Featured Acquisitions

Featured Acquisitions - August 2004


		Disabling America: The Unintended Consequences of the Government's Protection of the Handicapped by Greg Perry Nashville : WND Books, c2003 HV1553 .P465 2003 Basement One disabled man gives his personal and powerful account of the crippling effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Despite what many politicians would like you to believe, the Americans with Disabilities Act is a travesty of government regulation--it actually harms businesses, taxpayers, and, ironically, the people it's supposed to help: disabled Americans. In fact, it is such a disaster that Greg Perry, a man who himself was born disabled, declares in this eye-opening book, "I am so very grateful that I was born long before the ADA was put into law." Feisty and frank, Perry exposes the dangerous consequences of this supposedly compassionate law and shows through personal accounts and sobering statistics that quality of public life for the disabled hasn't been improved since the ADA was signed into law; instead, the liberties of all Americans have been diminished considerably. Citing alarming, outrageous examples of frivolous lawsuits, unnecessary reliance on government intervention, reams of bureaucratic red tape, and stifled economic growth for all, Perry boldly contends that the Americans with Disabilities Act has fostered a culture of dependence, dangerously convincing many people that they can't make it without the government's help. Told with the passion and conviction of a man who has seen firsthand the many ways such intrusive government threatens our freedom, this book finally exposes how the ADA is a legislative disaster that, in effect, disables all Americans.
		Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System by Duncan Kennedy New York : New York University Press, c2004 KF272 .K46 2004 Balcony In 1983 Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy self-published a biting critique of the law school system called Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy. This controversial booklet was reviewed in several major law journals—unprecedented for a self-published work—and influenced a generation of law students and teachers. In this well-known critique, Duncan Kennedy argues that legal education reinforces class, race, and gender inequality in our society. However, Kennedy proposes a radical egalitarian alternative vision of what legal education should become, and a strategy, starting from the anarchist idea of workplace organizing, for struggle in that direction. Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy is comprehensive, covering everything about law school from the first day to moot court to job placement to life after law school. Kennedy's book remains one of the most cited works on American legal education. The visually striking original text is reprinted here, making it available to a new generation. The text is buttressed by commentaries by five prominent legal scholars who consider its meaning for today, as well as by an introduction and afterword by the author that describes the context in which Kennedy wrote the book, including a brief history of critical legal studies.
		The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review by Larry D. Kramer Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2004 KF4881 .K73 2004 Balcony Even as lawsuits challenging its admissions policies made their way through the courts, the University of Michigan carried the torch for affirmative action in higher education. The University's position on affirmative action was vindicated in June 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled that race may be used as a factor in university admissions programs. The Court thus upheld what the University had argued all along: diversity in the classroom translates to a beneficial and wide-ranging social value. With the green light given to the University's law school admissions policies, Defending Diversity validates the positive benefits gained by students in a diverse educational setting. Written by prominent University of Michigan faculty, Defending Diversity is a timely response to the Court's ruling. With chapters that explore the factual background, historical context, and psychosocial implications of affirmative action, the book illuminates the many benefits of a diverse higher educational setting, demonstrating why affirmative action is necessary to achieve that diversity. Defending Diversity is a powerful contribution to the ongoing discussion on affirmative action in higher education. Perhaps more important, it is a valuable record of the history, events, arguments, and issues surrounding the original lawsuits and the Supreme Court's subsequent ruling, and helps reclaim the debate from those forces opposed to affirmative action.
		Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution by Jaroslav Pelikan New Haven : Yale University Press, c2004 BS500 .P45 2004 Basement Both the Bible and the Constitution have the status of “Great Code,” but each of these important texts is controversial as well as enigmatic. They are asked to speak to situations that their authors could not have anticipated on their own. In this book, one of our greatest religious historians brings his vast knowledge of the history of biblical interpretation to bear on the question of constitutional interpretation. Jaroslav Pelikan compares the methods by which the official interpreters of the Bible and the Constitution--the Christian Church and the Supreme Court, respectively--have approached the necessity of interpreting, and reinterpreting, their important texts. In spite of obvious differences, both texts require close, word-by-word exegesis, an awareness of opinions that have gone before, and a willingness to ask new questions of old codes, Pelikan observes. He probes for answers to the question of what makes something authentically “constitutional” or “biblical,” and he demonstrates how an understanding of either biblical interpretation or constitutional interpretation can illuminate the other in important ways.
		Enduring Legacies: Native American Treaties and Contemporary Controversies : edited by Bruce E. Johansen Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004 KF8205 .E53 2004 Balcony Treaties are so fundamental to the lives of Native Americans and their nations in the United States and Canada that life without them would be difficult to imagine. Most contemporary issues, from land claims to resource ownership to gambling permits, are rooted in laws that derive much of their sustenance from such documents. Treaties are, therefore, vibrant documents that define important issues in our time. This book is an attempt to maintain a "national conversation" on the treaty basis of important contemporary laws and issues. While the texts of such treaties have long been available, discussion and other annotation in a context that gives them contemporary meaning has been scarce. This collection of essays by experts in Native American history examines these historic agreements in light of recent and ongoing controversies. Claims to ancestral land bases are one prime example: the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 provides a context in which to address the Onondaga's claim to most of the Syracuse urban area. Treaties provide the bases for events such as the modern-day rebirth of the Ponca Nation in Nebraska more than a century after a bureaucratic error resulted in banishment from ancestral land. One chapter explores why the U.S. Army still officially regards tragic events at Wounded Knee in December 1890 as a "battle," rather than a "massacre." Another reveals how treaties and laws have been used to retain and regain gas and oil resource ownership. Still another expert examines why so much energy has been expended over the fate of 9,300- year-old bones that have come to be called "Kennewick Man."
