Big Tech & The Digital Economy

Nicolas Petit, Big Tech & The Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario (Oxford University Press, 2020). 

Using economics, business, and management science as well legal reasoning, this book offers a new perspective on big tech. It builds a theory of "moligopoly." The theory advances that the tech giants, or at least some of them, coexist both as monopolies and oligopoly firms that compete against each other in an environment of deep uncertainty and economic dynamism. 

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A Collective Bargain

 Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (Ecco, 2020). 

In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor organizer, environmental activist, and political campaigner Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are one of the only institutions capable of taking effective action against today's super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. 

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Online Courts and the Future of Justice

 Richard Susskind, Online Courts and the Future of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2019). 

Drawing on almost 40 years in the fields of legal technology and jurisprudence, Susskind shows how we can use the remarkable reach of the internet to help people understand and enforce their legal rights. More than half of humanity is now online. More people in the world now have internet access than access to justice. 

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Theorising Labour Law in a Changing World

Alysia Blackham, Miriam Kullmann & Ania Zbyszewska, Theorising Labour Law in a Changing World: Towards Inclusive Labour Law (Hart Publishing, 2019).

This collection brings together perspectives from industrial relations, political economy, political theory, labour history, sociology, gender studies and regulatory theory to build a more inclusive theory of labour law. That is, a theory of labour law that is more inclusive of non-traditional workers (including those in atypical work, or from non-traditional backgrounds); more inclusive of a variety of collective approaches to work regulation that foster solidarity between workers; and more inclusive of interdisciplinary and complex explanations of labour law and its regulatory spaces. The individual chapters speak to this theme of inclusivity in different ways and offer different suggestions for how it might be achieved. They break down the barriers between legal research and other fields, to promote fruitful and integrative conversations across disciplines.

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Divorcing Traditions

Katherine Lemons, Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism (Cornell University, 2019).

Divorcing Traditions is an ethnography of Islamic legal expertise and practices in India, a secular state in which Muslims are a significant minority and where Islamic judgments are not legally binding. Katherine Lemons argues that an analysis of divorce in accordance with Islamic strictures is critical to the understanding of Indian secularism. 

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The ILO @ 100

Christophe Gironde & Gilles Carbonnier, The ILO @ 100: Addressing the Past and Future of Work and Social Protection (Brill, 2019).
On the occasion of the centenary of the International Labour Organization (ILO), this 11th special issue of International Development Policy explores the Organization's capacity for action, its effectiveness and its ability to adapt and innovate. The collection of thirteen articles, written by authors from around the world, covers three broad areas: the ILO's historic context and contemporary challenges; approaches and results in relation to labour and social protection; and the changes shaping the future of work. The articles highlight the progress and gaps to date, as well as the context and constraints faced by the ILO in its efforts to respond to the new dilemmas and challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, with regard to labour and social protection.

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Digital Family Justice

Mavis Maclean & Bregje Dijksterhuis, Digital Family Justice: From Alternative Dispute Resolution to Online Dispute Resolution? (Hart Publishing, 2019).

Governments across the world have sought to reduce public spending on private quarrels by promoting mediation (ADR) and by beginning to look at digital justice (ODR) as alternatives to courts and lawyers. 

But this book describes how mediation has failed to take the place of courts and lawyers, even where public funding for legal help has been removed. Instead ODR has developed rapidly, led by the Dutch Rechtwijzer. The authors question the speed of this development, and stress the need for careful evaluation of how far these services can meet the needs of divorcing families. 

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Behind the Veil

Neville Cox, Behind the Veil: A Critical Analysis of European Veiling Laws (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019).

This timely book considers the most recently passed European laws that target Islamic veiling. The author situates the justifications for the anti-veiling laws in the context of a careful analysis of the reasons why women wear veils, and considers these justifications by reference to emerging debates surrounding the relative value of liberalism and human rights, multiculturalism, and the need to protect 'traditional values.' The book concludes that these laws are best viewed as symbolic strikes at a recognisable symbol of an ideological opponent, theorising that their principal purpose is to enable particular countries to reaffirm traditional values in a context of increased domestic opposition to multiculturalism.

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The 2020 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide

Sharon D. Nelson, John W. Simek & Michael C. Maschke, The 2020 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide (American Bar Association, 2020).

In clear, understandable language, it gives a vendor-neutral overview of and recommendations for computers, servers, networking equipment, legal software, printers, security products, smartphones, tablets, and more. Whether you choose to do it yourself or work with an IT consultant, this book has the information you need to reduce the sea of choices to a manageable set of proven options.

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African Americans and the First Amendment

Timothy C. Shiell, African-Americans and the First Amendment: The Case for Liberty and Equality (State University of New York Press, 2019).
Timothy C. Shiell utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate that a strong commitment to greater inclusion and participation. This crucial connection is evidenced throughout US history, from the days of colonial and antebellum slavery to Jim Crow: in the landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1937 freeing the black communist Angelo Herndon; in the struggles and victories of the civil rights movement, from the late 1930s to the late '60s; and in the historical and modern debates over hate speech restrictions. Liberty and equality can conflict in individual cases, Shiell argues, but there is no fundamental conflict between them. Robust First Amendment values protect and encourage demands for racial equality while weak First Amendment values, in contrast, lead to censorship and chilling demands for racial equality.

