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The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature
A Report on Half-Knowledge
David Simpson
University of Chicago Press, 1995
This brilliantly argued book is an entirely fresh critique of the postmodern turn. David Simpson sets his sights on the most distinctive aspects of postmodern scholarship: the pervasiveness of the literary and the flight from grand theory to local knowledge.

Simpson examines defining features of postmodern thought—storytelling, autobiography, anecdote, and localism—and traces their unacknowledged roots in literature and literary criticism. Considering such examples as the conversational turn in philosophy led by Richard Rorty and the anecdotal qualities of the New Historicism, he argues that much of contemporary scholarship is literary in its terms, methods, and assumptions about knowledge; in their often unconscious adoption of literary approaches, scholars in philosophy, history, anthropology, and other disciplines have confined themselves to a traditional—and limited—way of looking at the world. Simpson is the first to uncover the largely unacknowledged ancestry of the key paradigms and sensibilities of the academic postmodern—tracing their roots to nineteenth-century Romanticism and to more general traditions of literature. He warns scholars against mistaking the migration of ideas from one discipline to another for a radically new response to the postmodern age.

In his nuanced and balanced assessment of the academic postmodern enterprise, Simpson recognizes that both the literary turn and the emphasis on local, subjective voices have done much to enrich knowledge. But he also identifies the danger in abandoning synthetic knowledge to particular truths, cautioning that "we would be foolish to pretend that little narratives are true alternatives to grand ones, rather than chips off a larger block whose shape we can no longer see because we are not looking."
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Agrarian Environments
Resources, Representations, and Rule in India
Arun Agrawal, ed.
Duke University Press, 2000
Agrarian Environments questions the dichotomies that have structured earlier analyses of environmental processes in India and offers a new way of looking at the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change. The contributors claim that attempts to explain environmental conflicts in terms of the local versus the global, indigenous versus outsiders, women versus men, or the community versus the market or state obscure vital dynamics of mobilization and organization that critically influence thought and policy.
Editors Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan claim that rural social change in India cannot be understood without exploring how environmental changes articulate major aspects of agrarian transformations—technological, cultural, and political—in the last two centuries. In order to examine these issues, they have reached beyond the confines of single disciplinary allegiances or methodological loyalties to bring together anthropologists, historians, political scientists, geographers, and environmental scientists who are significantly informed by interdisciplinary research. Drawing on extensive field and archival research, the contributors demonstrate the powerful political implications of blurring the boundaries between dichotomous cultural representations, combine conceptual analyses with specific case studies, and look at why competing powers chose to emphasize particular representations of land use or social relations. By providing a more textured analysis of how categories emerge and change, this work offers the possibility of creating crucial alliances across populations that have historically been assumed to lack mutual goals.
Agrarian Environments will be valuable to those in political science, Asian studies, and environmental studies.

Contributors. Arun Agrawal, Mark Baker, Molly Chattopadhyaya, Vinay Gidwani, Sumit Guha, Shubhra Gururani, Cecile Jackson, David Ludden, Haripriya Rangan, Paul Robbins, Vasant Saberwal, James C. Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ajay Skaria, Jennifer Springer, Darren Zook

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Blockchain and the Law
The Rule of Code
Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright
Harvard University Press, 2018

“Blockchains will matter crucially; this book, beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience, powerfully demonstrates how.”
—Lawrence Lessig


“Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace—explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order… Blockchain and the Law is not just a theoretical guide. It’s also a moral one.”
Fortune


Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros?

The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to make financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen, they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities’ ability to supervise activities in banking, commerce, and the law. As this essential book makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.

“If you…don’t ‘get’ crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you.”
—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous, it is inflexible, which leaves it vulnerable, once it has been set in motion, to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address.”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

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Born to Rule
The Making and Remaking of the British Elite
Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman
Harvard University Press

A uniquely data-rich analysis of the British elite from the Victorian era to today: who gets in, how they get there, what they like and look like, where they go to school, and what politics they perpetuate.

Think of the British elite and familiar caricatures spring to mind. But are today’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and political instincts?

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman combed through a trove of data in search of an answer, scrutinizing the profiles, interests, and careers of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today. At the heart of this meticulously researched study is the historical database of Who’s Who, but Reeves and Friedman also mined genealogical records, examined probate data, and interviewed over 200 leading figures from a wide range of backgrounds and professions to uncover who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want.

What they found is that there is less movement at the top than we think. Yes, there has been some progress on including women and Black and Asian Brits, but those born into the top 1 percent are just as likely to get into the elite today as they were 125 years ago. What has changed is how elites present themselves. Today’s elite pedal hard to convince us they are perfectly ordinary.

Why should we care? Because the elites we have affect the politics we get. While scholars have long proposed that the family you are born into, and the schools you attend, leave a mark on the exercise of power, the empirical evidence has been thin—until now.

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Define and Rule
Native as Political Identity
Mahmood Mamdani
Harvard University Press, 2012

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.

A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice.

Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

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Design for Liberty
Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law
Richard A. Epstein
Harvard University Press, 2011

Following a vast expansion in the twentieth century, government is beginning to creak at the joints under its enormous weight. The signs are clear: a bloated civil service, low approval ratings for Congress and the President, increasing federal-state conflict, rampant distrust of politicians and government officials, record state deficits, and major unrest among public employees.

In this compact, clearly written book, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein advocates a much smaller federal government, arguing that our over-regulated state allows too much discretion on the part of regulators, which results in arbitrary, unfair decisions, rent-seeking, and other abuses. Epstein bases his classical liberalism on the twin pillars of the rule of law and of private contracts and property rights—an overarching structure that allows private property to keep its form regardless of changes in population, tastes, technology, and wealth. This structure also makes possible a restrained public administration to implement limited objectives. Government continues to play a key role as night-watchman, but with the added flexibility in revenues and expenditures to attend to national defense and infrastructure formation.

Although no legal system can eliminate the need for discretion in the management of both private and public affairs, predictable laws can cabin the zone of discretion and permit arbitrary decisions to be challenged. Joining a set of strong property rights with sound but limited public administration could strengthen the rule of law, with its virtues of neutrality, generality, clarity, consistency, and forward-lookingness, and reverse the contempt and cynicism that have overcome us.

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Enforcing the Rule of Law
Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies
Enrique Peruzzotti
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Reports of scandal and corruption have led to the downfall of numerous political leaders in Latin America in recent years. What conditions have developed that allow for the exposure of wrongdoing and the accountability of leaders? Enforcing the Rule of Law examines how elected officials in Latin American democracies have come under scrutiny from new forms of political control, and how these social accountability mechanisms have been successful in counteracting corruption and the limitations of established institutions.

This volume reveals how legal claims, media interventions, civic organizations, citizen committees, electoral observation panels, and other watchdog groups have become effective tools for monitoring political authorities. Their actions have been instrumental in exposing government crime, bringing new issues to the public agenda, and influencing or even reversing policy decisions.

Enforcing the Rule of Law presents compelling accounts of the emergence of civic action movements and their increasing political influence in Latin America, and sheds new light on the state of democracy in the region.

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The First Apology, The Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho, Exhortation to the Greeks, Discourse to the Greeks, The Monarchy or The Rule of God
Saint Justin Martyr
Catholic University of America Press, 1965
No description available
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From War to the Rule of Law
Peace Building after Violent Conflicts
Joris Voorhoeve
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
As recent events in Iraq demonstrate, countries that have suffered through civil war or rule by military regime can face a long, difficult transition to peaceful democracy.

Drawing on the experiences of peacekeepers in Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, From War to Rule of Law demonstrates that newly emerging democracies may need much more than emergency economic support. Restoring the rule of law, Joris Voorhoeve shows, can involve the training of a new police force, for example, or the creation of an international war crimes tribunal. Any disregard for human rights or delay in civilian reconciliation can lead to serious resurgences in violence.

Voorhoeve concludes by offering specific recommendations for members of the United Nations and the European Union, as well as individual donors. Given the nature of today’s armed conflicts, From War to Rule of Law provides new hope for all those concerned about the lasting success of international peacekeeping missions.

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Islam and the Rule of Justice
Image and Reality in Muslim Law and Culture
Lawrence Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In the West, we tend to think of Islamic law as an arcane and rigid legal system, bound by formulaic texts yet suffused by unfettered discretion. While judges may indeed refer to passages in the classical texts or have recourse to their own orientations, images of binding doctrine and unbounded choice do not reflect the full reality of the Islamic law in its everyday practice. Whether in the Arabic-speaking world, the Muslim portions of South and Southeast Asia, or the countries to which many Muslims have migrated, Islamic law works is readily misunderstood if the local cultures in which it is embedded are not taken into account.
           
