Something to Believe in:  Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering by Stuart A. Scheingold and Austin Sarat
Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Law and Politics, 2004
KF299.P8 S334 2004  Balcony

The gunfight at the OK Corral is legendary--but what happened once the shooting ended?

The gunfight at the OK Corral occupies a unique place in American history. Although the event itself lasted less than a minute, it became the basis for countless stories about the Wild West. At the time of the gunfight, however, Wyatt Earp was not universally acclaimed as a hero. Among the people who knew him best in Tombstone, Arizona, many considered him a renegade and murderer.

This book tells the nearly unknown story of the prosecution of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday following the famous gunfight. To the prosecutors, the Earps and Holiday were wanton killers. According to the defense, the Earps were steadfast heroes--willing to risk their lives on the mean streets of Tombstone for the sake of order.

The case against the Earps, with its dueling narratives of brutality and justification, played out themes of betrayal, revenge, and even adultery. Attorney Thomas Fitch, one of the era’s finest advocates, ultimately managed--against considerable odds--to save Earp from the gallows. But the case could easily have ended in a conviction, and Wyatt Earp would have been hanged or imprisoned, not celebrated as an American icon.

The United States patent system has become sand rather than lubricant in the wheels of American progress. Such is the premise behind this provocative and timely book by two of the nation's leading experts on patents and economic innovation.

Innovation and Its Discontents tells the story of how recent changes in patenting--an institutional process that was created to nurture innovation--have wreaked havoc on innovators, businesses, and economic productivity. Jaffe and Lerner, who have spent the past two decades studying the patent system, show how legal changes initiated in the 1980s converted the system from a stimulator of innovation to a creator of litigation and uncertainty that threatens the innovation process itself.

In one telling vignette, Jaffe and Lerner cite a patent litigation campaign brought by a a semi-conductor chip designer that claims control of an entire category of computer memory chips. The firm's claims are based on a modest 15-year old invention, whose scope and influenced were broadened by secretly manipulating an industry-wide cooperative standard-setting body.

Such cases are largely the result of two changes in the patent climate, Jaffe and Lerner contend. First, new laws have made it easier for businesses and inventors to secure patents on products of all kinds, and second, the laws have tilted the table to favor patent holders, no matter how tenuous their claims.

After analyzing the economic incentives created by the current policies, Jaffe and Lerner suggest a three-pronged solution for restoring the patent system: create incentives to motivate parties who have information about the novelty of a patent; provide multiple levels of patent review; and replace juries with judges and special masters to preside over certain aspects of infringement cases.

Well-argued and engagingly written, Innovation and Its Discontents offers a fresh approach for enhancing both the nation's creativity and its economic growth.

From the authors of the critically acclaimed Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury comes a collection of closing arguments that spans 250 years and eight landmark trials that have redefined civil rights in America and profoundly affected our society.

Every day millions of Americans enjoy the freedom to decide what they do with their property, their bodies, their speech, and their votes. However, the rights to these freedoms have not always been guaranteed. Our civil rights have been assured by cases that have produced monumental shifts in America's cultural, social, and legal landscape over the past three centuries.

Until now, the closing arguments from these trials have been unavailable to the lay reader -- except in the lasting effects of the decisions that they influenced. But here the authors have collected some of the most pivotal and exciting closing arguments in history -- from the Amistad case, in which John Quincy Adams brought the injustice of slavery to the center stage of American politics, to the Susan B. Anthony decision, which paved the way to success for women's suffrage, to the Larry Flynt trial, in which the porn king became an unlikely champion for freedom of speech.

One instance demonstrates how bad lawyering can make bad law -- the Carrie Buck case, in which the Supreme Court upheld the forced sterilization of women, a decision still on the books today.

The unprecedented expansion in environmental regulation over the past thirty years--at all levels of government--signifies a transformation of our nation's laws that is both palpable and encouraging. Environmental laws now affect almost everything we do, from the cars we drive and the places we live to the air we breathe and the water we drink. But while enormous strides have been made since the 1970s, gaps in the coverage, implementation, and enforcement of the existing laws still leave much work to be done.

In The Making of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus offers a new interpretation of the past three decades of this area of the law, examining the legal, political, cultural, and scientific factors that have shaped--and sometimes hindered--the creation of pollution controls and natural resource management laws. He argues that in the future, environmental law must forge a more nuanced understanding of the uncertainties and trade-offs, as well as the better-organized political opposition that currently dominates the federal government. Lazarus is especially well equipped to tell this story, given his active involvement in many of the most significant moments in the history of environmental law as a litigator for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, an assistant to the Solicitor General, and a member of advisory boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Ranging widely in his analysis, Lazarus not only explains why modern environmental law emerged when it did and how it has evolved, but also points to the ambiguities in our current situation. As the field of environmental law "grays" with middle age, Lazarus's discussions of its history, the lessons learned from past legal reforms, and the challenges facing future lawmakers are both timely and invigorating.

