Allan Hunt Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, with a foreword by H.H. Dalai Lama (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990) (These essays explore the link between Buddhism and ecological consciousness. "The Buddhist tradition, in all of its historical and cultural manifestations, encourages greater identification with the natural world." Id. at xv. "As the crisis of feeding the world's population grows, breeding of animals for human consumption becomes less acceptable--out of compassion for the suffering of animals, and the awareness that it is a grossly inefficient use of water and grain. A new relationship with the animal kingdom is part of our changing perception of the Earth. Animals are part of us, and part of our [Buddhist] practice." Id. at xvii. From Chatsumarn Kabilsing's "Early Buddhist View on Nature": "Buddhism views humanity as an integral part of nature, so that when nature is defiled, people ultimately suffer. negative consequences arise when cultures alienate themselves from nature, when people feel separate from and become aggressive towards natural systems. When we abuse nature, we abuse ourselves. Buddhist ethics follow from this basic understanding. Only when we agree on this common ground can we save ourselves, let alone the world." Id. at 8, 8. From Padmasiri De Silva's "Buddhist Environmental Ethics": "The survival of modern economic systems depends upon insatiable consumption. A simple way of life no longer satisfies most people; they demand that a wide range of goods and services be available at all times. Buddhism calls for a modest concept of living: simplicity, frugality, and an emphasis on what is essential--in short, a basic ethic of restraint. In the West, public discussion has been more concerned with the adequacy of resources than with the sustainability of current lifestyles...." Id. at 14, 15-16. "Destructive patterns of consumption generate unending cycles of desires and satisfactions." Id. at 17.).
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldview following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project, Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economics thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world." "Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mount Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood." "It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United State in the ensuring decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.").
R. M. Douglas, Architects of the Resurrection: Ailtiti na hAiseirghe and the Fascist 'New Order' In Ireland (Manchester & New York: Manchester U. Press, 2009) ("One of the more anomalous aspects of modern Irish history is the supposed non-emergence of any significant fascist or extreme-right movement during the twentieth century. This is all the more curious in light of the fact that independent Ireland before the Second World War, with its underperforming peasant economy, its sizable Northern irredenta and its variety of political and paramilitary groups contesting the legitimacy of the state, conformed more closely in many respects to the profile of the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe than to the liberal-democractic systems of the West. A growing scholarly consensus nevertheless maintains that no significant Irish counterpart of the ultra-right Continental movements of the interwar period ever arose, and that the most likely candidates for this heading ... were not in fact fascists...." Id. at 1. "The political movement at the centre of this study, Ailtira na hAiseirghe ['Archiects of the Resurrection'], has .... been virtually overlooked in English-language studies of Irish political history. Id. at 2. Aiseirghe's rise--and, no less importantly, the cultural environment in which it emerged--indicates that Ireland's supposed immunity from political extremism directed not merely against the legitimacy of the regime but the ideology upon which the state itself was constructed, is due for re-evaluation. The appearance of Aiseirghe and other pro-Axis and anti-democratic movements in the early 1940s shows that discontent with the system of parliamentary democracy itself, as distinct from the performance of individual governments, ran much deeper in Irish life than has ever been recognized, and that explanations of the regime's survival in the turbulent mid-century years must take into consideration the incompetence of its enemies as well as the sagacity of its defenders." Id. at 3. "In an unpublished manifesto probably written in the sprig of 1940, 'Ireland a Missionary-Ideological State?' O'Cuinneagain began to lay down the basic principles of his evolving political programme. It was first of all necessary, he argued, to reject the commonly held fallacy that the regimented pattern of life in the Continental fascist countries was in some way alien to the Irish mentality...." "The real question was not whether Ireland or any other country was amenable to 'discipline', but whether there existed 'a particular Gaelic ideal, corresponding to the Nazi or Fascist ideal, which could rouse and inspire the whole people of the Ireland of 1940?' In O'Cuinneagain's view...the only such objective that conformed to 'the requirements of the character of our racial genious' was the 'task of European and world re-Christianisation'. Among the Catholic countries, neither Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain nor even Salazar's Portugal--far less 'priest-impoverished France'--could provide a 'perfect example of Catholic national government'. Nor was the training and dispatch to foreign countries or missionaries sufficient to achieve this objective. 'The world requires to be shown in the twentieth century that Christianity can be practised in the world--not merely in the cloister!' Ireland's manifest destiny, then, was to prove it by her example the compatibility of faith and modernity, and thus to provide a practical as well as an ethical alternative to the materialistic heresies of capitalism and Communism. But it was futile to hope for any advance in this direction so long as the country retained its existing system of 'purely passive or administrative but non-directional government,'. Id. at 63. Read that last passage carefully. Scary! Think about the many Americans who aggressively argue that the United States is essentially a 'christian nation'. Thinks about certain current members of the United States Supreme Court whose Catholic conservatism underlie their legal reasoning and judicial opinions.).
