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On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession.

Addressing all these problems and more in a ringing critique is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades, with the scarce jobs offering starting salaries well below what is needed to handle such a debt load. At the heart of the problem, Tamanaha argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools—driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.

Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha has provided the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them.

In the wake of vast social and economic changes, the nuclear family has lost its dominance, both as an ideal and in practice. Some welcome this shift, while others see civilization itself in peril—but few move beyond ideology to develop a nuanced understanding of how families function in society. In this provocative book, Margaret F. Brinig draws on research from a variety of disciplines to offer a distinctive study of family dynamics and social policy.

Concentrating on legal reform, Brinig examines a range of subjects, including cohabitation, custody, grandparent visitation, and domestic violence. She concludes that conventional legal reforms and the social programs they engender ignore social capital: the trust and support given to families by a community. Traditional families generate much more social capital than nontraditional ones, Brinig concludes, which leads to clear rewards for the children. Firmly grounded in empirical research, Family, Law, and Community argues that family policy can only be effective if it is guided by an understanding of the importance of social capital and the advantages held by families that accrue it.

DISTINGUISHED PUBLICATION AWARD FOR THE NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION'S COMMUNICATION AND LAW DIVISION

The First Amendment: protected by law, threatened by fear in the Roberts Supreme Court.

In Fear and the First Amendment: Controversial Cases of the Roberts Court, Kevin A. Johnson and Craig R. Smith offer a deeply considered examination of the ways fear figures in First Amendment questions. Bringing together literature on theories of fear in rhetorical and philosophical traditions, Johnson and Smith focus on the rulings from the Roberts Court, which form a pivotal era of dramatic precedents. Each chapter analyzes one or more First Amendment cases and a variety of related fears—whether evidentiary or not—that pertain to a given case.

These cases include Morse v. Frederick, which takes up the competing fears of school administrators’ loss of authority and students’ loss of free speech rights. The authors touch on corporate funding of elections in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, from the fear of corporate influence on electoral politics to corporate fears of alienating their consumers by backing political candidates. They explore religious freedom and fears of homosexuality in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Similarly, in Snyder v. Phelps, the authors delve further into fears of God, death, emotional distress, failing as a parent, and losing one’s reputation. Next, they investigate parents’ anxieties about violence in video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Finally, Johnson and Smith examine the role of fear in indecent, obscene, and graphic communication in three cases: FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, and United States v. Stevens.

Together these cases reveal fear to be an endemic factor in the rhetoric of First Amendment cases. This fascinating and original work will appeal to current legal practitioners and students of law, rhetoric, philosophy, and the First Amendment.
 

Learning how to give and receive feedback is fundamental to the development of every student and professional. Yet few of us are ever taught anything like “feedback skills.” 

This book, which is the first in the Feedback Loops series, is designed to change that. Here is what students who have taken the University of Michigan Law School course on which the series is based have said about it:

• “One of the most memorable and useful classes I have taken in law school!”

• “Excellent, full stop.”

• “This class was always a fun highlight of my week.”

Female Gladiators is the first book to examine legal and social battles over the right of women to participate with men in contact sports. The impetus to begin legal proceedings was the 1972 enactment of Title IX, which prohibited discrimination in educational settings, but it was the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the equal rights amendments of state constitutions that ultimately opened doors. Despite court rulings, however, many in American society resisted—and continue to resist—allowing girls in dugouts and other spaces traditionally defined as male territories. 

Inspired, women and girls began to demand access to the contact sports which society had previously deemed too strenuous or violent for them to play. When the leagues continued to bar girls simply because they were not boys, the girls went to court. Sarah K. Fields's Female Gladiators is the only book to examine the legal and social battles over gender and contact sport that continue to rage today.

Through vivid interviews amplified by the author's responses and commentary, these attorneys reveal aspects of their internal experience that they have never talked about until now. How do capital defenders manage the weight of the responsibility they carry? To what extent do they experience symptoms of trauma in the aftermath of losing a client to execution or as a result of the cumulative effects of engaging in capital defense work? What motivates them, and what do they draw upon, in order to keep engaging in such emotionally demanding work? Have they considered practicing other types of law? What can we learn from capital defenders not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance?