		The Intruders: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft by Samuel Dash New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2004 KF9630 .D37 2004 Balcony As chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee, Sam Dash challenged the Nixon administration’s abuse of presidential power in the 1970s. Now he turns his discerning legal mind to the Bush administration’s increasing intrusion on the privacy rights of American citizens. What is the best way to balance the competing interests of national security and individual liberty in our post-9/11 world? To answer that question, Dash examines the factors that led to the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the people against unreasonable searches and seizures. Covering almost eight hundred years of history, he begins with King John of England and the Magna Carta, then moves to early America as colonists resisted searches mandated under King George III. These tensions eventually contributed to the birth of the United States and the adoption of the Bill of Rights with its essential Fourth Amendment. The story of the next two centuries is how effective that protection has been as the U.S. developed "from sea to shining sea." Dash explores the struggle for privacy rights by relating dramatic legal battles throughout our history, including landmark Supreme Court cases. He reveals the sometimes humorous experiences of the people involved, such as the unlucky gambler with a shoplifting wife and the police lieutenant turned king of the bootleggers. It becomes clear that to some extent, judicial safeguarding of Fourth Amendment protections depended on which justices made up the majority of the Court at any given time. By 2001, a conservative majority of the Court had given law enforcement agents greater search and seizure authority than ever before. Dash challenges the legal justification of the Bush Administration’s grab for extensive search, seizure, and wiretap powers after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He reminds us of government abuses in prior emergencies in American history, and concludes that the best security is dedication to our belief in individual liberty and the enforcement of our Bill of Rights. The Intruders should be read by every American concerned about the increasing encroachment of government on one of the principal values that defines who we are, our hard-won right to individual privacy and freedom.
		The Family on Trial In Revolutionary France by Suzanne Desan Berkeley : University of California Press, c2004 HQ623 .D45 2004 Basement In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence. The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France--sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges--all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.
		Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order by Gerry Simpson Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004 KZ4012 .S57 2004 Sohn Library The presence of Great Powers and outlaw states is a central but under-explored feature of international society. In this book, Gerry Simpson describes the ways in which an international legal order based on ‘sovereign equality’ has accommodated the Great Powers and regulated outlaw states since the beginning of the nineteenth-century. In doing so, the author offers a fresh understanding of sovereignty which he terms juridical sovereignty to show how international law has managed the interplay of three languages: the languages of Great Power prerogative, the language of outlawry (or anti-pluralism) and the language of sovereign equality. The co-existence and interaction of these three languages is traced through a number of moments of institutional transformation in the global order from the Congress of Vienna to the ‘war on terrorism’.
		Secession and Self-Determination edited by Stephen Macedo and Allen Buchanan New York : New York University Press, c2003 KZ1269 .S43 2003 Basement The many questions that surround movements for secession and self-determination are both practically urgent and theoretically perplexing. The United States settled its secession crisis in the 1860s. But the trauma and unfinished business of those events are still with us. Around the world secession and self-determination are the key issues that cause strife and instability. This volume provides an unusually comprehensive consideration of the many challenges of law and political philosophy that accompany them, and offers theoretical insights that provide guidance for policy. Among the questions considered are: should the international community recognize a right to secede and, if so, what conditions must be satisfied before the right can be asserted? Should secession and its conditions be recognized within domestic constitutions? Secession is the most extreme form of political separation and there are modes of self-determination short of it, including indigenous peoples' self-government and minority language rights. To what degree can these intrastate autonomy arrangements help ameliorate the injustices faced by indigenous groups?
		Laboratory of Justice: The Supreme Court's 200-Year Struggle to Integrate Science and the Law by David L. Faigman New York : Times Books, 2004 KF8748 .F27 2004 Balcony Suppose that scientists identify a gene that predicts that a person is likely to commit a serious crime. Laws are then passed making genetic tests mandatory, and anyone displaying the gene is sent to a treatment facility. Would the laws be constitutional? In this illuminating history, legal scholar David L. Faigman reveals the tension between the conservative nature of the law and the swift evolution of scientific knowledge. The Supreme Court works by precedent, embedding the science of an earlier time into our laws. In the nineteenth century, biology helped settle the "race question" in the famous Dred Scott case; not until a century later would cutting-edge sociological data end segregation with Brown v. Board of Education. In 1973 Roe v. Wade set a standard for the viability of a fetus that modern medicine could render obsolete. And how does the Fourth Amendment apply in a world filled with high-tech surveillance devices? To ensure our liberties, Faigman argues, the Court must embrace science, turning to the lab as well as to precedent.