Contemporary Society Series
New books about current affairs, politics, social trends, and human rights. From some of the leading voices in the world, authors of dozens of acclaimed books.
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Legal Realism to Law in Action recounts the tradition of innovative courses at Wisconsin Law
This is a book of papers and interviews about innovative law school courses developed by faculty of the Wisconsin Law School from 1950 to 1970 that forged a path from legal realism to law and social science. These courses took a “law in action” approach to the study of law which became a signature feature of the school’s tradition from that time to the present day. “The Legal Realists of the 1920s and 30s taught that the law that mattered was the law in action, as applied by ordinary officials and experienced by ordinary people. But they mostly failed to get their program adopted as part of professional education alongside…
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Wasby’s rich study of visiting judges on the federal courts of appeals tracks an understudied but common practice
In the first systematic examination of the role and impact of visiting judges, Borrowed Judges analyzes the U.S. courts of appeals’ use of judges who visit from other circuits and in-circuit district judges, along with the courts’ own senior judges. It shows the considerable variation in the extent to which these judges are used and their role in writing the law of the circuit. It also shows whether their presence affects courts in rehearing cases en banc and whether the U.S. Supreme Court grants review. The study draws on insightful interviews with judges, their statements both public and within the court, and empirical data gathered by the author. “This fascinating work provides…
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Good Courts by Berman and Feinblatt is digitally remastered,™ adding new Foreword
Presented in a new digital edition, and adding a Foreword by Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the state of New York, Good Courts is now available as an eBook to criminal justice workers, jurists, lawyers, political scientists, court officials, and others interested in the future of alternative justice and process in the United States. Public confidence in American criminal courts is at an all-time low. Victims, communities, and even offenders view courts as unable to respond adequately to complex social and legal problems including drugs, prostitution, domestic violence, and quality-of-life crime. Even many judges and attorneys think that the courts produce assembly-line justice. Increasingly embraced by even the most hard-on-crime…
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Leading Voices on Justice Under Law Discuss Civil Liberties, National Security, Gitmo, Immigration and Health Care
Law and the Quest for Justice is a 2013 book featuring evocative essays on hotbed issues of rights, liberty, security and law. An insightful collection of essays from leading voices on the challenges and promise of justice and law, this book is accessible and interesting to a wide audience. It features internationally renowned members of the academy, national political figures, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, and crusading lawyers. The thought-provoking topics include: Erwin Chemerinsky on reconceptualizing federalism and healthcare reform • John Echohawk on Native American rights • Jack Greenberg on Brown v. Board‘s legacy • Linda Greenhouse on how Supreme Court Justices evolve over time • Lani Guinier on reframing affirmative…
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Bert Kritzer’s Lawyers at Work: a recognized collection of studies and insights on the legal profession
This collection of articles and essays by Herbert Kritzer draws on his extensive research related to lawyers and legal practice conducted over the last 35 years. That research has applied existing theoretical frameworks and developed innovative ways of thinking about how to understand what it is that lawyers do. The chapters reflect the wide range of both qualitative and quantitative research methods he has employed, and draw on his work on the Civil Litigation Research Project, a massive study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Carter administration, and continues through subsequent studies of lawyer-client relationships in Canada, contingency fee legal practice, and insurance defense practice. This book…
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Jerold Auerbach explores Israeli legitimacy in his 2014 book Jewish State, Pariah Nation
Jewish statehood was restored in 1948 amid a struggle over legitimacy that has persisted in Israel ever since: Who rules? Who decides? Antagonism between the political left and right erupted into bloody violence over the Altalena. Secular-religious discord even made defining who is a Jew in a Jewish state contentious. After the Six-Day War, the return of religious Zionist settlers to biblical Judea and Samaria reframed the struggle over legitimacy. Who decides where in the Land of Israel Jews may live: settlers and rabbis or the government? Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 provoked the first significant eruption of military disobedience, undermining the authority of the Israel Defense Forces with…
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Greg Berman Recounts Criminal Process Reforms and Successes in the new book Reducing Crime, Reducing Incarceration
A new collection of compelling and challenging essays from one of the nation’s leading voices on criminal justice reform, Reducing Crime, Reducing Incarceration makes the argument that sometimes small changes on the ground can add up to big improvements in the criminal justice system. How do you launch a new criminal justice reform? How do you measure impact? Is it possible to spread new practices to resistant audiences? And what’s the point of small-bore experimentation anyway? Greg Berman answers these questions (and more) by telling the story of successful experiments like the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn, an experimental courthouse that has been documented to reduce both re-offending…
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Peter Gabel’s new book Another Way of Seeing: in hardcover, paperback and eBooks
In ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING, critical legal studies scholar Peter Gabel argues that our most fundamental spiritual need as human beings is the desire for authentic mutual recognition. Because we live in a world in which this desire is systematically denied due to the legacy of fear of the other that has been passed on from generation to generation, we exist as what he calls ‘withdrawn selves,’ perceiving the other as a threat rather than as the source of our completion as social beings. Calling for a new kind of ‘spiritual activism’ that speaks to this universal interpersonal longing, Gabel shows how we can transform law, politics, public policy, and…
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Exploring Disaster from a global and sociological perspective; new book joins the Contemporary Society Series
Legal governance of disaster brings both care and punishment to the upending of daily life of place-based disasters. National states use disasters to reorganize how they govern. The collection in Disaster and Sociolegal Studies, edited by Denver University professor Susan Sterett, considers how law is implicated in disaster. The late modern expectation that states are to care for their population makes it particularly important to point out the limits to care—limits that appear less in the grand rhetoric than in the government reports, case-level decisionmaking, administrative rules, and criminalization that make up governing. These insightful essays feature leading scholars whose perspectives range across disasters around the world. Their findings point…
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Lawrence Friedman’s Provocative The Human Rights Culture, Views the Modern Arc of Rights as a Social and Historical Phenomenon
New from the acclaimed legal historian Lawrence Friedman, professor at Stanford. He does not mind going against the grain of most writers on human rights, to ask questions about its origins and import that the previous literature sidesteps. Why, as a social and historical matter, is all the rights discourse so pervasive and near-global today?
