Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, 1945:  The scene of a trial without precedent in history, a trial that continues to haunt the modern world.  Leading the reader into the Palace is Sebastian, a young German-American whose fate is to be involved intimately with the lives and deaths of others -- the father who disappeared mysteriously, the ancestors whose stories become vitally relevant, and some of the towering figures of twentieth-century legal history, including Justice Robert Jackson, Albert Speer, Herman Goering, and the dark, untried shadow of Adolf Hitler.  In a gripping account of warmakers who must face the consequences of their actions, Nuremberg:  The Reckoning flows through Warsaw, Berlin, Lodz, Munich, Hamburg, and finally Nuremberg, as Sebastian, an interpreter-interrogator, comes to terms with his family legacy and his national identity. 

Our health-care system is at a crossroads.  Costs continue their relentless rise, while patients complain about not receiving needed health-care services.  As an added complication, the legal system plays an increasingly prominent role in how health care is organized, financed, and delivered.  More than ever before, resolving the health-care crisis requires cooperation between physicians and attorneys.  Patients, physicians, and health-care administrators thus have a large stake in how the law influences medical care.

Strangers in the Night explains how the legal system helps shape health-care delivery and policy, explores new ways of looking at the relationship between law and medicine, and reflects on why it all matters.  The story focuses on the judicial response to the rise of managed care, especially challenges to cost-containment initiatives, and shows how the legal system has facilitated managed care's dominance over the health-care system.  An equally important part of the story is the evolution of the relationship between physicians and attorneys and how their mutual antagonism affects patient care.  In the end, the stories come together around a strategy for reconciling the difficult health policy choices the country faces and for restoring American's trust in their health-care system.

Roman public and private law regulated many aspects of life in Late Antiquity.  Legal sources, statutes, juristic opinions, textbooks, documents, and reports preserve a wealth of information shedding light on little-known areas of Roman society and its economy, but the use of this kind of evidence is often difficult , either technically or methodologically.  Through a series of case studies dealing with luxury consumption, gifts between spouses, legal aspects of sea and land transportation, marriage practices among the elite, and double standards in the application of the death penalty, an inter-disciplinary group of classicists, historians, and legal scholars propose various approaches to integrate Roman legal evidence with other kinds of sources in ancient social and economic history. 

Speculum Iuris considers the complex relationship between law and social practice from the particular angle of Roman legislation and jurisprudence as conditioned by or reacting to a specific social, economic, and political context.  Various strategies can be used to mine a huge body of texts in order to determine facts and to study attitudes and behaviors of upper-class Romans, whose social concerns are reflects in the way legal rules developed. 

Narrowing the Nation's Power is the tale of how a cohesive majority of the Supreme Court has, in the last six years, cut back the power of Congress and enhanced the autonomy of the fifty states.  The immunity from suit of the sovereign, Blackstone taught, is necessary to preserve the people's idea that the sovereign is "a superior being."  Promoting the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity to constitutional status, the current Supreme Court has used it to shield the states from damages for age discrimination, disability discrimination, and the violation of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and fair labor standards.  Not just the states themselves, but every state-sponsored entity--a state insurance scheme, a state university's research lab, the Idaho Potato Commission -- has been insulated from paying damages in tort or contract.  Sovereign immunity, as Noonan puts it, has metastasized. 

Noonan is a passionate believer in the place of persons in the law.  Rules, he claims, are a necessary framework, but they must not obscure law's task of giving justice to persons.  His critique of Supreme Court doctrine is driven by this conviction.

The emergence of a European private law is one of the great issues on the legal agenda of our time.  Among the most prominent initiatives furthering this process is the work of the Commission on European Contract Law ('Lando Commission').  The essays collected in this volume have their origin within this context.  They explore two very important practical topics which have hitherto been largely neglected in comparative legal literature:  set-off and 'extinctive' prescription (or 'limitation of actions').  Professor Zimmerman lays the comparative foundations for a common approach which may provide the basis for a set of European principles.

The popular culture of American law has never played a larger role than it does today in shaping the way we think about lawyers and the legal system.  Our very definition of justice is now inseparable from motion picture and television images and popular legal narratives, from Hollywood westerns and O.J. Simpson to Law and Order and John Grisham.  Through its exploration of the "legal" film genre, Movies on Trial is an illuminating and entertaining examination of the interrelationship between law and film. 

While the dramatic possibilities of the courtroom scene have long been familiar to moviegoers, beyond that trope our culture relies upon a concept of the law drawn from images presented on the silver screen.  Law professor and movie aficionado Anthony Chase focuses on how movies fit into our history, our politics and particularly, our legal values and assumptions.

Personal rights, such as the right to procreate--or-not--and the right to die generate endless debate.  This book maps out the legal, political, and ethical issues swirling around intimate family and personal rights.  Howard Ball shows how the U.S. Supreme Court has grappled with controversial issues dealing with birth, marriage, sex, the family, childbearing, and death.  The justices have been as divided on these issues as the American people.

For the last half of the twentieth century, the justices of the Supreme Court have had to wrestle with new and difficult personal and intimate questions dealing with doctors and their patients, changing spousal relations, same-sex marriage and homosexual rights, and personal autonomy with the family.  The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans offers a look at these issues as they emerged and examines the manner in which the men and women of the U.S. Supreme Court struggled to resolve them.