Judicial intervention in social, economic and political issues ('judicialization') has increased substantially in democracies in recent years.  The change has been more dramatic in Europe than in the United States, where judicial law-making has largely been assimilated into the political process.  Judges have played a central role in a series of major political controversies throughout the 1990s in Italy, Spain, and France, and their involvement has resulted in moves to restrict or alter the power of judges.  The role of judges has become the subject of political debate and reform proposals in England, Portugal and Germany.  This book argues that three elements affect the political significance of judicial decisions.  First, the status of judges (the way they are recruited and the role in the judicial and political process.  Secondly, the organization of the judicial system, including the existence of judicial review of legislation, the structure of trials, and the arrangement of public prosecution.  Thirdly, judicial power is affected by the broader political system:  a polity in which power is divided and fragmented offers wider opportunities for the judiciary to intervene in the political process. 

The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over public grazing lands.  Drawing upon neglected sources from organized ranchers, this is the first book to provide a historically based explanation for why the relationship between ranchers and the federal government became so embattled long before modern environmentalists were involved in the issue.  Reconstructing the increasingly contested interpretations of the meaning of public land administration, Public Lands and Political Meaning traces the history of the political dynamics between ranchers and federal land agencies giving us a new look at the relations of power that made the modern West.  

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those relating to privacy.  This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state.  Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in human genetics.  He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality.  This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned with both genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also be of interest to genetic counsellors, researchers and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine.

When does a person become disqualified for some or all of the rights associated with full citizenship?  Who does qualify for rights?

When mental health workers took Joyce Brown from her "home" on a New York sidewalk and hospitalized her against her will, she defended herself by asserting her rights:  to live where she wanted, to speak to the press to deride the city's policy, and to refuse unwanted psychiatric treatment.  In theory, as a United States citizen, Brown possessed rights protecting her from governmental intrusion into her personal life.  In practice, those rights were curtailed at the time of her civil commitment.

Using the case of Joyce Brown as an example, Judith Lynn Failer explores the theoretical, legal, and practical justifications for limiting the rights of people who are involuntarily hospitalized.  By looking at the reasons law and theory say that some people diagnosed with mental illnesses no longer qualify for the full complement of constitutional rights, the author uncovers basic assumptions about who does, and who should, qualify for rights. 

In  Fighting Injustice, famed trial attorney Michael E. Tigar describes the battles -- both inside and outside the courtroom -- that have made him one of the world's most courageous defenders of personal freedoms.  From his days as a student leader at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s to his representation of Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City federal building bombing conspirator, Tigar has championed personal rights and freedoms and has come to the aid of countless defendants in need of representation, regardless of the unpopularity of the cause.

Policing Hatred explores the intersection of race and law enforcement in the controversial area of hate crime.  The nation's attention has recently been focused on high-profile hate crimes such as the dragging death of James Byrd and the torture-murder of Matthew Shepard.  This book calls attention to the thousands of other individuals who each year are attacked because of their race, religion , or sexual orientation.  The study of hate crimes challenges common assumptions regarding perpetrators and victims:  most of the accused tend to be white, while most of their victims are not.

Policing Hatred is an in-depth ethnographic study of how hate crime law works in practice, from the perspective of those enforcing it.  It examines the ways in which the police handle bias crimes, and the social impact of those efforts.  Bell exposes the power that law enforcement personnel have to influence the social environment by showing how they determine whether an incident will be charged as a bias crime.