The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.

In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital -- and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations -- assets that exist only in law.

-Publisher's Description

The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Privacy was not always a matter of public import. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, as corporate industry, social institutions, and the federal government swelled, increasing numbers of citizens believed their privacy to be endangered. Popular journalism and communication technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and workplace testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all propelled privacy to the foreground of U.S. culture. Jurists and philosophers but also ordinary people weighed the perils, the possibilities, and the promise of being known. In the process, they redrew the borders of contemporary selfhood and citizenship.

The Known Citizen reveals how privacy became the indispensable language for monitoring the ever-shifting line between our personal and social selves. Igo's sweeping history, from the era of "instantaneous photography" to the age of big data, uncovers the surprising ways that debates over what should be kept out of the public eye have shaped U.S. politics and society. It offers the first wide-angle view of privacy as it has been lived and imagined by modern Americans.

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Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution

Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2019).

In Fidelity & Constraint, Lawrence Lessig explains that one of the most basic approaches to interpreting the constitution is the process of translation. Indeed, some of the most significant shifts in constitutional doctrine are products of the evolution over time of the translation process. In every new era, judges understand their translations as instances of "interpretive fidelity," framed within each new temporal context.

Yet, as Lessig also argues, there is a repeatedly occurring countermove that upends the process of translation. Throughout American history, there has been a second fidelity in addition to interpretive fidelity: what Lessig calls "fidelity to role." In each of the cycles of translation that he describes, the role of the judge -- the ultimate translator -- has evolved too. Old ways of interpreting the text now become illegitimate because they do not match up with the judge's perceived role. And when that conflict occurs, the practice of judges within our tradition has been to follow the guidance of a fidelity to role. Ultimately, Lessig not only shows us how important the concept of translation is to constitutional interpretation, but also exposes the institutional limits on this practice.

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White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century

John Oller, White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century (Dutton, 2019).

The legal profession once operated on a smaller scale -- folksy lawyers arguing for fairness and justice before a judge and jury. But by year 1900, a new type of lawyer had been born, one who understood business as well as the law. Working hand in glove with their clients, over the next two decades these New York City "white shoe" lawyers devised and implemented legal strategies that would drive the business world throughout the twentieth century. These lawyers were the architects of the new monopolistic corporations so despised by many, and they acted as guardians who helped the kings of industry fend off government overreaching. Yet they also quietly steered their robber baron clients away from a "public be damned" attitude toward more enlightened corporate behavior during a period of progressive, turbulent change in America.

Author John Oller, himself a former Wall Street lawyer, gives us a richly written glimpse of turn-of-the-century New York, from the grandeur of private mansions and elegant hotels to the city's early skyscrapers and transportation systems and the depths of its deplorable tenement housing conditions. Some of the biggest names of the era are featured, including business titans J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller; lawyer statesmen Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes; and presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.

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Slices & Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life

Lee Anne Fennell, Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

How things are divided up or pieced together matters. Half a bridge is of no use at all. Conversely, many things would do more good if they could be divided up differently: Perhaps you would prefer a job that involves a third fewer hours and a third less pay or a car that materializes only when needed and is priced accordingly? Difficulties in "slicing" and "lumping" shape nearly every facet of how we live and work -- and a great deal of law and policy as well.

Lee Anne Fennell explores how both types of challenges -- carving out useful slices and assembling useful lumps -- surface in myriad contexts, from hot-button issues like conservation and eminent domain to developments in the sharing economy to personal struggles over work, money, time, diet and exercise. Yet the significance of configuration is often overlooked, leading to missed opportunities for improving our lives. With a technology-fueled entrepreneurial explosion under way that is dividing goods, services, and jobs in novel ways, and as urbanization and environmental threats raise the stakes for assembling resources and cooperation, this is an especially exciting and crucial time to confront questions of slicing and lumping. The future of the city, the workplace, the marketplace, and the environment all turn on matters of configuration, as do the prospects for more effective legal doctrines, for better management of finances and health, and more. This book reveals configuration's power and potential -- as a unifying concept and as a focus of public and private innovation.

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The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis

Michael J. Gerhardt, The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

For more than twenty years, The Federal Impeachment Process has served as the most complete analysis of the constitutional and legal issues raised in every impeachment proceeding in American history. Impeachment, Michael J. Gerhardt shows, is an inherently political process designed to expose and remedy political crimes -- serious breaches of duty, abuse of power, or injuries to the Republic. Subject neither to judicial review nor to presidential veto, impeachment is a unique congressional power that requires members of Congress to consider the political and constitutional ramifications, the gravity of the offense charged, the harm to the constitutional order, and the link between an official's misconduct and duties.

For this third edition, Gerhardt updates the book to cover questions relating to impeachment since President Clinton's acquittal, as well as recent scholarly debates. He discusses issues arising from President Trump's possible impeachment, including whether a sitting president may be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted for criminal misconduct or whether impeachment and conviction in Congress is the only way to sanction a sitting president; what the "emoluments clause" means and whether it might provide the basis for presidential removal; whether incompetence may serve as the basis for impeachment; and the extent to which the past conduct of public officials may serve as a basis for their impeachment and removal from office.

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The Little Book on Oral Argument

Alan L. Dworsky, The Little Book on Oral Argument (2d ed. 2019)

The Little Book on Oral Argument, Second Edition by Alan Dworsky is a reader-friendly guide to oral argument for law students and new lawyers, designed to introduce and cover its subject in a simple and entertaining, yet comprehensive, way. It focuses on how to argue a case before an appellate court. Additionally, it contains chapters on such topics as style, substance, structure, questions, and rebuttal to explain effective approaches to this peculiar form of conversation. More profoundly, it delves into the core theme of oral argument—how one interacts with one’s audience. Judges can interrupt with questions, cut a person off, or force a lawyer to move on.

Each oral argument is different, requiring one to make moment-to-moment adjustments to fit the situation and the judges. To make these adjustments intelligently, there is a need for more than mechanical rules. There is also a need to understand the psychology of persuasion.

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