Everything you’ve been taught about the World War II “internment camps” in America is wrong:

• They were not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria
• They did not target only those of Japanese descent
• They were not Nazi-style death camps

In her latest investigative tour-de-force, New York Times best-selling author Michelle Malkin sets the historical record straight—and debunks radical ethnic alarmists who distort history to undermine common-sense, national security profiling.

The need for this myth-shattering book is vital. President Bush’s opponents have attacked every homeland defense policy as tantamount to the “racist” and “unjustified” World War II internment. Bush’s own transportation secretary, Norm Mineta, continues to milk his childhood experience at a relocation camp as an excuse to ban profiling at airports.

Misguided guilt about the past continues to hamper our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks.

In Defense of Internment shows that the detention of enemy aliens, and the mass evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast were not the result of irrational hatred or conspiratorial bigotry. This document-packed book highlights the vast amount of intelligence, including top-secret “MAGIC” messages, which revealed the Japanese espionage threat on the West Coast.

Malkin also tells the truth about:

• who resided in enemy alien internment camps (nearly half were of European ancestry)
• what the West Coast relocation centers were really like (tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese were allowed to leave; hundreds voluntarily chose to move in)
• why the $1.65 billion federal reparations law for Japanese internees and evacuees was a bipartisan disaster
• and how both Japanese American and Arab/Muslim American leaders have united to undermine America’s safety.

With trademark fearlessness, Malkin adds desperately needed perspective to the ongoing debate about the balance between civil liberties and national security. In Defense of Internment will outrage, enlighten, and radically change the way you view the past—and the present.

Can we achieve justice during war? Should law substitute for realpolitik? Can an international court act against the global community that created it?

Justice in a Time of War is a translation from the French of the first complete, behind-the-scenes story of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, from its proposal by Balkan journalist Mirko Klarin through recent developments in the trial of Slobodan Milošević. It is also a meditation on the conflicting intersection of law and politics in achieving justice and peace.

Le Monde's review (November 3, 2000) of the original edition recommended Hazan's book as a nuanced account of the Tribunal that should be a must-read for the new leaders of Yugoslavia. "The story Pierre Hazan tells is that of an institution which, over the course of the years, has managed to escape in large measure from the initial hidden motives and manipulations of those who created it (and not only the Americans)."

With insider interviews filling out every scene, Hazan tells a chaotic story of war that raged while the Western powers cobbled together a tribunal in order to avoid actual intervention. The international lawyers and judges for this rump world court started with nothing—but they ultimately established the tribunal as an unavoidable actor in the Balkans. The West had created the Tribunal in 1993, hoping to threaten international criminals with indictment and thereby force an untenable peace. In 1999, the Tribunal suddenly became useful to NATO countries as a means by which to criminalize Milošević's regime and to justify military intervention in Kosovo and in Serbia. Ultimately, this hastened the end of Milošević's rule and led the way to history's first war crimes trial of a former president by an international tribunal.

Hazan's account of the Tribunal's formation and evolution questions the contradictory policies of the Western powers and illuminates a cautionary tale for the reader: realizing ideals in a world enamored of realpolitik is a difficult and often haphazard activity.

During the formative years of the American republic, lawyers and architects, both eager to secure public affirmation of their professional status, worked together to create specialized, purpose-built courthouses to replace the informal judicial settings in which trials took place during the colonial era. In From Tavern to Courthouse, Martha J. McNamara addresses this fundamental redefinition of civic space in Massachusetts. Professional collaboration, she argues, benefited both lawyers and architects, as it reinforced their desire to be perceived as trained specialists solely concerned with promoting the public good. These courthouses, now reserved exclusively for legal proceedings and occupying specialized locations in the town plans represented a new vision for the design, organization, and function of civic space.

McNamara shows how courthouse spaces were refined to reflect the increasingly professionalized judicial system and particularly to accommodate the rapidly growing participation of lawyers in legal proceedings. In following this evolution of judicial space from taverns and town houses to monumental courthouse complexes, she discusses the construction of Boston's first civic building, the 1658 Town House, and its significance for colonial law and commerce; the rise of professionally trained lawyers through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and changes in judicial rituals at the turn of the century and development of specialized judicial landscapes. A case study of three courthouses built in Essex County between 1785 and 1805, delineates these changes as they unfold in one county over a thirty year period.

Concise and clearly written, From Tavern to Courthouse reveals the processes by which architects and lawyers crafted new judicial spaces to provide a specialized, exclusive venue in which lawyers could articulate their professional status.