Tamar Frankel, The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle: A History and Analysis of Con Artist and Victims (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("America is ambivalent toward con artists. It does not condemn them as it would, say, the slayers of helpless elderly people, even though the actions of con artists may have a similar devastating effect on their victims, and even though their methods may be just as heartlessly cruel...." "[T]rust and honesty are indeterminate, and realizing that people follow many routes with different measures of truth and honesty, we may conclude that 'a little dishonesty' will always be there. So a little dishonesty is acceptable or even justified." "Here lies our greatest danger. A society that accepts a little dishonesty as a way of life is headed toward deception and abuse of trust on a grand scale. Because con artists resemble us, the true danger is that we might become like them. Knowing that fully self-enforced honesty cannot be achieved does not mean that accepting a little fraud, deception, and just a bit of breach of trust is the way to go." Id. at 188-189.).
Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).
Rebecca Redwood French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1995) ("This book presents the 'golden yoke' of Buddhist Tibet, the last medieval legal system in existence in the middle of the twentieth century.... The practice of law in this unique legal world, which lacked most of our familiar signposts, ranged from the fantastic use of oracles in the search for evidence to the more mundane presentation of cases in court." "Buddhism and law, two topics rarely intertwined in Western consciousness, are at the center of this work. The Tibetan legal system was based on Buddhist philosophy and reflected Buddhist thought in legal practice and decision-making. For Tibetans, law is cosmology, a kaleidoscopic patterning of relations which is constantly changing, recycling, and re-forming even as it integrate the universe and the individual into a timeless mandalic whole." "This book also critiques our idea of legal culture. It argues that we conceal from ourselves the ways we do law by segregating things legal into a separate space with rigidly defined categories. The legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet brings into question both this autonomous framework and most of the basic presumptions we have about the very nature of law, from precedent and res judicata to eule-formation and closure." Id. at xiii.).
Stuart P. Green, Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket" "In this full-scale critique, Green reveals that the last major reforms in Anglophone theft law, which took place almost fifty years ago, flattened moral distinctions, so that the same punishments are not assigned to vastly different offenses. Unreflective of community attitudes toward theft, which favor gradations in blameworthiness according to what is stolen and under what circumstances, and uninfluenced by advancements in criminal law, theory theft law cries out for another reformation--and soon.").
J. Bradford Jensen, Global Trade in Services: Fear, Facts, and Offshoring (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011) (From the backcover: "The service sector is large and growing and international trade in services is expanding rapidly. Yet there is a dearth of empirical research on the size, scope, and potential impact of service trade. The underlying source of this gap is well-known--official statistics on the service sector in general, and trade in services in particular, are inadequate." Jensen "finds that, in spite of US comparative advantage in service activities, service firms' export participation lags behind manufacturing firms. Jensen evaluates the impediments to service trade and finds evidence that there is considerable room for liberalization--especially among the large, fast-growing developing economies.").
Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels: The 2 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (New York: Crown, 2012).
Sanford Levinson, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In Framed, Levinson challenges our belief that the most important features of our [federal and state] constitutions concern what rights they protect. Instead, he focuses on the fundamental procedures of governance such as congressional bicameralism, the selection of the President by the electoral college, and the dimensions of the President's veto power--not to mention the near impossibility of amending the United States Constitution. These seemingly 'settled' and 'hardwired' structures contribute to the now almost universally recognized 'dysfunctionality" of American politics. "Levinson argues that we should stop treating the United States Constitution as uniquely exemplifying the American constitutional tradition. We should be aware of the 50 state constitutions, often interestingly different--and perhaps better--than the national model. Many states have updated their constitutions by frequent amendment or by complete replacement via state constitutional conventions. Indeed, California's ungovernable condition has prompted serious calls for a constitutional convention. This constant churn indicates that basic law often reaches the point where it fails and becomes obsolete. Given the experience of so many states, [Levinson] writes, surely it is reasonable to believe that the U.S. Constitution merits its own updating." "American constitutions, at both the state and national levels, generate important questions both about the meaning of American democracy and about the capacity of government to meet contemporary challenges. We should emulate the Framers and ask if our constitutions need fundamental change.").
Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2012) ("The spread of capitalism has brought the insecurity of the sea to the land. Human beings had long associated the power of chance with the capricious tides of he high seas. Now the image of the ship on stormy waters became a powerful metaphor for the perils and possibilities of life under capitalism. Nineteenth-century Americans spoke of howling winds, thunder claps, unknown breakers, and tempests and storms and cyclones that wept over the deep--for which they were not responsible. But they had learned to cope with them, and even to profit from them. As daunting as the task of managing risk could be, there was also the existential thrill of taking a risk. That tension was at the very operational and moral heart of both capitalism and a rising liberal order." "In the nineteenth-century Americans had their own term for this tension, for all of the sudden economic twists and turns, booms and busts, and ups and downs that were newly and inexplicably in their midst. They called them 'freaks of fortune." "Within the context created by the freaks--by the economic chance-world of capitalism--the history of risk comes into view." Id. at 1. "The thread that runs consistently through risk's history is a moral one. For risk triumphed in the nineteenth-century United States in the context of the nation's moral struggle over freedom and slavery. A generation--financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists--developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.' In a democratic society, according to the new gospel, free and equal men must take, run, own, assume, bear, carry, and manage personal risks. That involved actively attempting to become the master of one's own personal destiny, adopting a moral duty to attend to the future. Which meant taking risks. But it also meant offloading one's risk onto new financial corporations--like when a wage worker insured his productive labor against workplace accident, an ex-slave open a savings account, or a Wall Street financier hatched a corporate profit-sharing and employee benefit plan. A new vision of what it meant to be a free and secure actor thus took shape in the new material and psychological reality created by the modern American corporate financial system." Id. at 5.).
Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("During the early 1790s, the simmering Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania came to full boil. Despite Gallatin's efforts to pacify the rebels, they attacked individual collectors and set fire to the barns of farmers who complied with the tax. In July 1794, 500 armed men gathered near Pittsburgh and began threatening all manner of mayhem--firing shots into the air, interfering with the courts, robbing the mails, and planning an assault on federal property in Pittsburgh. It was the first serious domestic challenge to the national government under the Constitution, and was met by decisive action." "Urged on by Hamilton, President Washington sent a force of about 12,500 militiamen into western Pennsylvania--an overwhelming display of federal power. Hamilton himself traveled from the capital in Philadelphia as a civilian observer. As he wrote Angelica Church, his sister-in-law, 'A large army has cooled the courage of those madmen & the only question seems to be how to guard best against the return of the phrenzy . . . Twas very important there should be no mistake in the management of the affair.' The militia arrested about twenty rebels, two of whom were convicted of treason and sentenced to hang. Washington, concluding that the proper lesson had been taught and learned, commuted these sentences. But Gallatin always regarded the incident as an gross overreaction by the federal government. It confirmed his worst suspicions about Hamilton, whom he came to think of as a tool of wealthy Easterners unconcerned with the West." Id. at 203.).
Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Discussing the movement's origins, Neier looks at the dissenters who fought for religious freedom in seventeenth-century England and the abolitionists who opposed slavery before the Civil War era. He pays special attention to the period from the 1970s onward, and he describes the growth of the human rights movement after the Helsinki Accord, the roles played by American presidential administrations, and the astonishing Arab revolutions of 2011. Neier argues that the contemporary human rights movement was, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the Cold War, and he demonstrates how it became the driving influence in international law, institutions, and rights. Throughout, Neier highlights key figures, controversies, and organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and he considers the challenges to come.").
Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver, Toronto & Berkeley: David Suzuki Foundation/Greystone Books/D & M Publishers, 2012) ("As noted by the French philosopher Fabrice Flipo, the story of fire tells us that no energy is clean, free, or unlimited and that the use of every Promethean tool must be carefully measured. Only justice and respect can defeat excess. In the absence of proportion and scale, energy invites destruction and dispersion. And it create a servitude that blinds master and slave alike." Id. at xi. "[E]very form of energy consumption, from slavery to oil, involves, somewhere, a sacrifice." Id. at 2. "Before coal and oil, civilization ran on a two-cycle engine: the energy of solar-fed crops and the energy of slaves." Id. at 3. "The Atlantic slave trade wasted energy like a leaking pipeline. Over a three-hundred-year period, as many as 10 million Africans crossed the Atlantic in chains. For every successful import, two to five corpses littered the high seas or African slave ports." Id. at 13. 'It would take a new energy master to unshackle this order of human slavery. Although fossil fuels at first promised widespread liberty and virgin utopias, they eventually delivered something different: an army of fuel-hungry mechanical workers that would require increasingly complex forms of management and an aggressive class of powerful carbon traders. Without much thought, we replaced the ancient energy of human slaves with a new servitude, powered by fossil fuels." Id. at 17. "In 1957, Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, gave a sobering speech to a group of U.S. physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota...." "Rickover told his listeners that he didn't know of a society where reduction in energy slaves--human or petroleum--had not resulted in in a decline of civilization. 'Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels,' he continued. 'What assurance do we have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer is--in the long run--none'" Id. at 57-58. "Noisy leaf-powers, expensive SUVs, and glowing smartphones dominate modern life as fully as did servants in a nineteenth0century Brazilian 'Big House.' The average North American or European consumer thinks of these inanimate servants as entitlements. And although our comfort providers and labor savers number in the billions, we largely pretend that they do not exist. U.S. plantation owners at least earnestly debated the morality of living off the sweat of their shackled servants. Their modern descendants take immediate offense at any discussion about the carbon emissions of their mechanical servants." Id. at 63. "High energy consumption nourishes highly narcissistic cultures. Since the 1970s, when domestic oil production peaked in the United States, the country has refused to recognize any real change in its energy fortunes. As noted by the essayist Daniel Altman, self-obsessed Americans tend to do what they want regardless of the consequences for other people. Some believe that they are entitled to superhuman wealth even when the country's dwindling oil supplies deliver nothing but debt. Many Americans consistently reject taxation that might serve future generations or the current good of their communities. Explains Altman, 'In recent decades Americans have encountered far more inequality and far less social mobility than their parents. But narcissism leads these same Americans to reject redistributive tax systems.'" Id. at 223-224. "[I]t would take five times more energy than the current global supply to extend these profligate habits to the rest of the world". Id. at 224. "Lowering energy demand is a radical prescription. It is as revolutionary as the abolition of U.S. slavery or the redistribution of land in nineteenth-century Russia, says Vaclav Smil. But our health, our freedom, and our humanity depend on a moral reassessment of mastery and slavery in all energy relationships. Our debilitating servitude to the concentrated forces of fossil fuels has just one proper solution: a radical decentralization and relocalizing of energy spending combined with a systematic reduction in the number of inanimate slaves in our housefuls and places of work." Id, at 227.).
James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012) ("Many Americans, stunned by these pivotal events, have subsequently identified 1965--the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural change and polarization--as the time when America's social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called 'the Sixties' broke into view. They were right to see 1965 as a year of exceptionally rapid and widespread change, through by no means was all of it for the worse. The tumultuous times that erupted in 1965 and that lasted into the early1970's differed greatly from the early 1960s, which, for the most part, were years of political and social consensus that resembled the 1950s." Id. at xiii. "[T]he unrest besetting the nation as of late 1965 unnerved many people who lived through it and who viewed it in hindsight as a pivotal time. Conservatives shaken by the pace of change, sensed that an inexorably expanding rights-consciousness--a 'rights revolution' --was undermining a durable and long-cherished culture of rules and responsibilities, and they were quick--even in 1965--to voice their fears. One such anguished observer was former president Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a friend in October, 'Lack of respect for law, laxness in dress, appearance and thinking, in conduct and in manner, as well as student and other riots with civil disobedience all spring from a common source: lack of concern for the ancient virtues of decency, respect for law and elders, and old-fashioned patriotism.'" Id. at xiii-xiv. I want someone to write about what I think is a marked contrast between two groups of Americans: those who were coming of age at the beginning of "The Sixties"--that is, those who were, say, 13-19 in 1965-- and those coming of age at the beginnings of "The Seventies"--that is, those who were 13-19 in 1974. Less than a decade separates the two, but I suspect that some interesting, deep and profound contrasts would be found therein.).
