1917 books match the query 'Law' and 62 start with b

cover of BEING PROFILED:COGITAS ERGO SUM: 10 Years of Profiling the European Citizen

BEING PROFILED

COGITAS ERGO SUM: 10 Years of Profiling the European Citizen

Emre Bayamlioglu

Amsterdam University Press, 2019

This book celebrates and mourns the increasing relevance of the 2008 volume of 'Profiling the European Citizen. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives' (edited by Mireille Hildebrandt & Serge Gutwirth). Both volumes contain in-depth investigations by lawyers, philosophers and computer scientists into the legal, philosophical and computational background of the emerging algorithmic order. In BEING PROFILED:COGITAS ERGO SUM 23 scholars engage with the issues, underpinnings, operations and implications of micro-targeting, data-driven critical infrastructure, ethics-washing, p-hacking and democratic disruption. These issues have now become part of everyday life, reinforcing the urgency of the question: are we becoming what machines infer about us, or are we? This book has been designed as a work of art by Bob van Dijk, the hardcopy has been printed as a limited edition. The separate chapters (2000 word provocations) will become available in open access in 2019.
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cover of Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters

Baby Ninth Amendments

How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters

Anthony B. Sanders

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and free exercise of religion, plus a handful of others. However, we do not need to enumerate every liberty because there is another way to protect them: an "etcetera clause." It states that there are other rights beyond those specifically listed: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Yet scholars are divided on whether the Ninth Amendment itself actually does protect unenumerated rights, and the Supreme Court has almost entirely ignored it. Regardless of what the Ninth Amendment means, two-thirds of state constitutions have equivalent provisions, or "Baby Ninth Amendments," worded similarly to the Ninth Amendment.

This book is the story of how the "Baby Ninths" came to be and what they mean. Unlike the controversy surrounding the Ninth Amendment, the meaning of the Baby Ninths is straightforward: they protect individual rights that are not otherwise enumerated. They are an "etcetera, etcetera" at the end of a bill of rights. This book argues that state judges should do their duty and live up to their own constitutions to protect the rights "retained by the people" that these "etcetera clauses" are designed to guarantee. The fact that Americans have adopted these provisions so many times in so many states demonstrates that unenumerated rights are not only protected by state constitutions, but that they are popular. Unenumerated rights are not a weird exception to American constitutional law. They are at the center of it. We should start treating constitutions accordingly.

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cover of Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters

Baby Ninth Amendments

How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters

Anthony B. Sanders

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and free exercise of religion, plus a handful of others. However, we do not need to enumerate every liberty because there is another way to protect them: an "etcetera clause." It states that there are other rights beyond those specifically listed: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Yet scholars are divided on whether the Ninth Amendment itself actually does protect unenumerated rights, and the Supreme Court has almost entirely ignored it. Regardless of what the Ninth Amendment means, two-thirds of state constitutions have equivalent provisions, or "Baby Ninth Amendments," worded similarly to the Ninth Amendment.

This book is the story of how the "Baby Ninths" came to be and what they mean. Unlike the controversy surrounding the Ninth Amendment, the meaning of the Baby Ninths is straightforward: they protect individual rights that are not otherwise enumerated. They are an "etcetera, etcetera" at the end of a bill of rights. This book argues that state judges should do their duty and live up to their own constitutions to protect the rights "retained by the people" that these "etcetera clauses" are designed to guarantee. The fact that Americans have adopted these provisions so many times in so many states demonstrates that unenumerated rights are not only protected by state constitutions, but that they are popular. Unenumerated rights are not a weird exception to American constitutional law. They are at the center of it. We should start treating constitutions accordingly.

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cover of Baby You're a Rich Man: Suing the Beatles for Fun and Profit

Baby You're a Rich Man

Suing the Beatles for Fun and Profit

Stan Soocher

University Press of New England, 2015

The Beatles, the most popular, influential, and important band of all time, have been the subject of countless books of biography, photography, analysis, history, and conjecture. But this long and winding road has produced nothing like Baby You’re a Rich Man, the first book devoted to the cascade of legal actions engulfing the band, from the earliest days of the loveable mop-heads to their present prickly twilight of cultural sainthood. Part Beatles history, part legal thriller, Baby You’re a Rich Man begins in the era when manager Brian Epstein opened the Pandora’s box of rock ’n’ roll merchandising, making a hash of the band’s licensing and inviting multiple lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom. The band’s long breakup period, from 1969 to 1971, provides a backdrop to the Machiavellian grasping of new manager Allen Klein, who unleashed a blizzard of suits and legal motions to take control of the band, their music, and Apple Records. Unsavory mob associate Morris Levy first sued John Lennon for copyright infringement over “Come Together,” then sued him again for not making a record for him. Phil Spector, hired to record a Lennon solo album, walked off with the master tapes and held them for a king’s ransom. And from 1972 to 1975, Lennon was the target of a deportation campaign personally spearheaded by key aides of President Nixon (caught on tape with a drug-addled Elvis Presley) that wound endlessly through the courts. In Baby You’re a Rich Man, Stan Soocher ties the Beatles’ ongoing legal troubles to some of their most enduring songs. What emerges is a stirring portrait of immense creative talent thriving under the pressures of ill will, harassment, and greed. Praise for They Fought the Law: Rock Music Goes to Court “Stan Soocher not only ably translates the legalese but makes both the plaintiffs and defendants engrossingly human. Mandatory reading for every artist who tends to skip his contract’s fine print.”—Entertainment Weekly
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cover of Backlash Against the ADA: Reinterpreting Disability Rights

Backlash Against the ADA

Reinterpreting Disability Rights

Linda Hamilton Krieger, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2003

For civil rights lawyers who toiled through the 1980s in the increasingly barren fields of race and sex discrimination law, the approval of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 by a nearly unanimous U.S. House and Senate and a Republican President seemed almost fantastic. Within five years of the Act's effective date, however, observers were warning of an unfolding assault on the ADA by federal judges, the media, and other national opinion-makers. A year after the Supreme Court issued a trio of decisions in the summer of 1999 sharply limiting the ADA's reach, another decision invalidated an entire title of the act as it applied to the states. By this time, disability activists and disability rights lawyers were speaking openly of a backlash against the ADA.
What happened, why did it happen, and what can we learn from the patterns of public, media, and judicial response to the ADA that emerged in the 1990s? In this book, a distinguished group of disability activists, disability rights lawyers, social scientists and humanities scholars grapple with these questions. Taken together, these essays construct and illustrate a new and powerful theoretical model of sociolegal change and retrenchment that can inform both the conceptual and theoretical work of scholars and the day-to-day practice of social justice activists.
Contributors include Lennard J. Davis, Matthew Diller, Harlan Hahn, Linda Hamilton Krieger, Vicki A. Laden, Stephen L. Percy, Marta Russell, and Gregory Schwartz.
Backlash Against the ADA will interest disability rights activists, lawyers, law students and legal scholars interested in social justice and social change movements, and students and scholars in disability studies, political science, media studies, American studies, social movement theory, and legal history.
Linda Hamilton Krieger is Professor of Law, University of California School of Law, Berkeley.
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cover of Bad Acts and Guilty Minds: Conundrums of the Criminal Law

Bad Acts and Guilty Minds

Conundrums of the Criminal Law

Leo Katz

University of Chicago Press, 1987

With wit and intelligence, Leo Katz seeks to understand the basic rules and concepts underlying the moral, linguistic, and psychological puzzles that plague the criminal law.