With Islam and the Rule of Justice, Lawrence Rosen analyzes a number of these misperceptions. Drawing on specific cases, he explores the application of Islamic law to the treatment of women (who win most of their cases), the relations between Muslims and Jews (which frequently involve close personal and financial ties), and the structure of widespread corruption (which played a key role in prompting the Arab Spring). From these case studie the role of informal mechanisms in the resolution of local disputes. The author also provides a close reading of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was charged in an American court with helping to carry out the 9/11 attacks, using insights into how Islamic justice works to explain the defendant’s actions during the trial. The book closes with an examination of how Islamic cultural concepts may come to bear on the constitutional structure and legal reforms many Muslim countries have been undertaking.
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Justice Scalia
Rhetoric and the Rule of Law
Edited by Brian G. Slocum and Francis J. Mootz III
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Justice Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) was the single most important figure in the emergence of the “new originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution, which sought to anchor the court’s interpretation of the Constitution to the ordinary meaning of the words at the time of drafting. For Scalia, the meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes was rigidly fixed by their original meanings with little concern for extratextual considerations. While some lauded his uncompromising principles, others argued that such a rigid view of the Constitution both denies and attempts to limit the discretion of judges in ways that damage and distort our system of law.

In this edited collection, leading scholars from law, political science, philosophy, rhetoric, and linguistics look at the ways Scalia framed and stated his arguments. Focusing on rhetorical strategies rather than the logic or validity of Scalia’s legal arguments, the contributors collectively reveal that Scalia enacted his rigidly conservative vision of the law through his rhetorical framing.
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The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas
How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State
Kenneth C. Barnes
University of Arkansas Press, 2021

Winner, 2022 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award, Arkansas Historical Association

The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state’s development.

Barnes shows that the Klan seemed to wield power everywhere in 1920s Arkansas. Klansmen led businesses and held elected offices and prominent roles in legal, medical, and religious institutions, while the women of the Klan supported rallies and charitable activities and planned social gatherings where cross burnings were regular occurrences. Inside their organization, Klan members bonded during picnic barbeques and parades and over shared religious traditions. Outside of it, they united to direct armed threats, merciless physical brutality, and torrents of hateful rhetoric against individuals who did not conform to their exclusionary vision.

By the mid-1920s, internal divisions, scandals, and an overzealous attempt to dominate local and state elections caused Arkansas’s Klan to fall apart nearly as quickly as it had risen. Yet as the organization dissolved and the formal trappings of its flamboyant presence receded, the attitudes the Klan embraced never fully disappeared. In documenting this history, Barnes shows how the Klan’s early success still casts a long shadow on the state to this day.

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Legitimacy
The Right to Rule in a Wanton World
Arthur Isak Applbaum
Harvard University Press, 2019

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate.

What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently.

How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason.

Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

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The Making of the Christian Mind
The Adventure of the Paraclete: Vol. 3: Confessions and Rule
James Patrick
St. Augustine's Press, 2022
In the third installment of The Making of the Christian Mind, James Patrick's Church history and 'adventure' series, we meet more towering figures of Christianity, among them Augustine and Benedict. The former, who abandoned rhetoric to become learned by Saint Ambrose, and the latter, whose Rule built a thousand monastic communities across Europe, were not isolated characters but beneficiaries of wisdom drawn entirely from the pursuit of holiness. What emerges is a culture of living and learning that flourishes on the foundations of prayer. This is the adventure of the Great Helper, who working throughout the passage of time post-Christ has come to guide not just the dreams and spirit of man, but his work and daily life. 

