What happens when private companies, nonprofit agencies, and religious groups manage what government used to -- in education, criminal justice, legal services, and welfare programs?  As for-profit companies run schools, where will they make their profit margin?  As religious groups provide job training and food stamps, will they respect public rules against discrimination and forcing people to pray?

Renowned legal scholar Martha Minow takes on this astonishingly unexamined change in our public life.  She acknowledges that private commercial interests are here to stay, and that religious providers have long played crucial roles in health care, social services, and schooling.  New arrangements expanding these trends are not necessarily bad - market forces can be useful in improving public services, and the motivation and know-how of religious groups can help to guard against the dangers of privatization and preserve essential public values of due process, freedom from discrimination, and democratic participation.

Given widespread concern over the world-wide loss of biodiversity and popular crusades to "save" endangered species and habitats, why has the Endangered Species Act remained unauthorized since October 1992?  In Fate of the Wild  Bonnie B. Burgess offers an illuminating assembly of facts about biodiversity and straightforward analysis of the legislative stalemate surrounding the Endangered Species Act.  Fate of the Wild surveys the history of and analyzes the conflict over the legislation itself, the heated issues regarding its enforcement, and the land-use and habitat battles waged among conservationists, environmental activists, and private property proponents.

Burgess's meticulous and exhaustive research makes Fate of the Wild a valuable resource for professionals in conservation biology, public policy, environmental law, and environmental organizations, while the narrative clarity of the book will appeal to anyone interested in the fate of nonhuman species.

Teens are often seen as challenging social mores.  They are frequently perceived to engage in activities considered by adults to be immoral, including sexual behavior, delinquent activities, and low-level forms of violence.  Yet the vast majority report suprisingly high levels of religiosity.  Ninety-five percent of American teens aged thirteen to seventeen believe in God or a universal spirit, and 76 percent believe that God observes their actions and rewards or punishes them.  Nearly half engage in religious practices, such as praying alone or attending church or synagogue services.  Rather than a group that rejects social traditions, adolescents seemingly embrace and seek to participate in religious institutions.

Levesque argues that teens' search for meaning does not always serve adolescents to society well.  Religious doctrine and institutions are not all "good,"  with violence linked to religious beliefs -- particularly racial/ethnic and sexual orientation harassment -- becoming an increasing concern.  Not by Faith Alone is the first attempt to integrate current research on the place of religion in adolescent development and to discuss the relevance of that research for policies and laws that regular religion in their lives.  It asks how religion, broadly defined, influences the development of teens' compasses, and how we can ensure that religion and the apparent need for "religious" activity lead to positive outcomes for individual adolescents and for society. 

This study is the first to show how state courts enabled the mass expulsion of Native Americans from their southern homelands in the 1830s.  Our understanding of that infamous period, argues Tim Alan Garrison, is too often molded around the towering personalities of the Indian removal debate, including President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee leader John Ross, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall.  This common view minimizes the impact on Indian sovereignty os some little-known legal cases at the state level.

Because the federal government upheld Native American self-dominion, southerners bent on expropriating Indian land sought a legal toehold through state supreme court decisions.  As Garrison discusses Georgia v. Tassels (1830), Caldwell v. Alabama (1831), Tennessee v. Forman (1835), and other cases, he shows how proremoval partisans exploited regional sympathies.  By casting removal as a states' rights, rather than a moral, issue, they won the wide support of a land-hungry southern populace.  The disastrous consequences to Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles are still unfolding.

Important in its own right, jurisprudence on Indian matters in the antebellum South also complements the legal corpus on slavery.  Readers will gain a broader perspective on the racial views of the southern legal elite and on the logical inconsistencies of southern law and politics during this formative period of anti-Indian and proslavery ideologies.

The Unpredictable Constitution brings together a distinguished group of U.S. Supreme Court justices and U.S. Court of Appeals judges, and the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, who are some of our most prominent legal scholars, to discuss an array of topics on civil liberties.  In thoughtful and incisive essays, the authors draw on decades of experience to examine such wide-ranging issues as how legal error should be handled, the death penalty, women and the Constitution, reasonable doubt in criminal cases, racism in American and South African courts, and government benefits.

Contributors:  Richard S. Arnold, Martha Craig Daughtrey, Harry T. Edwards, Betty B. Fletcher, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Lord Irvine of Lairg, Jon O. Newman, Sandra Day O'Connor, Richard A. Posner, Stephen Reinhardt, and Patricia M. Wald.

The establishment of Constitutional Courts, which in Europe exert much of the functions of the Supreme Court of the US, was one of the major milestones, in the re-creation of the democratic system in the countries of East-Central Europe.

The book examines constitutional jurisdiction in the so-called Visegrad Four:  the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.  Prochazka provides a comprehensive study of the historical, cultural, political and institutional aspects of the emergence and operation of the four courts, analysing and explaining similarities and differences between them.  The immediate western European samples, too, showed marked divergences, which also explains the differences in the theory and practice of constitutional law in these four countries.

John Sassoon's study of the written laws of four thousand years ago puts paid to the belief that the most ancient laws were merely arbitrary and tyrannical.  On the contrary, the earliest legal systems honestly tried to get to the truth, do justice to individuals, and preserve civil order.  They used the death penalty surprisingly seldom, and then more because society had been threatened than an individual killed.

Some of the surviving law codes are originals, others near-contemporary copies.  Together they preserve a partial, but vivid picture of life in the early cities.  This occupies more than half the book.

Comparison of ancient with modern principles occupies the remainder and is bound to be controversial; but it is important as well as fascinating.  The first act of writing laws diminished the discretion of the judges and foretold a limit on individual justice.  Some political principles such as uniformity of treatment or individual freedom have, when carried to extremes, produced crises in modern legal systems world wide.

But it is tempting but wrong to blame the judges or the lawyers for doing what society requires of them.