"Bad Acts and Guilty Minds . . . revives the mind, it challenges superficial analyses, it reminds us that underlying the vast body of statutory and case law, there is a rationale founded in basic notions of fairness and reason. . . . It will help lawyers to better serve their clients and the society that permits attorneys to hang out their shingles."—Edward N. Costikyan, New York Times Book Review
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cover of Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity

Bad Boys

Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity

Ann Arnett Ferguson

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Black males are disproportionately "in trouble" and suspended from the nation’s school systems. This is as true now as it was when Ann Arnett Ferguson’s now classic Bad Boys was first published.  Bad Boys offers a richly textured account of daily interactions between teachers and students in order to demonstrate how a group of eleven- and twelve-year-old males construct a sense of self under adverse circumstances. This new edition includes a foreword by Pedro A. Noguera, and an afterword and bibliographic essay by the author, all of which reflect on the continuing relevance of this work nearly two decades after its initial publication.
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cover of Bad News Travels Fast: The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era

Bad News Travels Fast

The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era

Patrick C. File

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalists transmitted news across the country by telegraph. But what happened when these stories weren't true? In Bad News Travels Fast, Patrick C. File examines a series of libel cases by a handful of plaintiffs—including socialites, businessmen, and Annie Oakley—who sued newspapers across the country for republishing false newswire reports. Through these cases, File demonstrates how law and technology intertwined to influence debates about reputation, privacy, and the acceptable limits of journalism.

This largely forgotten era in the development of American libel law provides crucial historical context for contemporary debates about the news media, public discourse, and the role of a free press. File argues that the legal thinking surrounding these cases laid the groundwork for the more friendly libel standards the press now enjoys and helped to establish today's regulations of press freedom amid the promise and peril of high-speed communication technology.
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cover of Bagpipe Brothers: The FDNY Band's True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery

Bagpipe Brothers

The FDNY Band's True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery

Kerry Sheridan

Rutgers University Press, 2004

After the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks, New York City's Emerald Society Bagpipe Band of firefighter-musicians took out their instruments and prepared to bury their dead--343 brothers in duty and in blood. Many firefighters alternated between playing their instruments at funerals and digging for the missing in the rubble of Ground Zero. The Irish American tradition of funeral bagpiping became the sound of mourning for an entire nation.

Bagpipe Brothers tells the unforgettable story of four firefighters in the band, who struggled to bring peace to their families and themselves while searching for the dead, coping with the endless round of funerals, and rethinking the meaning of faith. Their experiences illustrate the grief and recovery of the nation in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Kerry Sheridan has written the first book to cover the ordeal of the massive number of funerals, the importance of recovering bodies in Irish American culture, and the bagpiping ritual, both traditional and modern.
 
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cover of Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston

Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston

By Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt

University of Texas Press, 1991

As counsel for Pennzoil's successful effort to recover billions of dollars in damages from Texaco over the acquisition of Getty Oil Company, the Baker & Botts law firm of Houston, Texas, achieved wide public recognition in the 1980s. But among its peers in the legal and corporate worlds, Baker & Botts has for more than a century held a preeminent position, handling the legal affairs of such blue-chip clients as the Southern Pacific Railroad, Houston Lighting & Power Company, Rice University, Texas Commerce Bank, and Tenneco. In this study, Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt chronicle the history of Baker & Botts, placing particular emphasis on the firm's role in Houston's economic development.

Founded in 1840, Baker & Botts literally grew up with Houston. The authors chart its evolution from a nineteenth-century regional firm that represented eastern-based corporations moving into Texas to a twentieth-century national firm with clients throughout the world. They honestly discuss the criticisms that Baker & Botts has faced as an advocate of big business. But they also identify the important impact that corporate law firms of this type have on business reorganization and government regulation. As the authors demonstrate in this case study, law firms throughout the twentieth century have helped to shape public policy in these critical areas.

Always prominent in the community, and with prominent connections (former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is the great-grandson of the original Baker), the Baker & Botts law firm belongs in any history of the development of Houston and the Southwest.

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cover of Bankrupt in America: A History of Debtors, Their Creditors, and the Law in the Twentieth Century

Bankrupt in America

A History of Debtors, Their Creditors, and the Law in the Twentieth Century

Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Bradley A. Hansen

University of Chicago Press, 2020

In 2005, more than two million Americans—six out of every 1,000 people—filed for bankruptcy. Though personal bankruptcy rates have since stabilized, bankruptcy remains an important tool for the relief of financially distressed households. In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen offer a vital perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America, beginning with the first lasting federal bankruptcy law enacted in 1898.

Interweaving careful legal history and rigorous economic analysis, Bankrupt in America is the first work to trace how bankruptcy was transformed from an intermittently used constitutional provision, to an indispensable tool for business, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans. To do this, the authors track federal bankruptcy law, as well as related state and federal laws, examining the interaction between changes in the laws and changes in how people in each state used the bankruptcy law. In this thorough investigation, Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about the causes and consequences of bankruptcy, adding nuance to the discussion of the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic performance.
 
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cover of Bankruptcy's Universal Pragmatist: Festschrift in Honor of Jay Westbrook

Bankruptcy's Universal Pragmatist

Festschrift in Honor of Jay Westbrook

Christoph G. Paulus and John A. E. Pottow, Editors

Michigan Publishing Services, 2021

A Who’s Who of international scholars of bankruptcy law have come together to compile a Festschrift honoring the work of Jay Lawrence Westbrook, one of the most prominent professors of bankruptcy law. Jay is not just the father—perhaps grandfather—of modern cross-border insolvency theory, but a pioneer (along with his co-authors Teresa A. Sullivan and Elizabeth Warren) of empirical research in commercial law. The volume collects the papers presented at “JayFest,” the 2018 celebration of Jay’s work in Austin co-sponsored by the University of Texas Law School, the Texas Law Review, and the world’s premier bankruptcy organization, the International Insolvency Institute.
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cover of Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption

Baseball on Trial

The Origin of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption

Nathaniel Grow

University of Illinois Press, 2014

The controversial 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the "business of base ball" was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. In Baseball on Trial, legal scholar Nathaniel Grow defies conventional wisdom to explain why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time.
 
Currently a billion dollar enterprise, professional baseball teams crisscross the country while the games are broadcast via radio, television, and internet coast to coast. The sheer scope of this activity would seem to embody the phrase "interstate commerce." Yet baseball is the only professional sport--indeed the sole industry--in the United States that currently benefits from a judicially constructed antitrust immunity. How could this be?
 
