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Experimenting With The Consumer exposes the hazards of the mass-market experimentation in which every American consumer and worker is unwittingly tapped for product risk data by manufacturers, scientists, and regulators. Vioxx, Heparin, Avandia, Paxil, fen-phen, estrogens, silicone implants, pacemakers, formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, C60 buckyballs in coatings ... the headlines are increasingly filled with hidden risks coming to light in popular products years after federal agencies approve them for the American public. Shapo shows readers how get past unreasonable trust or fear and make the best risk-management choices for themselves and their families. He walks them through what questions to ask before consenting to be in a clinical trial; how to evaluate the implied bold-print claims against the small-print disclosures in advertisements for medical products; how to uncover product and environmental risks in their homes, workplaces, supermarkets, and neighborhoods; how to assess and control product risk while maximizing consumer choice and benefit; how to pressure government to tighten consumer protection; and how to seek legal redress.

Semerdjian (Islamic and Middle Eastern history, Whitman College) analyzes how the shari'a courts of Ottoman Aleppo (located in modern- day Syria) treated the crime of zina, which has been defined as "any sexual intercourse between persons who are not in a state of legal matrimony or concubinage," and is thus an umbrella category for adultery, prostitution, procurement, abduction, incest, bestiality, sodomy, rape, and more. After conducting an archaeology of the treatment of zina in Islamic juridical writings, she then compares the juridical literature of the fatwas of Ebu's Su`ud Efendi, supreme religious leader of the Ottoman Empire from 1545 to 1574, and the imperial law codes, the kanunnames, to the actual practice of the courts of Aleppo. Her study shows how the Islamist courts of Aleppo were flexible in their interpretation and application of doctrine and how they often favored local societal norms for treating deviancy over regulations laid down by the state and religious authorities.

A first-hand account of the failure of humanitarian intervention, from Somalia to Iraq. The idea that we should "do something" to help those suffering in far-off places is the main impulse driving those who care about human rights. Yet from Kosovo to Iraq, military interventions have gone disastrously wrong. In this groundbreaking new book, Conor Foley explores how the doctrine of humanitarian intervention has been used to allow states to invade other nations in the name of human rights. Drawing on his own experience of working in over a dozen conflict and post-conflict zones, Foley shows how the growing influence of international law has been used to override the sovereignty of the poorest countries in the world. The Thin Blue Line describes how in the last twenty years humanitarianism has emerged as a multibillion dollar industry that has played a leading role in defining humanitarian crises, and shaping the foreign policy of Western governments and the United Nations. Yet, too often, this has been informed by myths and assumptions that rest on an ill-informed post-imperial arrogance. Movements set up to show solidarity with the powerless and dispossessed have ended up betraying them instead.

How to restore the can-do spirit that made America great, from the author of the best-selling The Death of Common Sense. Americans are losing the freedom to make sense maintain order in the classroom, managers are trained to avoid candor, schools ban the game of tag, and companies plaster inane warnings on everything: "Remove Baby Before Folding Stroller."  Philip K. Howard's urgent and elegant argument is full of examples, often darkly humorous. He describes the historical and cultural forces that led to this mess, and he lays out the basic shift in approach needed to fix it. Today we are flooded with rules and legal threats that prevent us from taking responsibility and using our common sense. We must rebuild boundaries of law that affirmatively protect an open field of freedom. The stories here will ring true to every reader. The analysis is powerful, and the solution in this seminal book, is the vitality of American culture.

A renowned attorney and political critic, Bruce Fein reveals the dangers faced by our Constitution and our nation courtesy of the Bush Administration and a Congress asleep at the wheel.  In blistering detail, he deconstructs the policies of Bush in the War on Terror--from the flouting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to the crippling of the Great Writ of habeas corpus--and forecasts that the damage done is unlikely to be repaired by a kindhearted successor.  As we head toward the next national election, there are questions regarding matters more grave than education, healthcare, and even Iraq, questions that involve the very foundations of our government and the degrees to which they have been undermined, either actively or passively, by nearly everyone in power today.  By exploring the constitutional crises of the past--Lincoln and habeas corpus to Nixon and Watergate--Fein is able to begin to answer those questions and to discern a practical and rational way out of the current morass.