Patrick's work is both fine scholarship and epic story-telling, a key component to both the education and fascination of the Christian mind, which in turn has shaped the world more deeply than any other influence in human history. "The Christian intellect will guide the heart to the place where the knee can bend and the eye see; the making of the Christian mind will continue from age to age, locating eternal truth in a human history that will endure as God wills so that many may be saved, pointing beyond itself to the reality that thoughts and words represent, making all things new."
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Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason
John C. McCarthy
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
The essays in this volume pose the question common usage has obscured: was "the Enlightenment" truly enlightened or enlightening? Scholarly investigation has sometimes avoided the question by confining itself to historical particulars of 18th-century Euro
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Oligarchy in America
Power, Justice, and the Rule of the Few
Luke Winslow
University of Alabama Press, 2024
Illuminates one of the most widely used yet poorly understood concepts in contemporary discourse, as apt and relevant to democracy in America as it is to Eastern Europe and Putin’s Russia
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Political (In)Justice
Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina
Anthony W. Pereira
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
Why do attempts by authoritarian regimes to legalize their political repression differ so dramatically? Why do some dispense with the law altogether, while others scrupulously modify constitutions, pass new laws, and organize political trials?  Political (In)Justice answers these questions by comparing the legal aspects of political repression in three recent military regimes: Brazil (1964–1985); Chile (1973–1990); and Argentina (1976–1983).  By focusing on political trials as a reflection of each regime’s overall approach to the law, Anthony Pereira argues that the practice of each regime can be explained by examining the long-term relationship between the judiciary and the military.  Brazil was marked by a high degree of judicial-military integration and cooperation; Chile’s military essentially usurped judicial authority; and in Argentina, the military negated the judiciary altogether. Pereira extends the judicial-military framework to other authoritarian regimes—Salazar’s Portugal, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain—and a democracy (the United States), to illuminate historical and contemporary aspects of state coercion and the rule of law.
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Power and Terror
Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force
Noam Chomsky
Pluto Press, 2011

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Questioning Secularism
Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt
Hussein Ali Agrama
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.
 
Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts —the last courts in Egypt to use Shari‘a law—Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism’s dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, Questioning Secularism lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.
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Revolutionary Constitutions
Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law
Bruce Ackerman
Harvard University Press, 2019

A robust defense of democratic populism by one of America’s most renowned and controversial constitutional scholars—the award-winning author of We the People.

Populism is a threat to the democratic world, fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds—or so its critics would have us believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce Ackerman showed that Americans have repeatedly rejected this view. Now he draws on a quarter century of scholarship in this essential and surprising inquiry into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism around the world. He takes us to India, South Africa, Italy, France, Poland, Burma, Israel, and Iran and provides a blow-by-blow account of the tribulations that confronted popular movements in their insurgent campaigns for constitutional democracy. Despite their many differences, populist leaders such as Nehru, Mandela, and de Gaulle encountered similar dilemmas at critical turning points, and each managed something overlooked but essential. Rather than deploy their charismatic leadership to retain power, they instead used it to confer legitimacy to the citizens and institutions of constitutional democracy.

Ackerman returns to the United States in his last chapter to provide new insights into the Founders’ acts of constitutional statesmanship as they met very similar challenges to those confronting populist leaders today. In the age of Trump, the democratic system of checks and balances will not survive unless ordinary citizens rally to its defense. Revolutionary Constitutions shows how activists can learn from their predecessors’ successes and profit from their mistakes, and sets up Ackerman’s next volume, which will address how elites and insiders co-opt and destroy the momentum of revolutionary movements.

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The Rule of Art
Literature and Painting in the Renaissance
Clark Hulse
University of Chicago Press, 1990
What do Renaissance poetry and painting have in common? What are the social, ideological, and aesthetic bases for the links between them? And what role do those links play in creating the humanistic culture that still has power over us today?

These are the questions Clark Hulse takes up in this sophisticated interdisciplinary study of Renaissance aesthetics. Proposing an archeology of artistic knowledge, Hulse examines the theoretical language through which the poets, painters, and patrons of the Renaissance conceived of the relationship between the arts. That language is embedded in what he calls a "rule of art," a specific set of categories, assumptions, and practices that defined the two art forms and the relationship between them. Hulse charts the rise of both forms to the status of liberal arts requiring special intellectual training for artist and patron alike. In the process, he uncovers the history of the practice of theory in the Renaissance, revealing how artistic discourse lived in the world.
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The Rule of Dons
Criminal Leaders and Political Authority in Urban Jamaica
Rivke Jaffe
Duke University Press, 2024

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The Rule of Five
Making Climate History at the Supreme Court
Richard J. Lazarus
Harvard University Press, 2020

Winner of the Julia Ward Howe Prize

“The gripping story of the most important environmental law case ever decided by the Supreme Court.”
—Scott Turow

“In the tradition of A Civil Action, this book makes a compelling story of the court fight that paved the way for regulating the emissions now overheating the planet. It offers a poignant reminder of how far we’ve come—and how far we still must go.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

On an unseasonably warm October morning, an idealistic young lawyer working on a shoestring budget for an environmental organization no one had heard of hand-delivered a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency, asking it to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from new cars. The Clean Air Act authorized the EPA to regulate “any air pollutant” thought to endanger public health. But could carbon dioxide really be considered a harmful pollutant? And even if the EPA had the authority to regulate emissions, could it be forced to do so?