Drawing upon recently released documents from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Grow analyzes how the Supreme Court reached this seemingly peculiar result by tracing the Federal Baseball litigation from its roots in 1914 to its resolution in 1922, in the process uncovering significant new details about the proceedings. Grow observes that while interstate commerce was measured at the time by the exchange of tangible goods, baseball teams in the 1910s merely provided live entertainment to their fans, while radio was a fledgling technology that had little impact on the sport. The book ultimately concludes that, despite the frequent criticism of the opinion, the Supreme Court's decision was consistent with the conditions and legal climate of the early twentieth century.
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cover of Battering States: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel

Battering States

The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel

Madelaine Adelman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2017

Battering States explores the most personal part of people's lives as they intersect with a uniquely complex state system. The book examines how statecraft shapes domestic violence: how a state defines itself and determines what counts as a family; how a state establishes sovereignty and defends its borders; and how a state organizes its legal system and forges its economy. The ethnography includes stories from people, places, and perspectives not commonly incorporated in domestic violence studies, and, in doing so, reveals the transformation of intimate partner violence from a predictable form of marital trouble to a publicly recognized social problem.

The politics of domestic violence create novel entry points to understanding how, although women may be vulnerable to gender-based violence, they do not necessarily share the same kind of belonging to the state. This means that markers of identity and power, such as gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion and religiosity, and socio-economic and geographic location, matter when it comes to safety and pathways to justice.

The study centers on Israel, where a number of factors bring connections between the cultural politics of the state and domestic violence into stark relief: the presence of a contentious multinational and multiethnic population; competing and overlapping sets of religious and civil laws; a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor; and the dominant presence of a security state in people's everyday lives. The exact combination of these factors is unique to Israel, but they are typical of states with a diverse population in a time of globalization. In this way, the example of Israel offers insights wherever the political and personal impinge on one another.
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cover of Be Not Afraid: A Southern Journey Through Law, Liberty, and Civil Rights

Be Not Afraid

A Southern Journey Through Law, Liberty, and Civil Rights

Jack Drake

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A civil rights attorney’s unflinching memoir about the fight against segregation and systemic racism through landmark legal battles in Alabama

Be Not Afraid: A Southern Journey Through Law, Liberty, and Civil Rights is a timely and unflinching memoir from civil rights attorney Jack Drake, who has spent decades on the front lines of Alabama’s legal battles for racial justice. Raised in a segregated community in Gardendale, Alabama, Drake came of age during the civil rights movement and became a pivotal figure in cases that reshaped the state’s legal and moral landscape.

Drake helped reform Alabama’s grossly inadequate mental health system and supported voting rights efforts throughout Alabama. His career underscores the crucial role private attorneys and grassroots advocates played in enforcing civil rights laws long after their passage.

Through vivid recollections of courtroom battles, civil rights alliances, and personal transformation, Be Not Afraid offers an intimate view into the persistence and courage required to challenge systemic injustice. At a time when debates over equity and democracy remain pressing, Drake’s story is both a powerful reflection on the past and a call to action for the present. It speaks to the enduring importance of legal advocacy and community solidarity in the fight for a more just society, making it essential reading for those engaged in civil rights history, law, or social change.

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cover of Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change

Bearing Witness

The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change

Thomas A. Kerns

Oregon State University Press, 2021

Fracking, the practice of shattering underground rock to release oil and natural gas, is a major driver of climate change. The 300,000 fracking facilities in the US also directly harm the health and livelihoods of people in front-line communities, who are disproportionately poor and people of color. Impacted citizens have for years protested that their rights have been ignored.

On May 14, 2018, a respected international human-rights court, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, began a week-long hearing on the impacts of fracking and climate change on human and Earth rights. In its advisory opinion, the Tribunal ruled that fracking systematically violates substantive and procedural human rights; that governments are complicit in the rights violations; and that to protect human rights and the climate, the practice of fracking should be banned.

The case makes history. It revokes the social license of extreme-extraction industries by connecting environmental destruction to human-rights violations. It affirms that climate change, and the extraction techniques that fuel it, directly violate deeply and broadly accepted moral norms encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of this landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including searing eye-witness testimony, groundbreaking legal testimony, and the Tribunal’s advisory opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox, Mary Wood, and Anna Grear give context to the controversy. Framing essays by the editors, experts on climate ethics and human rights, demonstrate that a human-rights focus is a powerful, transformative new tool to address the climate crisis.

 
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cover of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame

Before the Law

Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame

Cary Wolfe

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.
 
Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals.
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cover of Before the Law: The Complete Text of Préjugés

Before the Law

The Complete Text of Préjugés

Jacques Derrida

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Thinking judgment in relation to the work of Jean-François Lyotard


“How to judge—Jean-François Lyotard?” It is from this initial question that one of France’s most heralded philosophers of the twentieth century begins his essay on the origin of the law, of judgment, and the work of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard. If Jacques Derrida begins with the term préjugés, it is in part because of its impossibility to be rendered properly in other languages and also contain all its meanings: to pre-judge, to judge before judging, to hold prejudices, to know “how to judge,” and more still, to be already prejudged oneself. 

Striving to contain that which comes before the law, that is in front of the law and also prior to it, how to judge Jean-François Lyotard then becomes perhaps a beneficial attempt for Derrida to explore humanity’s rapport with judgment, origins, and naming. For how does one come to judge the author of the Differend? How does one abstain from judgment to accept the term préjugés as suspending judgment and at once as taking into account the impossibility of speaking before the law, prior to naming or judging? If this task indeed seems insurmountable, it is the site where Lyotard’s work itself is played out. Hence this sincere and intriguing essay presented by Jacques Derrida, published here for the first time in English.

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cover of Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin

Beginning the Quest

Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin

Barry Cooper

University of Missouri Press, 2009

Beginning the Quest by Barry Cooper provides an analysis of the legal and political writings of Eric Voegelin during the 1920s and 1930s. The subject matter of his analyses during this time period was quite distinct from the focus of his concerns thirty years later.

It has often been noted that Voegelin was a pupil of Hans Kelsen, the author of the postwar Austrian constitution and one of the great legal minds of the twentieth century. The significance of the fact that Voegelin began his academic life as a legal scholar has not, however, been emphasized, though his background provides a strong contrast with that of his contemporaries Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Beginning the Quest opens with Voegelin’s efforts, following the trauma of defeat in World War I, at understanding the relation of law and the study of law (Staatslehre) to what he then called “sociohistorical reality.” Much of this writing consisted of methodological analysis and criticism centered chiefly on the status of neo-Kantian philosophy as the basis for what we now call the social sciences. Voegelin wished to push the scientific understanding of sociohistorical reality beyond the scope afforded by German social science.

Cooper discusses Voegelin’s first systematic effort to bring together the principles of philosophical anthropology (including philosophy of history) with his understanding of comparative social science and a theory of law more comprehensive than Kelsen’s. In developing his argument, Voegelin discovered the centrality of what he called “political ideas.”

Cooper also deals with Voegelin’s The Authoritarian State (1936), which argues that Austria was more an administrative unit than a body politic. It was, to say the least, a startling analysis, but one that reappeared in later writings as well, especially in The New Science of Politics.

