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. 

-Publisher's Description

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. 

-Publisher's Description

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. 

-Publisher's Description

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.

-Publisher's Description

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.

-Publisher's Description

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. 

-Publisher's Description