Sorting Sexualities

Stefan Vogler, Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification (University of Chicago Press, 2021). 

In the United States, when LGBTQ people seek asylum and when sexual offenders are evaluated for carceral placement, state actors must determine individuals' sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed -- one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one -- they present the same question: how do we know someone's sexuality? In Sorting Sexualities, Stefan Vogler focuses specifically on these state classification processes to deftly unpack the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the U.S. 

-Publisher's Description

What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said

Helen M. Alvare, Jack M. Balkin, William N. Eskridge, Jr., Katherine Franke, Robert P. George, Sherif Gorges, John C. Harrison, Andrew Koppelman, Melissa Murray, Douglas NeJaime, Reva B. Siegel, Catherine Smith & Jeremy Waldron, What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Same-Sex Marriage Decision (Yale University Press, 2020). 

Jack Balkin and an all-star cast of legal scholars, sitting as a hypothetical Supreme Court, rewrite the famous 2015 opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry. In eleven incisive opinions, the authors offer the best constitutional arguments for and against the right to same-sex marriage, and debate what Obergefell should mean for the future. 

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Queering Law and Order

Kevin Leo Yabut Nada, Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System (Lexington Books, 2020).

Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System examines the state of LGBTQ people within the criminal justice system. Intertwining legal cases, academic research, and popular media, Nadal reviews a wide range of issues -- ranging from historical heterosexist and transphobic legislation to police brutality to the prison industrial complex to family law. Grounded in Queer Theory and intersectional lenses, each chapter provides academic resource and call to action for readers who are interested in advocating for LGBTQ rights. 

-Publisher's Description

His Name is George Floyd

Robert Samuels & Toluse Olorunnipa, His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Struggle and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Viking, 2022).

His Name is George Floyd tells the story of a beloved figure from Houston’s housing projects as he faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the context of the country’s enduring legacy of institutional racism, this deeply reported account examines Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the overpolicing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with Floyd’s closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest seats of political power, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world. 

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Championship Mock Trial

Hon. David Nelmark & Justin Berstein, Championship Mock Trial: The Guide for Students and Coaches (American Bar Association, 2022). 

Championship Mock Trial is the culmination of lessons learned and techniques developed by Judge David Nelmark and Professor Justin Berstein during their more than 50 years of combined experience. They have competed for and coached teams to dozens of championships and run hundreds of Middle School, High School, College, and Law School Mock Trial tournaments. Both are former presidents of the American Mock Trial Association. 

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Critical Race Judgments

Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R. A. Lenhardt & Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

By re-writing U.S. Supreme Court opinions that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, Critical Race Judgments demonstrates that it’s possible to be judge and a critical race theorist. Specific issues covered in these cases include the death penalty, employment, voting, policing, education, the environment, justice, housing, immigration, sexual orientation, segregation, and mass incarceration. While some rewritten cases – Plessy v. Ferguson (which constitutionalized Jim Crow) and Korematsu v. United States (which constitutionalized internment) – originally focused on race, many of the rewritten opinions – Lawrence v. Texas (which constitutionalized sodomy laws) and Roe v. Wade (which constitutionalized a woman’s right to choose) – are used to incorporate racial justice principles in novel and important ways. This work is essential for everyone who needs to understand why critical race theory must be deployed in constitutional law to uphold and advance racial justice principles that are foundational to U.S. democracy.

-Publisher's Description

Seek and Hide

Amy Gajda, Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking, 2022). 

Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging. And that's doubly dangerous, as legal expert Amy Gajda argues. Too little privacy can mean extraordinary profits and power for people who deal in and publish soul-crushing secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy. Seek and Hide carries us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law
allows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. In the 1960s those privacy interests gave way to the glory days of investigative reporting in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today's full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet had erased the right to privacy completely. The stories touch on the famous and the worthy but barely remembered, on presidents with secret babies, and on the evolution of a modern media emboldened to reveal the most intimate details about anyone -- and how so much of today rests on Section 230, a 1996 federal law that became privacy's downfall and then the catalyst for its rebirth.

-Publisher's Description

Discussions in Dispute Resolution

Art Hinshaw, Andrea Kupfer Schneider & Sarah Rudolph Cole, Discussions in Dispute Resolution: The Foundational Articles (Oxford University Press, 2021).

In this book, the editors have identified 16 articles published before the year 2000, four from each of the field’s primary subfields – negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and public policy. In each section, the works appear in chronological order, and for each work four commenters answer the question: why is this work a foundational piece in the dispute resolution field? The purpose in asking this simple question is four-fold: to hail the field’s foundational generation and their work, to bring a fresh look at these articles, to engage the articles’ original authors where possible, and to challenge the articles with the benefit of hindsight.

-Publisher’s Description

Black in White Space

Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study  of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “White space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country. 

-Publisher’s Description

Stamped

Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (Little, Brown and Company, 2020).

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. Racist ideas are woven into the fabric of this country, and the first step to building an antiracist America is acknowledging America's racist past and present. This book takes you on that journey, showing how racist ideas started and were spread, and how they can be discredited.

-Publisher's Description

Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten

Kimberly M. Mutcherson, Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 

Reproductive justice (RJ) is a pivotal movement that supplants the language and limitations of reproductive rights. RJ's tenets are that women have the human rights to decide if or when they'll become pregnant, whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and to parent the children they have in safe and healthy environments. Recognizing the importance of the rights at stake when the law addresses parenting and procreation, the authors in this book re-imagine judicial opinions that address the law's treatment of pregnancy and parenting. The cases cover topics such as forced sterilization, pregnancy discrimination, criminal penalties for women who take illegal drugs while pregnant, and state funding for abortion. Though some of the re-imagined cases come to the same conclusions as the originals, each rewritten opinion analyzes how these cases impact the most vulnerable populations, including people with disabilities, poor women, and women of color. 

