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Featured Acquisitions - January
2004

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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