As a final point, Cooper deals with the concept of “political religions” that Voegelin developed in the 1938 book of that name. Just as the Austrians were groping toward the formation of a body politic, so too were the Germans. Instead of the authoritarian state being the form that the German “political people” attained, it was, as Voegelin showed in his race books, quite different. Voegelin developed the term political religion to describe the animating core of the National Socialist regime. The formation of this concept reveals that Voegelin had moved from a focus on the legal structure of a polity to its spiritual order—in the example of Nazi Germany, an unquestionably “Satanic” order.

Cooper concludes that just as the great crisis of Voegelin’s youth—World War I and its aftermath—led him to question the received premises of the Staatslehre tradition in which he was schooled, so did the crisis resulting in World War II lead him to develop ever-more-comprehensive accounts of the disorder and political convulsions of the day. The “quest” of the title of this study continued until Voegelin’s death.
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cover of Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption

Belonging in an Adopted World

Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption

Barbara Yngvesson

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide. In Belonging in an Adopted World, Barbara Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences and implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West. Yngvesson illuminates how the politics of adoption policy has profoundly affected the families, nations, and children involved in this new form of social and economic migration.

Starting from the transformation of the abandoned child into an adoptable resource for nations that give and receive children in adoption, this volume examines the ramifications of such gifts, especially for families created through adoption and later, the adopted adults themselves. Bolstered by an account of the author’s own experience as an adoptive parent, and fully attuned to the contradictions of race that shape our complex forms of family, Belonging in an Adopted World explores the fictions that sustain adoptive kinship, ultimately exposing the vulnerability and contingency behind all human identity.

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cover of Bending the Law: The Story of the Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy

Bending the Law

The Story of the Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy

Richard B. Sobol

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Winner of the American Bar Association's 1992 Silver Gavel Award "in recognition of an outstanding contribution to public understanding of the American system of law and justice."

"Mr. Sobol has produced a readable yet fully researched and detailed study of the operation of the bankruptcy and its effects upon all concerned—the women who were injured, the swarms of lawyers who represented parties in the bankruptcy, and the court which oversaw the bankruptcy in Richmond. . . . This book adds greatly to the current debate about how strong a managerial federal judge our system should have."—Paul D. Rheingold, New York Law Journal

"Bending the Law is polemical and relentless. It is also minutely researched, fluidly written, and persuasive."—Paul Reidinger, ABA Journal

"Bending the Law is a must read for bankruptcy practitioners, and for anyone else concerned about the use of bankruptcy law to deal with mass torts. Although its author is a civil rights lawyer, he details the subtle art of practicing bankruptcy law with a discerning eye, and is a gifted storyteller as well."—Joryn Jenkins, Federal Bar News and Journal

"This is an accessible history of the case by a veteran civil-rights lawyer."—Washington Post Book World
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cover of Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy

Bending the Rules

Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy

Rachel Augustine Potter

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process.
           
With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.
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cover of Better Bankers, Better Banks: Promoting Good Business through Contractual Commitment

Better Bankers, Better Banks

Promoting Good Business through Contractual Commitment

Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Taking financial risks is an essential part of what banks do, but there’s no clear sense of what constitutes responsible risk. Taking legal risks seems to have become part of what banks do as well. Since the financial crisis, Congress has passed copious amounts of legislation aimed at curbing banks’ risky behavior. Lawsuits against large banks have cost them billions. Yet bad behavior continues to plague the industry. Why isn’t there more change?
           
In Better Bankers, Better Banks, Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter look back at the history of banking and show how the current culture of bad behavior—dramatized by the corrupt, cocaine-snorting bankers of The Wolf of Wall Street—came to be. In the early 1980s, banks went from partnerships whose partners had personal liability to corporations whose managers had no such liability and could take risks with other people’s money. A major reason bankers remain resistant to change, Hill and Painter argue, is that while banks have been faced with large fines, penalties, and legal fees—which have exceeded one hundred billion dollars since the onset of the crisis—the banks (which really means the banks’shareholders) have paid them, not the bankers themselves. The problem also extends well beyond the pursuit of profit to the issue of how success is defined within the banking industry, where highly paid bankers clamor for status and clients may regard as inevitable bankers who prioritize their own self-interest. While many solutions have been proposed, Hill and Painter show that a successful transformation of banker behavior must begin with the bankers themselves. Bankers must be personally liable from their own assets for some portion of the bank’s losses from excessive risk-taking and illegal behavior. This would instill a culture that discourages such behavior and in turn influence the sorts of behavior society celebrates or condemns.

Despite many sensible proposals seeking to reign in excessive risk-taking, the continuing trajectory of scandals suggests that we’re far from ready to avert the next crisis. Better Bankers, Better Banks is a refreshing call for bankers to return to the idea that theirs is a noble profession.
[more]
cover of Between the Temple and the Tax Collector: The Intersection of Mormonism and the State

Between the Temple and the Tax Collector

The Intersection of Mormonism and the State

Samuel D. Brunson

University of Illinois Press, 2025

The founding and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints run parallel to the rise of the modern tax system and administrative state. Samuel D. Brunson looks at the relationships between the Church and various federal, state, local, and international tax regimes.

The church and its members engage with the state as taxpayers and as members of a faith exempt from taxes. As Brunson shows, LDS members and the Church have at various times enacted, enforced, and collected taxes while also challenging taxes in the courts and politics. Brunson delves into the ways LDS members used their status as taxpayers to affirm themselves as citizens and how outsiders have attacked the Church’s tax-exempt status to delegitimize it. Throughout, Brunson uses the daily interactions between the Latter-day Saints and taxation to explain important and inevitable holes in the wall between church and state.

Enlightening and informed, Between the Temple and the Tax Collector provides general readers and experts alike with a new perspective on a fundamental issue.

[more]
cover of Beyond Busing: Reflections on Urban Segregation, the Courts, and Equal Opportunity

Beyond Busing

Reflections on Urban Segregation, the Courts, and Equal Opportunity

Paul R. Dimond

University of Michigan Press, 2005


A compelling insider's account of the fight for educational desegregation, from one of its most dedicated and outspoken heroes. A new afterword explains the author's controversial belief that the moment for litigating educational equality has passed, clear-sightedly critiquing his own courtroom strategies and the courts' responses, before closing with an assessment of the economic and social changes that he feels have already moved us "beyond busing."