The Rule of Five tells the dramatic story of how Joe Mendelson and the band of lawyers who joined him carried his case all the way to the Supreme Court. It reveals how accident, infighting, luck, superb lawyering, politics, and the arcane practices of the Supreme Court collided to produce a legal miracle. The final ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, by a razor-thin 5–4 margin brilliantly crafted by Justice John Paul Stevens, paved the way to important environmental safeguards which the Trump administration fought hard to unravel and many now seek to expand.

“There’s no better book if you want to understand the past, present, and future of environmental litigation.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“A riveting story, beautifully told.”
Foreign Affairs

“Wonderful…A master class in how the Supreme Court works and, more broadly, how major cases navigate through the legal system.”
Science

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The Rule of Law in Latin America
The International Promotion of Judicial Reform
Edited by Pilar Domingo and Rachel Sieder
University of London Press, 2001

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A Rule of Property for Bengal
An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement
Ranajit Guha
Duke University Press, 1996
A Rule of Property for Bengal is a classic work on the history of colonial India. First published in 1963, and long unavailable in this country, it is an essential text in the areas of colonial and postcolonial studies. In this book, Ranajit Guha examines the British establishment of the Permanent Settlement of Bengal—the first major administrative intervention by the British in the region and an effort to impose a western notion of private property on the Bengal countryside. Guha’s study of the intellectual origins, goals, and implementation of this policy provides an in-depth view of the dynamics of colonialism and reflects on the lasting effect of that dynamic following the formal termination of colonial rule.
By proclaiming the Permanent Settlement in 1793, the British hoped to promote a prosperous capitalist agriculture of the kind that had developed in England. The act renounced for all time the state’s right to raise the assessment already made upon landowners and thus sought to establish a system of property that was, in the British view, necessary for the creation of a stable government. Guha traces the origins of the Permanent Settlement to the anti-feudal ideas of Phillip Francis and the critique of feudalism provided by physiocratic thought, the precursor of political economy. The central question the book asks is how the Permanent Settlement, founded in anti-feudalism and grafted onto India by the most advanced capitalist power of the day became instrumental in the development of a neo-feudal organization of landed property and in the absorption and reproduction of precapitalist elements in a colonial regime.
Guha’s examination of the British attempt to mold Bengal to the contours of its own society without an understanding of the traditions and obligations upon which the Indian agrarian system was based is a truly pioneering work. The implications of A Rule of Property for Bengal remain rich for the current discussions from the postcolonialist perspective on the meaning of modernity and enlightenment.
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Rule Of Racialization
Class, Identity, Governance
Steve Martinot
Temple University Press, 2002
An important history of the way class formed in the US, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work.Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a distinction in social relations. Martinot begins tracing this development in the slave plantations in 1600s colonial life. He examines how the social structures encoded there lead to a concrete development of racialization. He then takes us up to the present day, where forms of those structures still inhabit our public and economic institutions. Throughout, he engages historical and contemporary thinkers on the nature of race in the US, creating a book that at once synthesizes significant critiques of race while at the same time offers a completely original conception of how race and class have operated in American life throughout the centuries.A uniquely compelling book, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich contribution to the study of class, labor, and American social relations.
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The Rule of Rules
Morality, Rules, and the Dilemmas of Law
Larry Alexander and Emily Sherwin
Duke University Press, 2001
Rules perform a moral function by restating moral principles in concrete terms, so as to reduce the uncertainty, error, and controversy that result when individuals follow their own unconstrained moral judgment. Although reason dictates that we must follow rules to avoid destructive error and controversy, rules—and hence laws—are imperfect, and reason also dictates that we ought not follow them when we believe they produce the wrong result in a particular case. In The Rule of Rules Larry Alexander and Emily Sherwin examine this dilemma.
Once the importance of this moral and practical conflict is acknowledged, the authors argue, authoritative rules become the central problems of jurisprudence. The inevitable gap between rules and background morality cannot be bridged, they claim, although many contemporary jurisprudential schools of thought are misguided attempts to do so. Alexander and Sherwin work through this dilemma, which lies at the heart of such ongoing jurisprudential controversies as how judges should reason in deciding cases, what effect should be given to legal precedent, and what status, if any, should be accorded to “legal principles.” In the end, their rigorous discussion sheds light on such topics as the nature of interpretation, the ancient dispute among legal theorists over natural law versus positivism, the obligation to obey law, constitutionalism, and the relation between law and coercion.
Those interested in jurisprudence, legal theory, and political philosophy will benefit from the edifying discussion in The Rule of Rules.