-Publisher's Description

Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten

Rachel Rebouche, Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 

This book provides new, feminist perspectives on famous family law cases that span generations. The chapters take court decisions and rewrite them with feminist ideas in mind. Each author of a rewritten opinion relied only on materials available at the time of the original decision. The decision address topics such as the criminalization of polygamy, intimate partner violence as a ground for asylum, the enforcement of gestational surrogacy, contracts, the rights of cohabitants, discrimination against transgender parents, immigration rules governing noncitizen parents, and child welfare and child support systems, among others. Each opinion is accompanied by a commentary that explains the original opinion as well as the case's contemporary relevance. The combination of rewritten opinion and its commentary provides an in-depth examination of the most important topics in family law. 

-Publisher's Description

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions

Martha Chamallas & Lucinda M. Finley, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from prenatal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and noneconomic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or gender identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience. 

-Publisher's Description

Law as Data

Michael A. Livermore & Daniel N. Rockmore, Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis (Santa Fe Institute Press, 2019). 

In recent years, the digitization of legal texts, combined with developments in the fields of statistics, computer science, and data analytics, have opened entirely new approaches to the study of law. This volume explores the new field of computational legal analysis, an approach marked by its use of legal texts as data. The emphasis herein is work that pushes methodological boundaries, either by using new tools to study longstanding questions within legal studies or by identifying new questions in response to developments in data availability and analysis. 

-Publisher’s Description

Unsettled Waters

Eric P. Perramond, Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West (University of California Press, 2019). 

In the American West, water adjudication lawsuits are adversarial, expensive, and lengthy. Unsettled Waters is the first detailed study of water adjudications in New Mexico. The state envisioned adjudication as a straightforward accounting of water rights as private property. However, adjudication resurfaced tensions and created conflicts among water sovereigns at multiple scales. Based on more than ten years of fieldwork, this book tells a fascinating story of resistance involving communal water cultures, Native rights and cleaved identities, clashing experts, and unintended outcomes. Whether the state can alter adjudications to meet the water demands in the twenty-first century will have serious consequences. 

-Publisher's Description

The Supreme Court

Tom S. Clark, The Supreme Court: An Analytic History of Constitutional Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

This book presents a quantitative history of constitutional law in the United States and brings together humanistic and social-scientific approaches to studying law. Using theoretical models of adjudication, Tom S. Clark presents a statistical model of law and uses the model to document the historical development of constitutional law. Using sophisticated statistical methods and historical analysis of Court decisions, the author documents how social and political forces shape the path of law. Spanning the history of constitutional law since Reconstruction, this book illustrates the way in which the law evolves with American life and argues that a social-scientific approach to the history of law illuminates connections across disparate areas of law, connected by the social context in which the Constitution has been interpreted. 

-Publisher's Description

Lawless

Nicolas P. Suzor, Lawless: The Secret Rules that Govern Our Digital Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

Rampant abuse, hate speech, censorship, bias, and disinformation -- our internet has problems. It is governed by technology companies -- search engines, social media platforms, and infrastructure providers -- whose hidden rules influence what we are allowed to see and say. In Lawless, Nicolas P. Suzor presents gripping examples of exactly how tech companies govern our digital environment and how they bend to pressure from governments and other powerful actors to censor and control the flow of information online. We are at a constitutional moment -- an opportunity to rethink the basic rules of how the internet is governed. Suzor offers a vision of a vibrant, diverse, and flourishing internet that can protect our fundamental rights from the lawless rule of tech. The culmination of more than ten years of original research, this groundbreaking work should be read by anyone who cares about the internet and the future of our shared social spaces. 

-Publisher's Description

Cryptocurrencies in Public and Private Law

David Fox & Sarah Green, Cryptocurrencies in Public and Private Law (Oxford University Press, 2019). 

The meteoric rise in the use of cryptocurrencies necessitates that all these difficult legal and sociological questions be urgently examined. This book does so. It is not confined to English law, nor even European legal systems, but considers the problems from the viewpoint of Asian law systems as well. The distinguished authors, all specialists in the topics they address in each of the ten substantive chapters, explain the problems and suggest solutions in a clear and concise way. For any lawyer, like me, who is having to grapple with the legal aspects of cryptocurrencies for the first time, this book is a godsend. And for those who are tyros, the deep and careful analyses that are given in each chapter will provide answers to problems or leads to further study. 

-Richard Aikens (foreword)

Erotic Subjects and Outlaws

 Serena Petrella, Erotic Subjects and Outlaws: Sketching the Borders of Sexual Citizenship (Brill, 2019). 

This book examines the intricacies of emergent sexual citizenship. Designed for academics and broader audiences alike, the collection covers the theorization of sexual citizenship, the exploration of case studies in law, the relationship between sexual citizenship and bio-politics, and finally the erotic dissidence of sexual outlaws. The borders of sexual citizenship are traced, as authors investigate what it means to be 'inside,' as erotic subjects, or outside, as 'sexual outlaws.' The issues of inclusion and exclusion are approached through diverse methodological and analytical lenses: some articles are theoretical and philosophical; others are empirically based, presenting the findings of sociological and ethnographic research projects and some are textual analyses of religious texts, film texts, and of legal discourse. 

-Publisher's Description