Kal Raustiala & Christopher Sprigman, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("This book challenges the conventional wisdom about innovation and imitation...." "What we find is that even though others can freely copy in [certain] industries, creativity remains surprisingly vibrant. [W]e will explore a clutch of industries in which copying does not necessarily kill or even impair creativity. In some, copying actually spurs innovation--an effect we call the 'piracy paradox'. In others, social norms protect the interests of originators and keep innovation humming. Imitation may also force innovators to structure their creativity in ways that make it less vulnerable to copying. The details vary, yet in all of these instances copying tends to lead to transformation rather than decimation." "Our main message is an optimistic one: surprisingly, creativity can often co-exist with copying. And under certain circumstances, copying can even be good for creativity." Id. at 7.).
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas." From the "Epilogue": "How 'American' is lynching? It is American insofar as it was a practice that defined 'Americans' for those willing to use collective violence against those they would exclude from the terms of citizenship and community. It is American insofar as the most important divisions in American life, divisions over property, race, social class, labor, and gender, have been invoked at various times for various purposes to explain or justify lynching. In particular, it is American insofar as it became a peculiar practice of regulating and controlling one racial population in in order to assert a particular kind of white supremacy. What is perhaps most distinctively 'American' about lynching is that its apologists produced a discourse that explained different social roles and promoted both actual and discursive violence in order to exalt those who occupied some of those roles and control and debase others. [] Finally, lynching is American insofar as we have an enduring history of the practice from the origins of the nation to the present." Id. at 154.).
William Soulder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (New York: Crown, 2012) ("In 2006, the World Health Organization announced its endorsement of the use of DDT to combat malaria, mainly in Africa. The WHO had never lifted its approval of DDT for this purpose, but that year the agency decided an affirmative commitment to the insecticide was needed. The move was backed by most environmental groups--as it certainly would have been by Rachel Carson had she been alive to do so. But the myth that Carson wanted a total end to the use of chemical pesticides persists." "Carson would be less tolerant of the lack of action to reverse or at least slow global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption. George W. Bush had promised during his campaign for the presidency in 2000 that he wanted carbon dioxide emissions regulated by the EPA as a greenhouse gas pollutant. Within weeks of taking office in 2001 he reversed his position. Bush also announced the United States would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocols, an international agreement intended to limit greenhouse gases, In June 2001, the National Academy of Sciences--which Bush ha asked to look into the global warming question--reported to the president that global warming was real, that human activity was the main cause, and that things were getting worse. Bush did nothing then, and little--apart from improvements in automobile fuel consumption--has happened since. Rachel Carson would find nothing new in the unwillingness to confront the problem. Human arrogance and disregard for the collateral damage we inflict upon the environment was a story she knew well." Id. at 395. Also, see Elizabeth Royte, "The Poisoned Earth," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/16/2012.).
John Tobin, The Right to Health in International Law (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "The link between health and human rights has been recognized for many years, but the distinctive feature of the past decade has been increasingly visibility of the right to health in both domestic and international law. It is now commonly invoked by actors within civil society, academics, health professionals, lawyers, and courts in various jurisdictions as a tool to address health inequalities, in matters ranging from access to medicines and the availability of affordable health care to sexual and reproductive health. At the same time, it has be roundly challenged by human rights sceptics who have described it as poorly grounded, nebulous, and incapable of implementation." "This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the status and meaning of the right to health in international law. It traces the history of this right to reveal its nexus with public health and the longstanding recognition that a State has a responsibility to attend to the health needs of its population. It also offers a theoretical account of its conceptual foundations which challenges the position held by some philosophers that health is undeserving of the status of a human right. The book develops an interpretative methodology that provides a persuasive account of the meaning of the right to health and of the obligations it imposes on States. The result is an understanding of the right to health that is thoroughly grounded in international obligations, practical, and provides essential guidance to States that are genuinely committed to addressing the health of their populations.").
