The Internet revolution has come.  Some say it has gone.  What was responsible for its birth?  Who is responsible for its demise? 

In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect.  The choice Lawrence Lessig presents is not between progress and the status quo.  It is between progress and a new Dark Ages, in which our capacity to create is confined by an architecture of control and a society more perfectly monitored and filtered than any in history.  Important avenues of thought and free expression will increasingly be closed off.  The door to the future of ideas is being shut just as technology makes an extraordinary future possible. 

With an uncanny blend of knowledge, insight, and eloquence, Lawrence Lessig has written a profoundly important guide to the care and feeding of innovation in a connected world.  Whether it provides to be a road map or an elegy is up to us. 

In the fall of 1971, when William Rehnquist was nominated to fill an associate justice seat on the Supreme Court, the Senate raised no major objections, and a little-known attorney general suddenly found himself at the pinnacle of the judiciary.  It seemed, at the time, a straightforward choice of a relatively young, academically outstanding and politically seasoned lawyer who shared Richard Nixon's philosophy of "strict constructionism."  In fact, as Nixon's White House counsel John Dean reveals here for the first time, the choice was anything but Rehnquist's nomination was the result of a dramatic and very Nixonian rollercoaster.  Rehnquist was a last-minute substitution, an unlikely longshot who had once been dismissed by Nixon as a "clown."  Only John Dean--who was Rehnquist's champion at the time--knows the full, improbable story. 

Although passed into law with high expectations, the Americans With Disabilities Act has mostly failed in enabling those with mental disabilities to fight discrimination in the workplace.  In Hollow Promises, Susan Stefan explores the reasons for this failure and points to how the courts, government, and employers may finally make good on the ADA's seemingly hollow promises of rights.  Those with mental disabilities, like most people, want to work so that they may support themselves and find respect and personal fulfillment.  But because of engrained prejudices against those with a record of disability, obtaining and holding a job can be an epic task.  This book witnesses the difficulties that people with mental disabilities have in finding and keeping employment and describes how the ADA has affected this problem.  Filled with detailed descriptions of employment cases and sharp analyses of the law, this provocative book is essential reading for lawyers, employers, therapists, people with mental disabilities, and all those seeking just employment practice. 

What was it in Sandra Day O'Connor's background and early life that helped make her the woman she is today--the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America?  In this beautiful, illuminating, and unusual book, Sandra Day O'Connor, with her brother, Alan, tells the story of the Day family and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona.  Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, about people, self-reliance, and survival, and the reader will learn how the values of the Lazy B shaped them and their lives.

As defender of both the righteous and the not-so-righteous, Alan Dershowitz has become perhaps the most renowned and outspoken attorney in the land.  A dedicated champion of civil liberty and the rule of law, he has earned the respect of admirers and critics alike for the way he has chosen to live his life and pursue a truly unparalleled career as teacher, lawyer, author, and scholar.  In Letters to a Young Lawyer, he eloquently distills the wealth of his experiences and the passion of his beliefs into essays about life, law, and what it means to be a good lawyer and a good person. 

This first full-length biography of Clarence Thomas explores the controversial Supreme Court justice's remarkable rise to the nation's highest court.  Andrew Peyton Thomas (no relation) traces Thomas's family roots back to slavery, the Civil War and the long aftermath of Jim Crow. 

The author has turned up information that Clarence Thomas no doubt would rather not see in print--how he discussed Roe v. Wade prior to his confirmation hearings with at least three people, and how he benefited from affirmative action at every state of his career.  In fact, Justice Thomas tried to quash this book and urged many of his friends not to cooperate with the author.  It is ironic, therefore, that after peeling away all the clichés about his subject, Andrew Peyton Thomas has given us a portrait of a flawed but admirable man who triumphed over racism and slander and his own demons in charting an independent course and doing things "his way." 
 

The political system that emerged from the world's first great democratic experiment is the world's first great democratic experiment is unique--no other well-established democracy has copied it.  How does the American constitutional system function in comparison to other democratic systems?  How could our system be altered to achieve more democratic ends?  To what extent did the Framers of the Constitution build features into our political system that militate against significant democratic reform.

Refusing to accept the status of the American Constitution as a sacred text, Dahl challenges us all to think critically about the origins of our political system and to consider the opportunities for creating a more democratic society.