Through vivid interviews amplified by the author's responses and commentary, these attorneys reveal aspects of their internal experience that they have never talked about until now. How do capital defenders manage the weight of the responsibility they carry? To what extent do they experience symptoms of trauma in the aftermath of losing a client to execution or as a result of the cumulative effects of engaging in capital defense work? What motivates them, and what do they draw upon, in order to keep engaging in such emotionally demanding work? Have they considered practicing other types of law? What can we learn from capital defenders not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance?

Biosocial criminology—and biosocial criminologists—focuses on both the environmental and biological factors that contribute to antisocial behavior. Importantly, these two domains are not separate parts of an equation but pieces of the same puzzle that fit together for a complete picture of the causes of crime/antisocial behavior. 

Fitting the Facts of Crime applies a biopsychosocial lens to the “13 facts of crime” identified by John Braithwaite in his classic book, Crime, Shame and Reintegration. The authors unpack established facts—about gender and sex, age, environment, education, class, social bonds and associations, stress, and other influences—providing both empirical research and evidence from biopsychosocial criminology to address the etiology behind these facts and exactly how they are related to deviant behavior.

With their approach, the authors show how biopsychosocial criminology can be a unifying framework to enrich our understanding of the most robust and well-established topics in the field. In so doing, they demonstrate how biological and psychological findings can be responsibly combined with social theories to lend new insight into existing inquiries and solutions. Designed to become a standard text for criminology in general, Fitting the Facts of Crime introduces key concepts and applies them to real-world situations.

A revelatory study of how Black churches turn the financial system back against predatory lenders.

When American churches face financial difficulties, a disproportionately high number of Black churches reorganize under chapter 11 bankruptcy. There are no easy explanations for this distinction: not location, denomination, leadership structure, or the reasons for the loans. In Forgive Us Our Debts, legal scholar Pamela Foohey asks why, then, Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for chapter 11 bankruptcy every year. 

Drawing on case studies of six Black churches and one white church, and 150 interviews with church leaders, members, and attorneys, Foohey finds answers in a long history of predatory lending. Unable to negotiate with recalcitrant loan officers, Black churches turn to the legal system to force reasonable concessions from lenders to prevent the stripping of their wealth and the destruction of their communities. While the structural discrimination remains, these churches have found in the bankruptcy system a refuge and some power to fight back.

• discusses information law as part of a continuum of interrelated issues rather than an assortment of discrete topics;
• examines information law in the context of different types of libraries;
• delves into the manifold legal issues raised when interacting with patrons and communities, from intellectual freedom topics like censorship and public activities in the library to the legal issues surrounding materials and information access;
• elucidates operational and management legal issues, including library security, interacting with law enforcement, advocacy, lobbying, funding, human resources, and liability;
• promotes literacy of the law, its structures, and its terminology as a professional skill;
• gives readers the tools to find and understand different sources of legal authority and demonstrates how to interpret them when they conflict; and
• explores information law as a national and cross-national issue.

From Coexistence to Conquest seeks to explain how the Arab-Israeli conflict developed by looking beyond strict legalism to the men behind the policies adopted by the Great Powers at the dawn of the twentieth century. It controversially argues that Zionism was adopted by the British Government in its 1917 Balfour Declaration primarily as an immigration device and that it can be traced back to the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration and the Alien’s Act 1905.

The book places the violent reaction of the Palestine Arabs to mass Jewish immigration in the context of Zionism, highlighting the findings of several British commissions of inquiry which recommended that Britain abandon its policy. The book also revisits the controversies over the question of self-determination, and the partition of Palestine.

The Chapter on the 1948 conflict seeks to update international lawyers on the scholarship of Israel’s ‘new’ historians and reproduces some of the horrific accounts of the atrocities that took place. The penultimate chapter argues that Israel was created through an act of conquest or subjugation. The book concludes with a sobering analysis of the conflict arguing that neither Jews nor Arabs were to blame for starting it.