decision makers follow or the outcomes that result.
           
Research has consistently found that choosing life or death for another is one of the most difficult decisions anyone can face, sometimes haunting families for decades. This book shines a bright light on a role few of us will escape and offers steps that patients and loved ones, health care providers, lawyers, and policymakers could undertake before it is too late.
 
[more]

front cover of Speaking of Crime
Speaking of Crime
The Language of Criminal Justice
Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Why do so many people voluntarily consent to searches by have the police search their person or vehicle when they know that they are carrying contraband or evidence of illegal activity? Does everyone understand the Miranda warning? How well can people recognize a voice on tape? Can linguistic experts identify who wrote an anonymous threatening letter?

Speaking of Crime answers these questions and examines the complex role of language within our criminal justice system. Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma compile numerous cases, ranging from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton to the JonBenét Ramsey case, that provide real-life examples of how language functions in arrests, investigations, interrogations, confessions, and trials. In a clear and accessible style, Solan and Tiersma show how recent advances in the study of language can aid in understanding how legal problems arise and how they might be solved.

With compelling discussions current issues and controversies, this book is a provocative state-of-the-art survey that will be of enormous value to legal scholars and professionals throughout the criminal justice system.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter