Piercing the Veil of Secrecy:  Litigation Against U.S. Intelligence   by Janine M. Brookner
Durham, N.C. : Carolina Academic Press, c2003
KF1321 .B75 2003   Balcony

Piercing the Veil of Secrecy brings together and exposes, for the first time in one publication, the magnitude of adverse actions U.S. intelligence agencies take to control and thwart the legal process and the range of concrete remedies available to confront such tactics.

Brookner begins the book with a description of actual CIA employee cases, followed by a discussion of unique problems litigants and lawyers face when suing intelligence agencies, including the misuse secrecy and national security, intimidation, and the denial of access to relevant evidence and witnesses, notwithstanding a lawyer’s and plaintiff’s security clearances. Recently, the CIA has invoked the seldom-used state secrets privilege to impede discovery, prevail upon the courts to dismiss cases, and, in effect, grant itself immunity from suits. These problems, as well as sovereign immunity and the various statutes from which the CIA is exempted, are carefully examined.

After dealing with what cannot be done, the book devotes itself to what can be done, including legal remedies, which maximize prospects for a favorable outcome. This discussion includes employment discrimination, torts, constitutional violations, employment-related civil conspiracies, and the innovative possibility of suing the government under civil RICO. The final chapter suggests administrative and procedural solutions to the serious inequities with which a litigant is confronted when bringing an action against U.S. intelligence.

The book is intended for lawyers and plaintiffs suing or contemplating suing the U.S. government, particularly those agencies that handle classified information. The target audience includes judges, senators, and members of congress who need to be aware when deciding cases or making laws of just how unlevel and unfair the playing field actually is. Government attorneys, law students and professors, and national security, civil rights, and employment rights law groups are among the potential readership as well.

As Albert Samuels observes, Brown’s tenet that separate educational institutions are inherently unequal has for nearly half a century forced HBCUs to defend their very right to exist. In this book he reexamines the debate over desegregation and its impact on publicly funded HBCUs, exploring the contradictions and concerns that Brown created for African Americans over four decades and challenging the idea that separate is necessarily unequal.

Because the Brown decision has come to embody the American Creed and is now a cultural icon, critical discussion of it can be difficult. Samuels contends, however, that Brown was originally intended to address discrimination against blacks as individuals; when its focus shifted to entire educational systems, the problem became more complicated and exacerbated by the existence of publicly funded HBCUs.

In this critique of the liberal perspective on desegregation, Samuels leads readers from the Brown decision to Green v. School Board of New Kent County and on to United States v. Fordice to show how the future of public black universities has been left uncertain at best. For Samuels, economic equality, not segregation, remains the primary obstacle to fully realized citizenship for African Americans. He argues that African Americans’ pursuit of equality in higher education can be achieved without defunding programs at these schools and that their funding should be increased in recognition of their role in preserving African American culture.

Is Separate Unequal? suggests that the application of the American Creed to the African American experience is problematic if the historical and cultural differences between blacks and whites are not taken into account. As new affirmative action rulings from Grutter v. Michigan take effect, Samuels’s study offers another view of desegregation to show that the real integration needed is one that integrates tax dollars with the underfunded budgets of HBCUs.

How can property rights be protected and contracts be enforced in countries where the rule of law is ineffective or absent? How can firms from advanced market economies do business in such circumstances? In Lawlessness and Economics, Avinash Dixit examines the theory of private institutions that transcend or supplement weak economic governance from the state.

In much of the world and through much of history, private mechanisms--such as long-term relationships, arbitration, social networks to disseminate information and norms to impose sanctions, and for-profit enforcement services--have grown up in place of formal, state-governed institutions. Even in countries with strong legal systems, many of these mechanisms continue under the shadow of the law. Numerous case studies and empirical investigations have demonstrated the variety, importance, and merits and drawbacks of such institutions.

This book builds on these studies and constructs a toolkit of theoretical models to analyze them. The models shed new conceptual light on the different modes of governance, and deepen our understanding of the interaction of the alternative institutions with each other and with the government's law. For example, one model explains the limit on the size of social networks and illuminates problems in the transition to more formal legal systems as economies grow beyond this limit. Other models explain why for-profit enforcement is inefficient. The models also help us understand why state law dovetails with some non-state institutions and collides with others. This can help less-developed countries and transition economies devise better processes for the introduction or reform of their formal legal systems.

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.

Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.

Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy.

For more info, read an excerpt from Hiding from Humanity.

In a few thousand words the Constitution sets up the government of the United States and proclaims the basic human and political rights of its people. From the interpretation and elaboration of those words in over 500 volumes of Supreme Court cases comes the constitutional law that structures our government and defines our individual relationship to that government. This book fills the need for an account of that law free from legal jargon and clear enough to inform the educated layperson, yet which does not condescend or slight critical nuance, so that its judgments and analyses will engage students, practitioners, judges, and scholars.

Taking the reader up to and through such controversial recent Supreme Court decisions as the Texas sodomy case and the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Charles Fried sets out to make sense of the main topics of constitutional law: the nature of doctrine, federalism, separation of powers, freedom of expression, religion, liberty, and equality.

Fried draws on his knowledge as a teacher and scholar, and on his unique experience as a practitioner before the Supreme Court, a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and Solicitor General of the United States to offer an evenhanded account not only of the substance of constitutional law, but of its texture and underlying themes. His book firmly draws the reader into the heart of today's constitutional battles. He understands what moves today's Court and that understanding illuminates his analyses.

Imagine a billion dollar corporation getting caught secretly videotaping parents and their children going to the bathroom!

How far would this company go to silence two-whistlblowers?

Be Careful Who You SLAPP is the extraordinary account of two Internet gadflies who brought this workplace horror to world attention. This book chronicles much of their five year legal struggle culminating in the California Supreme Court. A must read for anyone who thinks their Constitutional Rights are safe and judges follow the law!

Local Remedies in International Law  by Chittharanjan Felix Amerasinghe
Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004
K2315 .A95 2004 Balcony

Professor Amerasinghe examines the local remedies rule in terms of both historical and modern international law. He considers both the customary international law as well as the application of the rule to, among others, human rights protection and international organizations. New material includes bilateral investment treaties and state contracts. The law is dealt with in the light of state practice and the jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals. The book also ventures into important areas such as the incidence of the rule, limitations, the burden of proof and the application of the rule to procedural remedies, in which the law is less clear. It adheres to the requirements of juristic exposition and analysis where the law has been determined, but at the same time Amerasinghe offers criticisms and suggestions for improving the law in the light of modern policy considerations.

Harold Berman's masterwork narrates the interaction of evolution and revolution in the development of Western law. This new volume explores two successive transformations of the Western legal tradition under the impact of the sixteenth-century German Reformation and the seventeenth-century English Revolution, with particular emphasis on Lutheran and Calvinist influences. Berman examines the far-reaching consequences of these apocalyptic political and social upheavals on the systems of legal philosophy, legal science, criminal law, civil and economic law, and social law in Germany and England and throughout Europe as a whole.

Berman challenges both conventional approaches to legal history, which have neglected the religious foundations of Western legal systems, and standard social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the communitarian dimensions of early modern economic law, including corporation law and social welfare.

Clearly written and cogently argued, this long-awaited, magisterial work is a major contribution to an understanding of the relationship of law to Western belief systems.

For more info, view the table of contents of Law and Revolution II.