Richard A. Rosen & Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights (Univ. North Carolina Press 2016).
"Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark."
—Publisher's description
Deborah Boehm, Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation (Univ. of California Press 2016).
"Returned follows transnational Mexicans as they experience the alienation and unpredictability of deportation, tracing the particular ways that U.S. immigration policies and state removals affect families. Deportation—an emergent global order of social injustice—reaches far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens, also return after deportation or migrate for the first time. The book includes accounts of displacement, struggle, suffering, and profound loss but also of resilience, flexibility, and imaginings of what may come. Returned tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath."
—Publisher's description
Douglas Husak (Rutgers University), Ignorance of Law: A Philosophical Inquiry, (Oxford Univ. Press 2016).
" . . . Since persons cannot be faulted for failing to respond to reasons for criminal liability they do not believe they have, then ignorance should almost always excuse. But persons are somewhat responsible for their wrongs when their mistakes of law are reckless, that is, when they consciously disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk that their conduct might be wrong. This book illustrates this with examples and critiques the arguments to the contrary offered by criminal theorists and moral philosophers. It assesses the real-world implications for the U.S. system of criminal justice. The author describes connections between the problem of ignorance of law and other topics in moral and legal theory."
—From Publisher's description
Daniel Friedmann, The Purse and the Sword: The Trials of Israel's Legal Revolution (Oxford Univ. Press 2016).
"The Purse and the Sword presents a critical analysis of Israel's legal system in the context of its politics, history, and the forces that shape its society. This book examines the extensive powers that Israel's Supreme Court arrogated to itself since the 1980s and traces the history of the transformation of its legal system and the shifts in the balance of power between the branches of government. Centrally, this shift has put unprecedented power in the hands of both the Court and Israel's attorney general and state prosecution at the expense of Israel's cabinet, constituting its executive branch, and the Knesset--its parliament. . . . the aggrandizement of power by the legal system led to a backlash against the Supreme Court in the early part of the current century, and to the partial rebalancing of power towards the political branches."
—From publisher's description
Justice Stephen Breyer, Against the Death Penalty (Brookings Institute 2016).
"This volume contains Breyer’s dissent in the case of Glossip v. Gross, which involved an unsuccessful challenge to Oklahoma’s use of a lethal-injection drug because it might cause severe pain. Justice Breyer’s legal citations have been edited to make them understandable to a general audience, but the text retains the full force of his powerful argument that the time has come for the Supreme Court to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty."
—From Publisher's description