A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States--laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races.  Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest.  Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

The editors (professors of law at the U. of Victoria, Canada, and Macquarie U., Australia) present a volume that reflects the growing interest among Canadian legal historians with comparative studies of English settler colonies and the rule of law. Focused primarily on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (but with some discussion of the United States and South Africa), the volume's 13 chapters address the following themes: the differing reception and translation of common law doctrines, the influence of local histories on legal developments; judicial biography; how law operates "at the boundaries" (e.g. towards Aboriginal people in Australia or at sea); and "constitutionalism" in the sense of the fundamental construction of the legal order.

The fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court has special resonance today as we debate the limits of presidential authority. The Supreme Court has generated many dramatic stories, none more so than the one that began on February 5, 1937. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, confident in his recent landslide reelection and frustrated by a Court that had overturned much of his New Deal legislation, stunned Congress and the American people with his announced intention to add six new justices. Even though the now-famous “court packing” scheme divided his own party, almost everyone assumed FDR would get his way and reverse the Court’s conservative stance and long-standing laissez-faire support of corporate America, so persuasive and powerful had he become. In the end, however, a Supreme Court justice, Owen Roberts, who cast off precedent in the interests of principle, and a Democratic senator from Montana, Burton K. Wheeler, led an effort that turned an apparently unstoppable proposal into a humiliating rejection—and preserved the Constitution. FDR v. Constitution is the colorful story behind 168 days that riveted—and reshaped—the nation. Burt Solomon skillfully recounts the major New Deal initiatives of FDR’s first term and the rulings that overturned them, chronicling as well the politics and personalities on the Supreme Court—from the brilliant octogenarian Louis Brandeis, to the politically minded chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, to the mercurial Roberts, whose “switch in time saved nine.” The ebb and flow of one of the momentous set pieces in American history placed the inner workings of the nation’s capital on full view as the three branches of our government squared off. Ironically for FDR, the Court that emerged from this struggle shifted on its own to a liberal attitude, where it would largely remain for another seven decades. Placing the greatest miscalculation of FDR’s career in context past and present, Solomon offers a reminder of the perennial temptation toward an imperial presidency that the founders had always feared.

The dramatic growth of government over the course of the twentieth century since the New Deal prompts concern among libertarians and conservatives and also among those who worry about government's costs, efficiency, and quality of service. These concerns, combined with rising confidence in private markets, motivate the widespread shift of federal and state government work to private organizations. This shift typically alters only who performs the work, not who pays or is ultimately responsible for it. "Government by contract" now includes military intelligence, environmental monitoring, prison management, and interrogation of terrorism suspects. Outsourcing government work raises questions of accountability. What role should costs, quality, and democratic oversight play in contracting out government work? What tools do citizens and consumers need to evaluate the effectiveness of government contracts? How can the work be structured for optimal performance as well as compliance with public values?  Government by Contract explains the phenomenon and scope of government outsourcing and sets an agenda for future research attentive to workforce capacities as well as legal, economic, and political concerns.

In the mid-1940s, once the full impact of World War II was assessed, the world witnessed major legal developments in both modern trade and human rights. Since then, volumes have been written about modern trade law, and human rights law has seen an equal amount of attention. While these topics constitute two of the most active spheres in international law, follow similar intellectual trajectories, and often feature the same key actors and arenas, neither field has actively engaged with the other. They co-exist in relative isolation at best, peppered by occasional hostile debates. It has come to be a given that pro-trade laws are not good for human rights, and legislation that protects human rights hampers vibrant international trade.  In a bold departure from this canon, Just Trade makes a case for reaching a middle-ground between these two fields, acknowledging their co-existence and the significant points at which they overlap. Using actual examples from many of the 35 nations of the Western Hemisphere, the authors — one a human rights scholar and the other specializing in trade law — carefully combine their expertise to examine human rights policies involving conscripted child labor, sustainable development, promotion of health, equality of women, human trafficking, indigenous peoples, poverty, citizenship, and economic sanctions, never overlooking the very real human rights problems that arise from international trade.  However, instead of viewing the two kinds of law as isolated, polar, and sometimes hostile opposites, Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol and Stephen J. Powell make powerful suggestions for how these intersections may be navigated to promote an international marketplace that embraces both liberal trade and liberal protection of human rights.