"An extraordinarily informative and thoughtful book describing the process of bringing Brown [v. Board of Education] North and the impact this process had upon national attitudes toward desegregation."
--Drew S. Days III, Yale Law Journal

"An original analysis of a tough subject. A must-read for all who care about opportunity for all our children."
--Donna E. Shalala, President, University of Miami

"Paul Dimond remains a passionate and caring voice for inner-city students, whether in his advocacy of school desegregation, school choice plans, or school finance reform. He illuminates these issues as one who participated in the major education cases and as a perceptive scholar."
--Mark Yudof, Chancellor, The University of Texas System

"A must-read for anyone who wants to understand America's continued failure to give inner-city children a quality education or to do something about it!"
--Sheryll Cashin, Author of The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream

"Dimond is particularly good at relating his slice of legal history to the broader developments of the 1970s, and his occasional remarks about trial tactics are amusing and instructive. Dimond's
honesty about both his successes and failures makes his book required reading for civil rights lawyers."
--Lawrence T. Gresser, Michigan Law Review

"A fascinating first-hand account of 1970s northern school desegregation decisions."
--Neal E. Devins, American Bar Foundation Research Journal

"Dimond reminds the liberal reader of the promise that lies in the empowerment of ordinary families to choose their own schools."
--John E. Coons, Professor of Law, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

Paul R. Dimond is counsel to Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone, Michigan's largest law firm; chairman of McKinley, a national commercial real estate investment and management firm; and chairman or member of the board of trustees of numerous education, community, and civic organizations. He spent four years as President Clinton's Special Assistant for Economic Policy.
[more]
cover of Beyond Complementary Medicine: Legal and Ethical Perspectives on Health Care and Human Evolution

Beyond Complementary Medicine

Legal and Ethical Perspectives on Health Care and Human Evolution

Michael H. Cohen

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Consumers increasingly are turning to complementary medicine, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, massage therapy, dietary supplements and herbs, energy healing, meditation and yoga, and mind-body therapies. This book addresses the growing interest in the legal, ethical, and regulatory aspects of integrating such care into conventional clinical settings.
Integration of divergent philosophies, paradigms, and practices requires responsible investigation, informed judgment, and open-minded yet critical study and analysis of various systems of healing. Michael H. Cohen offers providers and policymakers vitally important information by addressing questions such as credentialing, malpractice, informed consent, and liability for referrals. He describes both practical strategies for minimizing liability, as well as the necessary future evolution of the legal and regulatory structure.
Cohen also probes uncharted ethical and bioethical issues in complementary medicine and integrative health care. He further explores the connection between law, medicine, and spirituality and the role of this connection in human evolution. The book's range mirrors the integrative process itself, a process of grappling with, and meaningfully assimilating, disparate traditions and unfamiliar ways of thinking about the significance of health, body, and being.
Beyond Complementary Medicine is required reading for anyone involved in health care, including executives, insurers, managed care organizations, attorneys, ethicists, and lawmakers; physicians integrating complementary and alternative therapies; complementary and alternative medicine practitioners; medical schools, law schools, and educational institutions offering programs in health care, public health, and complementary therapies; companies manufacturing herbs and dietary supplements; and most of all, patients and their families.
Michael H. Cohen is President of the Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine, a nonprofit organization in health care policy, ethics, and legal and regulatory affairs, and an attorney with an international practice in integrative health care.
[more]
cover of Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously

Beyond Criminology

Taking Harm Seriously

Edited by Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Dave Gordon and Steve Tombs

Pluto Press, 2004

[more]
cover of Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State Crises, and Professional Empowerment

Beyond Monopoly

Lawyers, State Crises, and Professional Empowerment

Terence C. Halliday

University of Chicago Press, 1987

How do professional associations build their resources and establish authroity? What are the conditions under which professional expertise can be mobilized for political action? If professional organizations are endowed with a wealth of resources, do they use them responsibly or only for economic monopoly? What is the potential scope of professional action today?

In this pathbreaking study of the legal profession, Terence Halliday raises and addresses these questions combining extensive data from the rich archives o the Chicago Bar Association, one of the nation's largest and wealthiest bar organizations, with data from a national survey of bar legislative and judicial action. Beyond Monopoly demonstrates that the primary commitment of lawyers to economic monopoly has long been complemented by "civic professionalism" as the legal profession takes on more responsibility in the American democratic system when state capabilities diminish.

Through his examination of three types of state crises in the 1950s and 1960s—the challenges to legitimacy in the legal system, the crisis of individual rights during McCarthyism and the civil rights eras, and the fiscal crises of various state governments—Halliday shows that large bar associations can have extensive influence on any institution that is regulated by law. He argues that lawyers have the capability of turning social and political issues into technical legal matters in what he calls an "idiom of legalism." Under technical guise, lawyers come to exercise moral authority.

Halliday maintains that the American legal profession over the past century has gone from a formative stage, when controlling its market in the delivery of legal services was paramount, to an established phase in the past two decades, when it has committed extensive resources to the complex needs of the modern state. A de facto bargain has been struck: if the state leaves the profession's monopoly fairly intact, the profession can use its expert resources to help the state adapt to strain and crisis. It can do so not only in the legal system, where it has been championing "autonomous" law, but in other spheres as well—from the economy to the private sphere of individual rights.

Halliday confirms that the legal profession deploys its expertise not merely to attain professional dominance, to control a market, or to purvey an ideology, but to increase the viability of democratic institutions. Beyond Monopoly introduces a pioneering approach to a historical and comparative sociology of the professions that will be of vital interest not only to sociologists, but to political scientists and lawyers as well.
[more]
cover of Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Beyond Occupation

Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Edited by Virginia Tilley

Pluto Press, 2012

Beyond Occupation looks at three contentious terms that regularly arise in contemporary arguments about Israel's practices towards Palestinians in the occupied territories – occupation, colonialism and apartheid – and considers whether their meanings in international law truly apply to Israel's policies. This analysis is timely and urgent – colonialism and apartheid are serious breaches of human rights law and apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The contributors present conclusive evidence that Israel’s administration of the Palestinian territories is consistent with colonialism and apartheid, as these regimes are defined in human rights law. Their analysis further shows that these practices are deliberate Israeli state policies, imposed on the Palestinian civilian population under military occupation.

These findings raise serious implications for the legality and legitimacy of Israel's continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories and the responsibility of the entire international community to challenge practices considered contrary to fundamental values of the international legal order.

[more]
cover of Beyond Recognition: Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility

Beyond Recognition

Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility

Collins, Laura Jane

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A bold and original analysis of how the complexity of legal struggles over transgender rights is shaped not only by politics but by a deeper cultural anxiety about the meaning of sex itself.

Beyond Recognition: Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility is a timely analysis that challenges the idea of transgender antidiscrimination law as a simple matter of inclusion or exclusion. Far from treating the law as a straightforward recognition project, Laura Jane Collins employs a rhetorically responsive approach that reveals how legal systems both reflect and shape our deepest uncertainties about sex, identity, and justice.

Through close readings of Title VII case law, state-level legislation such as California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, and legislative debates surrounding bathroom access and trans rights, Collins exposes the deep-seated anxieties driving contemporary legal debates. While courts, policymakers, and advocates struggle to construct legal protections, the very act of defining sex within the law exposes law’s limitations.

Rather than condemning the law’s failures or romanticizing its liberatory potential, Collins calls for a more self-reflective, ethically engaged response. She argues that our demand for legal clarity often conceals a broader discomfort with ambiguity—and that the law’s so-called shortcomings may in fact reflect our own refusal to confront the complexity of sex as a category and system of power.

A vital contribution to scholarship in law and rhetoric, gender studies, and critical legal theory, Beyond Recognition invites a deeper reckoning with both legal frameworks and personal responsibility. It offers a compelling perspective on the evolving landscape of transgender rights and the cultural anxieties that continue to shape it.

[more]
cover of Beyond Repair?: America's Death Penalty

Beyond Repair?

