Emre Bayamlioglu
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
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.
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.
Stan Soocher
University Press of New England, 2015
Linda Hamilton Krieger, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Leo Katz
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Ann Arnett Ferguson
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Patrick C. File
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
Kerry Sheridan
Rutgers University Press, 2004
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.
Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Bradley A. Hansen
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Christoph G. Paulus and John A. E. Pottow, Editors
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021
Nathaniel Grow
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Madelaine Adelman
Vanderbilt University Press, 2017
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.
Thomas A. Kerns
Oregon State University Press, 2021
Cary Wolfe
University of Chicago Press, 2012
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.
Barry Cooper
University of Missouri Press, 2009
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.
Richard B. Sobol
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Rachel Augustine Potter
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter
University of Chicago Press, 2015
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.
Paul R. Dimond
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Michael H. Cohen
University of Michigan Press, 2000

Edited by Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Dave Gordon and Steve Tombs
Pluto Press, 2004

Terence C. Halliday
University of Chicago Press, 1987

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.
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.
Stephen P. Garvey, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
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
Daphne Barak-Erez
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Pamela Cravez
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Nancy Neveloff Dubler
Vanderbilt University Press, 2011
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.

Judit Sandor
Central European University Press, 2027
Joseph Pugliese
Duke University Press, 2020

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.
Rebecca C. Harris
Rutgers University Press, 2008
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
Tryon P. Woods
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson, editors
Duke University Press, 2019
Robert M. Hayden
University of Michigan Press, 2000
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.
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.
Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins
Duke University Press, 2008

Dorothy Robyn
University of Chicago Press, 1987
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

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.
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.
Barry B. LePatner with Robert E. Wright and Timothy C. Jacobson
University of Chicago Press, 2007