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Women as Constitution-Makers

Ruth Rubio-Marin & Helen Irving, Women as Constitution-Makers: Case Studies from the New Democratic Era (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

This collection offers, for the first time, comprehensive case-studies of women's campaigns for constitutional equality in nine different countries that have undergone constitutional transformations in the 'participatory era.' Against a richly-contextualized historical and political background, each charts the actions and strategies of women participants, both formal and informal, and records their successes, failures and continuing hopes for constitutional equality. 

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Smarter Pricing, Smarter Profit

Stuart J. T. Dodds, Smarter Pricing, Smarter Profit: A Guide for the Law Firm of the Future (American Bar Association, 2020).

Smarter Pricing, Smarter Profit seeks to provide you with an easy-to-read "roadmap" that guides you through the steps to improving your law firm's existing pricing and legal project management capability, as well as the overall profit contribution. 

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Criminal Law and the Man Problem

Ngaire Naffine, Criminal Law and the Man Problem (Hart Publishing, 2019).

This new analysis probes the unacknowledged thinking of generations of influential legal men, which includes the psychological and legal techniques that have obscured the operation of bias, even to the legal experts themselves. It explains how men's interests have influenced the most cherished legal norms, especially the rules of human contact, which were designed to protect men from other men, while specifically securing lawful sexual access to at least one woman. The aim is to test the discipline's broadest commitments to civility, and its trajectory towards the final resolution, when men and women were declared to be equal and equivalent legal persons. In the process it exposes the morally and intellectually limiting consequences of male power. 

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Border Brokers

Christina M. Getrich, Border Brokers: Children of Mexican Immigrants Navigating U.S. Society, Laws, and Politics (University of Arizona Press, 2019).

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Diego over more than a decade, Border Brokers documents the continuing deleterious effects of U.S. immigration policies and enforcement practices on a group of now young adults and their families. In the first book-length longitudinal study of mixed-status families, Christina M. Getrich provides an on-the-ground portrayal of these young adults' lives from their own perspectives and in their own words.
More importantly, Getrich identifies how these individuals have developed resiliency and agency beginning in their teens to improve circumstances for immigrant communities. Despite the significant constraints their families face, these children have emerged into adulthood as grounded and skilled brokers who effectively use their local knowledge bases, life skills honed in their families, and transborder competencies. Refuting the notion of their failure to assimilate, she highlights the mature, engaged citizenship they model as they transition to adulthood to be perhaps their most enduring contribution to creating a better U.S. society.

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Reimagining the National Security State

Karen J. Greenberg, Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Looking through the lenses of theory, history, law and policy, the essays in this volume illuminate the ways in which liberal democracy has suffered at the hands of policymakers in the name of national security. The contributors, who are leading experts and practitioners in fields ranging from political theory to evolutionary biology, discuss the vast expansion of executive powers, the excessive reliance on secrecy, and the exploration of questionable legal territory in matters of detention, criminal justice, targeted killings, and warfare. This book gives the reader an eye-opening window into the historical precedents and lasting impact the security state has had on America's founding principles.

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Guilty People

Abbe Smith, Guilty People (Rutgers University Press, 2020).

In Guilty People, law professor and longtime criminal defense attorney, Abbe Smith gives us a thoughtful and honest look at guilty individuals on trial. Each chapter tells compelling stories about real cases she handled; some of her clients were guilty of only petty crimes and misdemeanors, while others committed offenses as grave as rape and murder. In the process, she answers the question that every defense attorney is routinely asked: How can you represent these people? 

Smith's answer also tackles seldom-addressed but equally important questions such as: Who are the people filling our nation's jails and prisons? Are they as dangerous and depraved as they are usually portrayed? How did they get caught up in the system? And what happens to them there? 

This book challenges the assumption that the guilty are a separate species, unworthy of humane treatment.

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Trial Films on Trial

Austin Sarat, Jessica Silbey & Martha Merrill Umphrey, Trial Films on Trial: Law, Justice, and Popular Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2019).

Despite the fact that the medium of film is one of the most pervasive means by which many citizens come to know the justice system, trial films are rarely analyzed and critiqued. The chapters cover a variety of topics, such as how and why film audiences adopt the role of the jury, the narrative and visual contentions employed by directors, and the ways mid- to late twentieth-century trial films offer insights into the events of that period.

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Platform Economy

Bram Devolder, The Platform Economy: Unravelling the Legal Status of Online Intermediaries (Intersentia, 2019).

Emerging platforms claim to create new market opportunities and to provide innovative solutions to improve social welfare. Conversely, the platform economy blurs established lines between traditional legal categories, such as business and consumer, personal and professional, and worker and contractor. Traditional regulation, which often focuses on balancing the interests of two contracting parties, is now confronted with the three-sided contractual relationship between a platform, a supplier and a user. 

In this book, a panel of international legal experts unravels the legal status of online intermediaries -- a thorny knot that legislators, judges and lawyers across the globe are facing. 

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Feminist Judgments in International Law

Loved Hodson & Troy Lavers, Feminist Judgments in International Law (Hart Publishing, 2019). 

This collection asks whether feminist perspectives can offer meaningful and viable alternatives to international law norms; and if so, whether that application results in distinguishable differences in outcomes. It answers these questions with particular reference to sources of international law, the public and private divide, State responsibility, State immunities, treaty law, State sovereignty, human rights protection, global governance, and the concept of violence in international law. This landmark publication offers a truly innovative reassessment of international law. 

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Destabilized Property

Shelly Kreiczer-Levy, Destabilized Property: Property Law in the Sharing Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The book develops a novel conceptualization of property in the age of the sharing economy. It argues that the sharing economy pushes for a mobile and flexible vision of engaging with possessions and, as a result, with other people. Property's role as a source of permanence and a facilitator of stable, longterm relationships is gradually decreasing in importance. The book offers a broad theoretical and normative framework for understanding the changing landscape of property, provides an institutional analysis of the phenomenon, discusses the social, communal, and relational implications of these changes, and offers guidelines for law reform.

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Raising the Bar

Debo P. Adegbile, Lisa Davis, Damaris Hernandez & Ted Wells, Raising the Bar: Diversifying Big Law (The New Press, 2019).

In Raising the Bar, four partners of color from leading law firms engage in a no-holds-barred conversation about what it takes to make it in big law, using their own journeys to the top to discuss how law firms can do a better job of attracting and holding on to a more diverse set of young attorneys. They offer advice to the attorneys themselves on how to succeed in a culture that has long excluded them, including finding mentors among those who don't look like them, building a portable tool kit of skills, establishing key connections outside the firm, and staying "true to you," even as young associates of color navigate the foreign terrain of insular firm culture.

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Mediation in International Commercial and Investment Disputes

Catharine Titi & Katia Fach Gomez, Mediation in International Commercial and Investment Disputes (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Mediation in International Commercial and Investment Disputes brings together a line-up of outstanding, highly-qualified experts from academia, mediation and arbitration institutions, and international legal practice, to address this highly topical, complex subject from a variety of angles.

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Skimmed

Andrea Freeman, Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.

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Foreclosure Echo

Linda E. Fisher & Judith Fox, The Foreclosure Echo: How the Hardest Hit Have Been Left Out of the Economic Recovery (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

This book tells the story of the foreclosure crisis from a new perspective -- that of ordinary people who experienced it. This angle has not been thoroughly communicated before now. The authors are legal academics who have worked for decades defending low- to moderate-income people from foreclosure and challenging predatory lending practices.

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Repugnant Laws

Keith E. Whittington, Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the President (University Press of Kansas, 2019).

A thorough examination of the record of judicial review requires first a comprehensive inventory of relevant cases. To this end, Whittington revises the extant catalog of cases in which the Court has struck down a federal statute and adds to this, for the first time, a complete catalog of cases upholding laws of Congress against constitutional challenges. With reference to this inventory, Whittington is then able to offer a reassessment of the prevalence of judicial review, an account of how the power of judicial review has evolved over time, and a persuasive challenge to the idea of an antidemocratic, heroic court. In this analysis, it becomes apparent that the court is political and often partisan, operating as a political ally to dominant political coalitions; vulnerable and largely unable to sustain consistent opposition to the policy priorities of empowered political majorities; and quasi-independent, actively exercising the power of judicial review to pursue the justices' own priorities within bounds of what is politically tolerable.

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Deference

Gary Lawson & Guy I. Seidman, Deference: The Legal Concept and the Legal Practice (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Deference is perhaps the most important concept and practice in law. It lies at the core of every system of precedent, appellate review, federalism, and separation of powers, all of which center on how one actor should deal with previous decisions. Oddly enough, deference is also one of the most under-analyzed and under-theorized legal concepts and practices, perhaps because its applications are so varied.

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Equal Justice

Frederick Wilmot-Smith, Equal Justice: Fair Legal Systems in an Unfair World (Harvard University Press, 2019).

In Equal Justice, Frederick Wilmot-Smith offers an account of a topic neglected in theory and undermined in practice: justice in legal institutions. He argues that the benefits and burdens of legal systems should be shared equally and that divergences from equality must issue from a fair procedure. He also considers how the ideal of equal justice might be made a reality. Least controversially, legal resources must sometimes be granted to those who cannot afford them. More radically, we may need to rethink the centrality of the market to legal systems. Markets in legal resources entrench pre-existing inequalities, allocate injustice to those without means, and enable the rich to escape the law's demands. None of this can be justified. Many people think that markets in health care are unjust; it may be time to think of legal services in the same way.

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