America's Death Penalty

Stephen P. Garvey, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

Can the death penalty be administered in a just way—without executing the innocent, without regard to race, and without arbitrariness? How does capital punishment in the United States fit with international human rights law? These are among the questions that leading legal scholars and journalists explore in Beyond Repair? All new, the essays in this collection focus on the period since 1976, when the Supreme Court held that capital punishment, in and of itself, does not violate the Constitution. In addition to reflecting on the most recent developments in the law, the contributors draw on empirical research to consider connections between newly available data and modern American death penalty procedures.

A number of the essays scrutinize thinking about capital punishment. They examine why, following almost two decades of strong public support for the death penalty, public opinion in favor of it has recently begun to decline. Beyond Repair? presents some of the findings of the Capital Jury Project, a nationwide research initiative that has interviewed over one thousand people who served as jurors in capital trials. It looks at what goes through the minds of jurors asked to consider imposing the death penalty, how qualified they are to make such an important decision, and how well they understand the judge’s instructions. Contributors also investigate the risk of executing the innocent, the role that race plays in determining which defendants are sentenced to death, and the effect of expanded restrictions on access to federal appellate relief. The postscript contemplates the peculiarities of our contemporary system of capital punishment, including the alarming variance in execution rates from state to state.

Filled with current insights and analysis, Beyond Repair? will provide valuable information to attorneys, political scientists, criminologists, and all those wanting to participate knowledgeably in the debates about the death penalty in America.

Contributors. Ken Armstrong, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Stephen P. Garvey, Samuel R. Gross, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Steve Mills, William A. Schabas, Larry W. Yackle, Franklin E. Zimring

[more]
cover of Biblical Judgments: New Legal Readings in the Hebrew Bible

Biblical Judgments

New Legal Readings in the Hebrew Bible

Daphne Barak-Erez

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Biblical Judgments invites readers to consider today's timeless dilemmas of law and government, social justice, and human rights, through the perspective of a text that has helped shape western society: the Hebrew Bible. By focusing on biblical narratives and literature rather than on traditional interpretations of biblical law, Daphne Barak-Erez is able to look beyond historic norms to concentrate on what Old Testament stories can reveal about the "big" issues. She discusses questions such as: What can modern-day governmental regulation learn from the exercise of food rationing in Egypt as a response to Pharaoh's dream of a future famine? How does social distancing in the time of Covid-19 compare with people sent outside the camp as a precautionary measure against bible-era plagues? What can promoters of social justice glean from the demands made to Moses that daughters should also inherit from their father when biblical law did not recognize inheritance rights of women? 

Rather than offering a historical study, Barak-Erez draws upon famous court decisions from around the world to root her analysis in modern law. Organized by subject matter, Biblical Judgments analyzes how the themes of law and government, judging and judges, human rights and social justice, criminal law, private law, and family and inheritance law are presented through a number of different stories. In recounting the compelling narratives of the Hebrew Bible, Biblical Judgments exposes their inherent legal tensions and what we can learn about legal dilemmas today. 
[more]
cover of BigLaw: Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm

BigLaw

Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm

Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The Great Recession intensified large law firms’ emphasis on financial performance, leading to claims that lawyers in these firms were now guided by business rather than professional values.  Based on interviews with more than 250 partners in large firms, Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer suggest that the reality is much more complex. It is true that large firm hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination policies are more influenced by business considerations than ever before and that firms actively recruit profitable partners from other firms to replace those they regard as unproductive. At the same time, law firm partners continue to seek the non-financial rewards of being members of a distinct profession and are sensitive to whether their firms are committed to providing them. Regan and Rohrer argue that modern firms responding effectively to business demands while credibly affirming the importance of non-financial professional values can create strong cultures that enhance their ability to weather the storms of the modern legal market.
[more]
cover of Biggest Damned Hat: Tales from Alaska's Territorial Lawyers and Judges

Biggest Damned Hat

Tales from Alaska's Territorial Lawyers and Judges

Pamela Cravez

University of Alaska Press, 2017

Alaska history from the days before statehood is rich in stories of colorful characters—prospectors, settlers, heroes, and criminals. And right alongside them were judges and lawyers, working first to establish the rule of law in the territory, then, later, laying the groundwork for statehood.
 
The Biggest Damned Hat presents a fascinating collection of stories ranging from the gold rush to the 1950s. Built on interviews and oral histories from more than fifty lawyers who worked in Alaska before 1959, and buttressed by research into legal history, the book offers a brilliantly multifaceted portrait of law in the territory—from laying the groundwork for strong civil and criminal law to helping to secure mining and fishing rights to the Alaska Court-Bar fight, which pitted Alaska’s community of lawyers against its nascent Supreme Court. Bringing to life a time long past—when some of the best lawyers had little formal legal education—The Biggest Damned Hat fills in a crucial part of the story of Alaska’s history.
 
[more]
cover of Bioethics Mediation: A Guide to Shaping Shared Solutions, Revised and Expanded Edition

Bioethics Mediation

A Guide to Shaping Shared Solutions, Revised and Expanded Edition

Nancy Neveloff Dubler

Vanderbilt University Press, 2011

Bioethics Mediation offers stories about patients, families, and health care providers enmeshed in conflict as they wrestle with decisions about life and death. It provides guidance for those charged with supporting the patient's traditional and religious commitments and personal wishes. Today's medical system, without intervention, privileges those within shared cultures of communication and disadvantages those lacking power and position, such as immigrants, the poor, and nonprofessionals. This book gives clinical ethics consultants, palliative care providers, and physicians, nurses, and other medical staff the tools they need to understand and manage conflict while respecting the values of patients and family members.


Conflicts come in different guises, and the key to successful resolution is early identification and intervention. Every bioethics mediator needs to be prepared with skills to listen, "level the playing field," identify individual interests, explore options, and help craft a "principled resolution" -- a consensus that identifies a plan aligned with accepted ethical principles, legal stipulations, and moral rules and that charts a clear course of future intervention.


The organization of the book makes it ideal for teaching or as a handbook for the practitioner. It includes actual cases, modified to protect the privacy of patients, providers, and institutions; detailed case analyses; tools for step-by-step mediation; techniques for the mediator; sample chart notes; and a set of actual role plays with expert mediator and bioethics commentaries. The role plays include:


- discharge planning for a dying patient

- an at-risk pregnancy

- HIV and postsurgical complications in the ICU

- treatment for a dying adolescent

- dialysis and multiple systems failure
Expanded by two-thirds from the 2004 edition, the new edition features two new role plays, a new chapter on how to write chart notes, and a discussion of new understandings of the role of the clinical ethics consultant.

