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Dawn of Desegregation : J.A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott by by Ophelia De Laine Gona
Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2011
KF228.B75 G66 2011 Balcony

At the forefront of a new era in American history, Briggs v. Elliott was one of the first five school segregation lawsuits argued consecutively before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952. The resulting collective 1954 landmark decision, known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, struck down legalized segregation in American public schools. The genesis of Briggs was in 1947, when the black community of Clarendon County, South Carolina, took action against the abysmally poor educational opportunities provided for their children. In a move that would define him as an early--although unsung--champion for civil rights justice, Joseph A. De Laine, a pastor and school principal, led his neighbors to challenge South Carolina's "separate but equal" practice of racial segregation in public schools. Their lawsuit, Briggs, provided the impetus that led to Brown.

Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the failure of public conversation in America by Alan Ackerman
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011
KF228.H45 A25 2011 Balcony

In an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment was not a legitimate conversation on public issues but an attack on her reputation. This intriguing book offers a many-faceted examination of Hellman's infamous suit and explores what it tells us about tensions between privacy and self-expression, freedom and restraint in public language, and what can and cannot be said in public in America.

A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach us About Justice by Kenji Yoshino
New York: Ecco, 2011
PR3028 .Y67 2011 Basement

Yoshino, celebrated law professor and author of the acclaimed memoir "Covering," offers a fresh reading of a dozen seminal Shakespeare plays to show how they provide parables of justice relevant to our lives today.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
New York: Basic Books, 1999
BD418.3 .L35 1999 Basement

Three major findings of cognitive science cast doubt on the past 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Lakoff and Johnson propose to rebuild philosophy from the ground up, starting from clearly known facts about the mind.

The Last Battle of the Civil War: United States Versus Lee, 1861-1883 by Anthony J. Gaughan
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011
KF228.L42 G38 2011 Balcony

Seventeen years after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the Supreme Court was the scene of one final, dramatic confrontation between the Lee family and the United States government. In The Last Battle of the Civil War, Anthony J. Gaughan recounts the fascinating saga of United States v. Lee, known to history as the ''Arlington Case.''

In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010
BD225 .B66 2010 Basement

Marcus Boon ably conveys complex concepts in a lucid style, connects the western habits of copying with related behaviors and laws, particularly copyright law, to demonstrate the centrality of the concept in everyday life. He muses on the meaning of real versus copy and the values assigned to both, using everyday examples in commercial culture, such as the ubiquitous Louis Vuitton bag and its copies, and adeptly demonstrating that a range of meaning and values concerning copying abound, and that, on closer examination, copying might not be an immoral activity. He does this, in part, by contrasting western values and legal models with Buddhist notions of compassion, emptiness, and abundance.

Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression by Douglas A. Irwin
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011
HF1756 .I685 2011 Basement

The Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which raised U.S. duties on hundreds of imported goods to record levels, is America's most infamous trade law. It is often associated with--and sometimes blamed for--the onset of the Great Depression, the collapse of world trade, and the global spread of protectionism in the 1930s. Even today, the ghosts of congressmen Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley haunt anyone arguing for higher trade barriers; almost single-handedly, they made protectionism an insult rather than a compliment. In Peddling Protectionism, Douglas Irwin provides the first comprehensive history of the causes and effects of this notorious measure, explaining why it largely deserves its reputation for combining bad politics and bad economics and harming the U.S. and world economies during the Depression.

International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law edited by Orna Ben-Naftali
Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011
KZ6471 .I59 2011 Basement

Published in four volumes each year, The Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law draw upon lectures given each summer at the European University Instituted Florence in the fields of European Union law and human rights law. Each annual set comprises a book on human rights and a book on EU law, authored by distinguished scholars, and a further two thematic collections featuring contributions by leading academics and practitioners in each of these fields.

A Distinct Judicial Power: The Origins of an Independent Judiciary, 1606-1787 by Scott Douglas Gerber
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011
KF8775 .G47 2011 Balcony

A Distinct Judicial Power: The Origins of an Independent Judiciary, 1606-1787, by Scott Douglas Gerber, provides the first comprehensive critical analysis of the origins of judicial independence in the United States. Part I examines the political theory of an independent judiciary. Gerber begins chapter 1 by tracing the intellectual origins of a distinct judicial power from Aristotle's theory of a mixed constitution to John Adams's modifications of Montesquieu. Part II chronicles how each of the original thirteen states and their colonial antecedents treated their respective judiciaries. This portion, presented in thirteen separate chapters, brings together a wealth of information about the judicial power between 1606 and 1787, and sometimes beyond. Part III, the concluding segment, explores the influence the colonial and early state experiences had on the federal model that followed and on the nature of the regime itself.

Hope and Despair in the American city: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh by Gerald Grant
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009
LB2822.83.N8 G73 2009 Basement

In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities-his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina-in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The school system in Syracuse is a slough of despair, the one in Raleigh a beacon of hope. Grant argues that the chief reason for Raleigh’s educational success is the integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse’s decline has been the growing class and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty.