Georgia Law - Alexander Campbell King Law Library

Featured Acquisitions - January 2004


Book JacketPhoto






Lincoln's Constitution   by Daniel Farber
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2003
E457.2 .F216 2003   Basement

The Civil War brought pressure on the Constitution that had never been seen before and hasn't been seen since, testing it in much the same way as an engineer tests his materials to destruction to assess their structure. Did the South have the right to secede? Did Abraham Lincoln trample on the Bill of Rights? Can the president go to war without congressional approval? What is the nature of the Union, and what are the limits of states' rights? Forced to confront these issues during the Civil War, Lincoln ran squarely into the conflicts and the issues at the heart of our constitution, issues that remain with us today.

Daniel Farber's purpose in Lincoln's Constitution is to lead the reader to understand exactly what Lincoln did, what arguments he made in defense of his actions, and how his words and deeds fit into the context of the times. Farber sets the constitutional problems that arose during Lincoln's term within their historical moment, as illuminated by recent work by historians, and investigates how well Lincoln's views hold up today--over a century later. The answers are crucial not only for a better understanding of the Civil War but also for shedding light on issues that the courts struggle with now: state sovereignty, presidential power, and national security limitations on civil liberties.

The first book in over seventy-five years to evaluate Lincoln's legal legacy comprehensively, Lincoln's Constitution is a marvelous blending of history and constitutional thought. Written for the intelligent reader, its insights speak urgently to us as our nation again finds itself in a time of danger and the limits of constitutional law are once more being tested.


Book Jacket Photo



The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law  by William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner
Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003
KF2979 .L36 2003  Balcony

This book takes a fresh look at the most dynamic area of American law today, comprising the fields of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, publicity rights, and misappropriation. Topics range from copyright in private letters to defensive patenting of business methods, from moral rights in the visual arts to the banking of trademarks, from the impact of the court of patent appeals to the management of Mickey Mouse. The history and political science of intellectual property law, the challenge of digitization, the many statutes and judge-made doctrines, and the interplay with antitrust principles are all examined. The treatment is both positive (oriented toward understanding the law as it is) and normative (oriented to the reform of the law).

Previous analyses have tended to overlook the paradox that expanding intellectual property rights can effectively reduce the amount of new intellectual property by raising the creators' input costs. Those analyses have also failed to integrate the fields of intellectual property law. They have failed as well to integrate intellectual property law with the law of physical property, overlooking the many economic and legal-doctrinal parallels.

This book demonstrates the fundamental economic rationality of intellectual property law, but is sympathetic to critics who believe that in recent decades Congress and the courts have gone too far in the creation and protection of intellectual property rights.


 Book JacketPhoto
Tell the Court I Love my Wife:  Race, Marriage, and Law - an American History   by Peter Wallenstein
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
KF511 .W35 2002 Balcony


The first in-depth history of miscegenation law in the United States, this book illustrates in vivid detail how states, communities, and the courts have defined and regulated mixed-race marriage from the colonial period to the present. Combining a storyteller's detail with a historian's analysis, Peter Wallenstein brings the sagas of Richard and Mildred Loving and countless other interracial couples before them to light in this harrowing history of how individual states had the power to regulate one of the most private aspects of life: marriage.
Book JacketPhoto
The Case Against Lawyers: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Bureaucrats Have Turned the Law into an Instrument of Tyranny, and What We As Citizens Have to Do About It by Catherine Crier
New York : Broadway Books, 2002
KF384 .C75 2002 Balcony


As a child, Catherine Crier was enchanted by film portrayals of crusading lawyers like Clarence Darrow and Atticus Finch. As a district attorney, private lawyer, and judge herself, she saw firsthand how the U.S. justice system worked – and didn’t. One of the most respected legal journalists and commentators today, she now confronts a profoundly unfair legal system that produces results and profits for the few – and paralysis, frustration, and injustice for the many. Alexis de Tocqueville’s dire prediction in Democracy in America has come true: We Americans have ceded our responsibility as citizens to resolve the problems of society to "legal authorities" – and with it our democratic freedoms.

The Case Against Lawyers is both an angry indictment and an eloquent plea for a return to common sense. It decries a system of laws so complex even the enforcers – such as the IRS – cannot understand them. It unmasks a litigation-crazed society where billion-dollar judgments mostly line the pockets of personal injury lawyers. It deplores the stupidity of a system of liability that leads to such results as a label on a stroller that warns, “Remove child before folding.” It indicts a criminal justice system that puts minor drug offenders away for life yet allows celebrity murderers to walk free. And it excoriates the sheer corruption of the iron triangle of lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians who profit mightily from all this inefficiency, injustice, and abuse.

The Case Against Lawyers will make readers hopping mad. And it will make them realize that the only response can be to demand change. Now.

Book
Trembling in the Ivory Tower:  Excesses in the Pursuit of Truth and Tenure by Kenneth Lasson
Baltimore, Md. : Bancroft Press, c2003
LA227.4 .L37 2003 Basement


In this gem of a book, scholar and wit Kenneth Lasson takes on all manner of excesses in the Ivory Tower which, from his insider's viewpoint, constitute little less than a full-scale assault on American values and mores. The ideological warfare is being waged by a slew of vociferous academicians whose predominance is manifested by stifling academic bureaucracies, radical feminist and deconstructionist faculties, and overbearing speech and conduct codes -- all in invidious pursuit of narrow but pervasive political agendas. Lasson uses his sharply pointed pen to skewer both the powerful and the petty, from perpetually outraged law professors and would-be literati to ethnic hatemongers with tenure.

Colleges and universities, Lasson reminds us, are not intellectual playgrounds, but training places for future social, political, and artistic leaders—so what’s said and not said on those campuses have a far-reaching effect on every one of us. We depend on academic institutions to take our best and brightest and nurture them to think creatively and independently. What's happening, however, is often just the opposite: the purposeful establishment of antii-establishment bias, a closely-guarded breeding ground in which students and professors are too intimidated to challenge extremist ideas. Lasson argues that there is nothing wrong with liberal and multi-cultural approaches to education, so long as they are presented fairly and in a broadly inclusive context. In what is the only truly funny scholarly book to hit the shelves,

Trembling in the Ivory Tower ponders the questions many of us should be asking, and supplies the answers we should be demanding: Why have universities apparently abandoned the concept of vigorous debate in an open marketplace of ideas? Why has no university speech or conduct code yet survived a constitutional challenge? Why are senior professors increasingly being charged with creating "hostile environments" despite emerging victorious whenever they challenge their arbitrary punishments in court? In an age of easy catch phrases, media hype, and watered down scholarship, Trembling in the Ivory Tower is a welcome breath of fresh air that pays homage to original, not merely popular, thought.


Book JacketPhoto
Antidumping Exposed:  The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Law by Brink Lindsey and Daniel J. Ikenson
Washington, D.C. : Cato Institute, c2003
KF6708.D8 L56 2003 Balcony

The U.S. antidumping law enjoys broad political support in part because so few people understand how the law actually works. Its rhetoric of “fairness” and “level playing fields” sounds appealing, and its convoluted technical complexities prevent all but a few insiders and experts from understanding the reality that underlies that rhetoric.

CONNUM? CEP? FUPDOL? TOTPUDD? DIFMER? NPRICOP? POI? POR? LOT? Confused? You’re not alone. Even members of Congress,

whose opinions shape the course of U.S. trade policy, are baffled by those devilish details.

This book seeks to penetrate the fog of complexity that shields the antidumping law from the scrutiny it deserves. It offers a detailed, step-by-step guide to how dumping is defined and measured under current rules. It identifies the many methodological quirks and biases that allow normal, healthy competition to be stigmatized as “unfair” and punished with often cripplingly high antidumping duties. The inescapable conclusion is that the antidumping law, as it currently stands, has nothing to do with maintaining a “level playing field.” Instead, antidumping’s primary function is to provide an elaborate excuse for old-fashioned protectionism.

What goes around comes around. As traditional tariff barriers have been gradually lowered throughout the world, antidumping has emerged to fill the void. India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and dozens of other countries have adopted and implemented their own antidumping laws. In recent years, U.S. exports have been targeted with increasing frequency.

It was this trend that the Bush administration cited as justification for agreeing to antidumping negotiations in the Doha Round of global trade talks. Powerful political forces, however, seek to prevent U.S. acceptance of any meaningful reform. Steel producers and other import-competing industries have long dominated the formulation of U.S. antidumping policy. Their lobbying has made the U.S. law increasingly protectionist and caused U.S. trade negotiators to block improved international rules.

Continued U.S. opposition to reform would carry high costs. Without substantive changes to antidumping rules, the Doha Round is likely to fail.

Accordingly, the authors offer 20 specific proposals for reform of the World Trade Organization’s Antidumping Agreement. Their analysis and ideas should be of great interest to businesses, trade lawyers, and trade negotiators around the world.


Book JacketPhoto
Success Without Victory:  Lost Legal Battles and the Long Road to Justice in America by Jules Lobel
New York : New York University Press, c2003
K184 .L63 2003
   Balcony
 

Winners and losers. Success and failure. Victory and defeat. American culture places an extremely high premium on success, and firmly equates it with winning. In politics, sports, business, and the courtroom, we have a passion to win and are terrified of losing.

Instead of viewing success and failure through such a rigid lens, Jules Lobel suggests that we move past the winner-take-all model and learn valuable lessons from legal and political activists who have advocated causes destined to lose in court but have had important, progressive long term effects on American society. He leads us through dramatic battles in American legal history, describing attempts by abolitionist lawyers to free fugitive slaves through the courts, Susan B. Anthony's trial for voting illegally, the post-Civil War challenges to segregation that resulted in the courts' affirmation of the separate but equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, and Lobel's own challenges to United States foreign policy during the 1980s and 1990s.

Success Without Victory explores the political, social, and psychological contexts behind the cases themselves, as well as the eras from which they originated and the eras they subsequently influenced.

 

Contact Information
Home  Prospective Students | Faculty & Academics  Faculty, Staff & Student Resources   | Alumni & Giving
Law Library  Career Services   |  Dean Rusk Center & International Programs   | Visiting Our Campus  |  News
Search  |  Site Index

The University of Georgia School of Law            Athens, GA 30602            (706) 542-5191
Copyright © 2001, University of Georgia School of Law.  All rights reserved.