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The Rule of Saint Benedict
Benedict of Nursia
Harvard University Press, 2011

One of the most influential texts in the Middle Ages, The Rule of Saint Benedict offers guidance about both the spiritual and organizational dimensions, from the loftiest to the lowliest, of monastic life. This new Latin-English edition has features of interest for first-time readers of the Rule as well as for scholars of medieval history and language.

The Latin text is a transcription of manuscript 914 of the Abbey of St. Gall (Switzerland), an early ninth-century copy regarded as the version that most closely reproduces Benedict's style. The saint’s idiom was informal, sometimes conversational, and heavily influenced by the spoken Latin of the sixth century CE. In the Rule his voice and thought processes come through in all their strength and humanity. Readers will find background to the monastic life in the notes. This volume also includes texts and translations of two letters that explain the origins of the St. Gall version as well as an index to all the translated materials.

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The Rule of the Taewon 'Gun, 1864-1873
Restoration in Yi Korea
Ching Young Choe
Harvard University Press, 1972

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The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe
Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki
University of Illinois Press, 2008
This collection brings a transcultural and transnational perspective to the study of early modern women rulers and female sovereignty, a topic that has until now been examined through the lens of a single nation. Contributors to the volume juxtapose rulers from different countries, including well-known sovereigns such as Isabel of Castile and Elizabeth Tudor, as well as other less widely studied figures Isabeau of Bavaria, Jeanne d'Albret, Isabel Clara Eugenia, Juana of Austria, and Catherine of Brandenburg. Several essays also focus on the representations of foreign rulers such as Catherine de' Medici in England and Elizabeth I in France.

Drawing on early modern literature and historical documents, this study investigates the various political, discursive, and symbolic measures employed to negotiate and support female sovereignty by both early modern writers and the rulers themselves. The detailed analysis of the women's responses--or inability to respond--to these strictures underscores the relationship between early modern authors and sovereigns and the complex and vexed situation of European women rulers.

Contributors are Tracy Adams, Anne J. Cruz, Éva Deák, Mary C. Ekman, Catherine L. Howey, Elizabeth Ketner, Carole Levin, Sandra Logan, Magdalena S. Sánchez, Mihoko Suzuki, and Barbara F. Weissberger.

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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.

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Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law
Jeremy Waldron
Harvard University Press, 2023

An essential study of the rule of law by one of the world’s leading liberal political and legal philosophers.

The meaning and value of the rule of law have been debated since antiquity. For many, the rule of law has become the essence of good government. But Jeremy Waldron takes a different view, arguing that it is but one star in a constellation of ideals that define our political morality, ranking alongside democracy, human rights, economic freedom, and social justice.

This timely essay collection, from one of the most respected political philosophers of his generation, is a brief on behalf of thoughtfulness: the intervention of human intelligence in the application of law. Waldron defends thoughtfulness against the claim that it threatens to replace the rule of law with the arbitrary rule of people. To the contrary, he argues, the rule of law requires thoughtfulness: it is impossible to apply a standard such as “reasonableness” on the basis of rules alone, and common legal activities like arguing in court and reasoning from precedents are poorly served by algorithmic logics. This rich compilation also addresses the place of law in protecting human dignity, the relation between rule of law and legislation, and whether vagueness in the law is at odds with law’s role in guiding action.

Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law emphasizes the value of procedures rather than the substance or outcome of legal decisions. Challenging the view that predictability and clarity are cardinal virtues, Waldron shows that real-world controversies often are best approached using a relatively thin concept of the rule of law, together with the thoughtfulness that a legal system frames and enables.

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Tradition and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church
Ronnie J. Rombs
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Tradition and the rule of faith are particularly apt themes for this collection of studies. The essays are written in honor of Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J., renowned American patristic scholar whose research and writings have focused on this particular theme.
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