Steven D. Smith (University of San Diego). The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2014).
"Smith maintains that the distinctive American contribution to religious freedom was not in the First Amendment, which was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. What was important was the commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation."
—The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom book jacket
Nicholas Freudenberg (City University of New York). Lethal but Legal (Oxford University Press, 2014).
"Decisions made by six industries—food, tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, gun, and auto—have a greater impact on today's health than the decisions made by scientists and policymakers. As the collective influence of corporations has grown, governments have increasingly stepped back and allowed for decisions that benefit corporate profit at the expense of public health. Lethal but Legal examines how corporations have shaped—and plagued—public helath over the last century, beginning in industrialized countries and then moving into less-regualted developing regions. It is both a current history of corporate antagonism towards health and an analysis of the emerging movements that are challenging those practices."
—Lethal but Legal book jacket
Justin Steinberg (University of Chicago). Dante and the Limits of the Law (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
"In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante's Divine Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by sophisticated laws, hierarchical jurisdictions, and rationalized punishments and rewards. He makes the compelling case that Dante deliberately exploits this highly structured legal system to explore the phenomenon of exceptions to it, crucially introducing Dante to current debates about literature's relation to law exceptionality, and sovereignty."
—Dante and the Limits of the Law book jacket
Neta C. Crawford (Boston University). Accountability for Killing (Oxford University Press, 2013).
"Given the nature of contemporary war, where military organizations—training, and the choice of weapons, doctrine, and tactics—create the conditions for systemic collateral damage, Crawford contends that assigning sole moral responsibility for systemic collateral damage to individuals is insufficient. She develops a new theory of organizational moral agency and responsibility, and shows how the US military exercised moral agency and moral responsibility to reduce the incidence of collateral damage in America's most recent wars."
—Accountability for Killing book jacket
Scott Cutler Shershow (UC Davis). Deconstructing Dignity (The University of Chicago Press).
"Deconstructing Dignity is an excellent book. It is well conceived and wonderfully executed. It not only intervenes in this particular debate on the right to die but takes up important and long-standing concepts and problems in the history of philosophy and culture; it dismantles vapid truisms and opens onto the possibility of a thought of life—and death—that is not always already lost within life's supposed dignity and sanctity."
—David E. Johnson, University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Steven D. Smith (University of San Diego). The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2014).