[more]
cover of Bioethics in the Courts: Analyszing the Bioethical Jurisprudence of International and National Courts

Bioethics in the Courts

Analyszing the Bioethical Jurisprudence of International and National Courts

Judit Sandor

Central European University Press, 2027

Courts worldwide are increasingly asked to resolve disputes that turn on bioethical questions: the moral status of embryos, the use of artificial reproductive technologies, or the boundaries of bodily autonomy. Yet the relationship between bioethics and judicial reasoning remains poorly understood. This volume examines how bioethical principles enter court decisions, identifying four distinct modes of interaction between the two fields and the challenges judges face in addressing scientific and moral complexity without specialist training. Drawing on case law from the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, Brazil, South Africa, and Malaysia, the book traces a broader shift from judicial avoidance to more active engagement with bioethics. Bringing together leading legal and bioethical scholars, this timely collection offers the first sustained account of how courts across legal traditions navigate the widening gap between biomedical innovation and existing law, and the moral environment in which both operate. Amid the erosion of the rules-based international order, bioethics can help courts strengthen the humanistic approach in health care and biomedical research.
[more]
cover of Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence

Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human

Forensic Ecologies of Violence

Joseph Pugliese

Duke University Press, 2020

In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities—from soil and orchards to animals and water—are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining occupied Palestine, Guantánamo, and sites of US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Pugliese challenges notions of human exceptionalism by arguing that more-than-human victims of war and colonialism are entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. He also draws on Indigenous epistemologies that invest more-than-human entities with judicial standing to argue for an ethico-legal framework that will enable the realization of ecological justice. Bringing the more-than-human world into the purview of justice, Pugliese makes visible the ecological effects of human war that would otherwise remain outside the domains of biopolitics and law.
[more]
cover of Black Lawyers, White Courts: The Soul of South African Law

Black Lawyers, White Courts

The Soul of South African Law

Kenneth S. Broun

Ohio University Press, 2000

In the struggle against apartheid, one often overlooked group of crusaders was the coterie of black lawyers who overcame the Byzantine system that the government established oftentimes explicitly to block the paths of its black citizens from achieving justice.

Now, in their own voices, we have the narratives of many of those lawyers as recounted in a series of oral interviews. Black Lawyers, White Courts is their story and the anti-apartheid story that has before now gone untold.

Professor Kenneth Broun conducted interviews with twenty-seven black South African lawyers. They were asked to tell about their lives, including their family backgrounds, education, careers, and their visions for the future. In many instances they also discussed their years in prison or exile, or under house arrest. Most told of both education and careers interrupted because of the ongoing struggle.

The story of the professional achievements of black lawyers in South Africa—indeed their very survival—provides an example of the triumph of individuals and, ultimately, of the law. Black Lawyers, White Courts is about South Africa, and about black professionals in that country, but the lessons its protagonists teach extend far beyond circumstances, geography, or race.

[more]
cover of Black Robes, White Coats: The Puzzle of Judicial Policymaking and Scientific Evidence

Black Robes, White Coats

The Puzzle of Judicial Policymaking and Scientific Evidence

Rebecca C. Harris

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Scientific evidence is commonplace in today's criminal trials. From hair and handwriting analysis to ink and DNA fingerprints, scientists have brought their world to bear on the justice system.

Combining political analysis, scientific reasoning, and an in-depth study of specific state supreme court cases, Black Robes, White Coats is an interdisciplinary examination of the tradition of "gatekeeping," the practice of deciding the admissibility of novel scientific evidence. Rebecca Harris systematically examines judicial policymaking in three areas forensic DNA, polygraphs, and psychological syndrome evidence to answer the question: Why is scientific evidence treated differently among various jurisdictions? These decisions have important implications for evaluating our judicial system and its ability to accurately develop scientific policy.

While the interaction of these professions occurs because the white coats often develop and ascertain knowledge deemed very useful to the black robes, Harris concludes that the black robes are well positioned to render appropriate rulings and determine the acceptability of harnessing a particular science for legal purposes.

First book to systematically gather and analyze judicial decisions on scientific admissibility

Analyzes several key cases including Arizona v. Bible and Kansas v. Marks

Includes examples of evidence in three appendices: forensic DNA, polygraph evidence, and syndrome evidence

Presents an original model of the gatekeeping process

[more]
cover of Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the "Post-Racial" Era

Blackhood Against the Police Power

Punishment and Disavowal in the "Post-Racial" Era

Tryon P. Woods

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of “race” and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary “post-racial” culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement’s singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today’s critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power—from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.
[more]
cover of Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea

Blue Legalities

The Life and Laws of the Sea

Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

The ocean and its inhabitants sketch and stretch our understandings of law in unexpected ways. Inspired by the blue turn in the social sciences and humanities, Blue Legalities explores how regulatory frameworks and governmental infrastructures are made, reworked, and contested in the oceans. Its interdisciplinary contributors analyze topics that range from militarization and Maori cosmologies to island building in the South China Sea and underwater robotics. Throughout, Blue Legalities illuminates the vast and unusual challenges associated with regulating the turbulent materialities and lives of the sea. Offering much more than an analysis of legal frameworks, the chapters in this volume show how the more-than-human ocean is central to the construction of terrestrial institutions and modes of governance. By thinking with the more-than-human ocean, Blue Legalities questions what we think we know—and what we don’t know—about oceans, our earthly planet, and ourselves.  

Contributors. Stacy Alaimo, Amy Braun, Irus Braverman, Holly Jean Buck, Jennifer L. Gaynor, Stefan Helmreich, Elizabeth R. Johnson, Stephanie Jones, Zsofia Korosy, Berit Kristoffersen, Jessica Lehman, Astrida Neimanis, Susan Reid, Alison Rieser, Katherine G. Sammler, Astrid Schrader, Kristen L. Shake, Phil Steinberg
[more]
cover of Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts

Blueprints for a House Divided

The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts

Robert M. Hayden

University of Michigan Press, 2000

If a house divided against itself cannot stand, does it help to declare it a condominium? This book examines why the common Yugoslav and Bosnian houses came to be divided, and how international diplomatic activities to resolve the conflicts have been misconceived. Through an analysis that combines cultural examination and constitutional study, Robert Hayden argues that almost everything that has happened in the former Yugoslavia since 1989 is congruent with the logic of the politicians who won election in the free and fair elections of 1990 and with the constitutional structures that these politicians have created. Once the idea of a common state for all of the Yugoslav peoples lost electorally, the conflicts that followed were so logical as to be inescapable. Throughout, the analysis relies almost exclusively on materials from the former Yugoslavia itself and on what participants said to each other in their own languages rather than in English to the world community. Drawing on the work of Max Weber and Tzvetan Todorov, this book also discusses the ethical and moral dangers of ignoring the probable consequences of actions that might be desirable in the abstract. A major conclusion is that the actions of the international community were never likely to achieve their stated goals, because they were based on premises unrelated to those driving the Yugoslav peoples themselves. This book addresses issues of interest in anthropology, political science, international relations, law, ethics, East European studies, and policy making.
[more]
cover of Bong Hits 4 Jesus: A Perfect Constitutional Storm in Alaska's Capital

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

A Perfect Constitutional Storm in Alaska's Capital

James C. Foster

University of Alaska Press, 2010

In January 2002, for the first time, the Olympic Torch Relay visited Alaska on its way to the Winter Games. When the relay runner and accompanying camera cars passed Juneau-Douglas High School, senior Joseph Frederick and several friends unfurled a fourteen-foot banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS."

An in-depth look at student rights within a public high school, this book chronicles the events that followed: Frederick's suspension, the subsequent suit against the school district, and, ultimately, the escalation of a local conflict into a federal case. Brought to life through interviews with the principal figures in the case, Bong Hits 4 Jesus is a gripping tale of the boundaries of free speech in an American high school.

[more]
cover of Book of the Disappeared: The Quest for Transnational Justice

Book of the Disappeared

The Quest for Transnational Justice

Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Book of the Disappeared confronts worldwide human rights violations of enforced disappearance and genocide and explores the global quest for justice with forceful, outstanding contributions by respected scholars, expert practitioners, and provocative contemporary artists. This profoundly humane book spotlights our historic inhumanity while offering insights for survival and transformation.

[more]
cover of Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, New Expanded Edition

Bound by Law?

Tales from the Public Domain, New Expanded Edition

Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins

Duke University Press, 2008

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.
[more]
cover of Braking the Special Interests: Trucking Deregulation and the Politics of Policy Reform

Braking the Special Interests

Trucking Deregulation and the Politics of Policy Reform

Dorothy Robyn

University of Chicago Press, 1987

In 1980 Congress voted to eliminate the federal system of protective regulation over the powerful trucking industry, despite fierce opposition. This upset marked a rare example in American politics of diffuse public interests winning out over powerful economic lobbies. In Braking the Special Interests Dorothy Robyn draws upon firsthand observations of formal proceedings and behind-the-scenes maneuverings to illuminate the role of political strategy in the landmark trucking battle.

Robyn focuses her analysis on four elements of strategy responsible for the deregulator's victory—elements that are essential, she argues, to any successful policy battle against entrenched special interests: the effective use of economic data and analysis to make a strong case for the merits of reform; the formation and management of a diverse lobbying coalition of firms and interest groups; presidential bargaining to gain political leverage; and transition schemes to reduce uncertainty and cushion the blow to losers.

Drawing on political and economic theory, Braking the Special Interests is an immensely rich and readable study of political strategy and skill, with general insights relevant to current political battles surrounding trade, agriculture, and tax policies. Robyn's interdisciplinary work will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of politics, economics, and public policy.
[more]
cover of Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America

Brandishing the First Amendment

Commercial Expression in America

Tamara R. Piety

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Over the past two decades, corporations and other commercial entities have used strategic litigation to win more expansive First Amendment protections for commercial speech—from the regulation of advertising to the role corporate interests play in the political process, most recently debated in the Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Tamara R. Piety, a nationally known critic of commercial and corporate speech, argues that such an expansion of First Amendment speech rights imperils public health, safety, and welfare; the reliability of commercial and consumer information; the stability of financial markets; and the global environment. 

Beginning with an evaluation of commonly evoked philosophical justifications for freedom of expression, Piety determines that, while these are appropriate for the protection of an individual’s rights, they should not be applied too literally to commercial expression because the corporate person is not the moral equivalent of the human person. She then gathers evidence from public relations and marketing, behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive studies to show how overly permissive extensions of First Amendment protections to commercial expression limit governmental power to address some of the major social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time.

“The timeliness of the topic and the provision of original positions are sure to make the book a valuable contribution that should draw much attention.”
—Kevin W. Saunders, Michigan State University

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cover of Break Point: Two Minnesota Athletes and the Road to Title IX

Break Point

Two Minnesota Athletes and the Road to Title IX

Sheri Brenden

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

How two teenage girls in Minnesota jump-started a revolution in high school athletics

Peggy Brenden, a senior, played tennis. Toni St. Pierre, a junior, was a cross country runner and skier. All these two talented teenagers wanted was a chance to compete on their high school sports teams. But in Minnesota in 1972 the only way on the field with the boys ran through a federal court—so that was where the girls went. Break Point tells the story, for the first time, of how two teenagers took on the unequal system of high school athletics, setting a legal precedent for schools nationwide before the passage of Title IX.

As Peggy’s younger sister, author Sheri Brenden is uniquely positioned to convey the human drama of the case, the stakes, and the consequences for two young women facing the legal machinery of the state, in court and in school. In an account that begins with Peggy painstakingly typing her appeal to the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union and concludes with a long view of what Brenden v. Independent School District 742 set in motion, Sheri Brenden summons the salient details of this landmark case as it makes its way through the courts. Peggy and Toni, coaches, administrators, and experts testify before Judge Miles Lord, whose decision, upheld in a precedent-setting appeal, would change these girls’ lives and open up athletic opportunities for innumerable others.

Grounded in newspaper coverage, court records, and interviews, Brenden’s deeply researched, scrupulously reported book is at heart the story of two talented teenage girls whose pluck and determination—and, often, heartache—led to a victory much greater than any high school championship.

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cover of Brexit and the UK Constitution

Brexit and the UK Constitution

John Springford, Catherine Barnard, Joël Reland, and Jonathan Thomas

Haus Publishing, 2026

Essays on Brexit's impact on the UK economy.

With a foreword by renowned political sociologist Katy Hayward, Brexit and the UK Constitution offers a grounded, factual, and authoritative contribution to understanding Brexit’s implications ten years on from the referendum. John Springford considers significant developments in trade, investment, the labor market and immigration, and productivity, and offers a refreshing evidence-based account of how the UK economy has changed outside the EU. Catherine Barnard and Joel Reland examine the legal and regulatory landscape post-Brexit and assess what “taking back control” has meant in practice for the United Kingdom's legal landscape. Finally, Jonathan Thomas looks at immigration since 2016, examining policy and trends since the referendum and considering the impact that Brexit has had on both immigration to, and emigration from, the United Kingdom. He focuses on what has really happened, moving beyond rhetoric and soundbites to provide an unbiased and non-partisan account. 

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cover of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry

Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets

How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry

Barry B. LePatner with Robert E. Wright and Timothy C. Jacobson

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Across the nation, construction projects large and small—from hospitals to schools to simple home improvements—are spiraling out of control. Delays and cost overruns have come to seem “normal,” even as they drain our wallets and send our blood pressure skyrocketing. In Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, prominent construction attorney Barry B. LePatner builds a powerful case for change in America’s sole remaining “mom and pop” industry—an industry that consumes $1.23 trillion and wastes at least $120 billion each year.

With three decades of experience representing clients that include eminent architects and engineers, as well as corporations, institutions, and developers, LePatner has firsthand knowledge of the bad management, ineffective supervision, and insufficient investment in technology that plagues the risk-averse construction industry. In an engaging and direct style, he here pinpoints the issues that underlie the industry’s woes while providing practical tips for anyone in the business of building, including advice on the precise language owners should use during contract negotiations.

Armed with Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, everyone involved in the purchase or renovation of a building or any structure—from homeowners seeking to remodel to civic developers embarking on large-scale projects—has the information they need to change this antiquated industry, one project at a time.
 
“LePatner describes what is wrong with the current system and suggests ways that architects can help—by retaking their rightful place as master builders.”—Fred A. Bernstein, Architect Magazine
 
“Every now and then, a major construction project is completed on time and on budget. Everyone is amazed. . . . Barry LePatner thinks this exception should become the rule. . . . A swift kick to the construction industry.”—James R. Hagerty, Wall Street Journal  
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