With the Supreme Court's landmark Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955, American education changed forever. But Brown was just the beginning, and Raymond Wolters contends that its best intentions have been taken to unnecessary extremes."

In this study, a scholar who has long observed the traumas of school desegregation uncovers the changes and difficulties with which public education has dealt over the last fifty years - and argues that some judicial decisions were ill-advised. Dealing candidly with matters usually considered taboo in academic discourse, Wolters argues that the Supreme Court acted correctly and in accordance with public sentiment in Brown but that it later took a wrong turn by equating desegregation with integration.

Retracing the history of desegregation and integration in America's schools, Wolters distinguishes between several Court decisions, explaining that while Brown called for desegregation by requiring that schools deal with students on a racially nondiscriminatory basis, subsequent decisions - Green, Swann, Keyes - required actual integration through racial balancing. He places these decisions in the context of educational reform in the 1950s that sought to encourage bright students through advanced placement and honors courses - courses in which African American and Hispanic students were less likely to be enrolled. Then with the racial unrest of the 1960s, the pursuit of academic excellence yielded to concerns for uplifting disadvantaged youths and ensuring the predominance of middle-class peer groups in schools.

Today, a California resident can incorporate her shipping business in Delaware, register her ships in Panama, hire her employees from Hong Kong, place her earnings in an asset-protection trust formed in the Cayman Islands, and enter into a same-sex marriage in Massachusetts or Canada--all the while enjoying the California sunshine and potentially avoiding many facets of the state's laws. In this book, Erin O'Hara and Larry E. Ribstein explore a new perspective on law, viewing it as a product for which people and firms can shop, regardless of geographic borders. The authors consider the structure and operation of the market this creates, the economic, legal, and political forces influencing it, and the arguments for and against a robust market for law. Through jurisdictional competition, law markets promise to improve our laws and, by establishing certainty, streamline the operation of the legal system. But the law market also limits governments' ability to enforce regulations and protect citizens from harmful activities. Given this tradeoff, O'Hara and Ribstein argue that simple contractual choice-of-law rules can help maximize the benefits of the law market while tempering its social costs. They extend their insights to a wide variety of legal problems, including corporate governance, securities, franchise, trust, property, marriage, living will, surrogacy, and general contract regulations. The Law Market is a wide-ranging and novel analysis for all lawyers, policymakers, legislators, and businesses who need to understand the changing role of law in an increasingly mobile world.

The People vs. O. J. Simpson ranks indisputably as the trial of the century. As the Los Angeles Superior Court's media liaison, Jerrianne Hayslett had unprecedented access to the trial - and met with Judge Lance Ito daily - as she attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully, to mediate between the court and members of the media and to balance their interests. In Anatomy of a Trial, she takes readers behind the scenes to shed new light on people and proceedings and to show how the media and the trial participants changed the court-media landscape to the detriment of the public's understanding of the judicial system.

As new technologies are created, terrorist groups are developing new methods of attack by using the Internet as their weapon and cyberspace as their battlefield. Since the Internet holds no territorial boundaries, nation-states have become increasingly vulnerable to cyberthreats and terrorist attacks. With almost no leads on the terrorist group at fault, it has become increasingly difficult for law enforcement and military officials to identify and effectively respond to attacks through cyberspace.

In Cyberthreats: The Emerging Fault Lines of the Nation State, Susan W. Brenner, a notable authority on cybercrime and technology provides a revealing look at how, and why, criminals, terrorists, and foreign militaries use cyberspace in launching attacks with little impunity. She discusses why the current division of labor between law enforcement and the military does not provide effective protection for nation-states, and why we are all at risk.

For over a decade, the Centre for Legislative Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands has studied the relationship between legislation and all kinds of law originating from sources other than the legislature. Then the scholars there began searching for a suitable partner for their Center; finding none, they invited individual scholars with the same orientation to visit and collaborate. Thus was the anthology spawned. The topics include revisiting in a global setting the Ehrlich-Kelsen debate over whether there can be law without the state, state and non-state regulatory activities in Britain related to nano-technological development, and the influence of court judgments on non-state law.