"Real discussion, new inquiry and learning are not easy. We should not expect them to be. They are not easy when it comes to science, but somehow we think science is different--different possibly because the rewards of science seem more genuine to us. Moreover, we have accepted a great deal of dogma--conservatives and liberals alike--about the coming shape of events, and the movement of history. In this setting we treat discussions and inquiry as but another contest of wits, involving not discovery but only persuasion and propaganda. Yet the means to the ends which we all seek do not come tailor made. They have to be worked out. The first impulse wrapped in the best cliche may not forge the best tool. The problems which encumber our world are enormous. Each of us has his own check list. Free inquiry means that we should put ourselves to the test of finding out what is wrong with what we think--an unsettling, a disconcerting, at times a most unwelcome pursuit of knowledge. This kind of inquiry and discussion can forge better instruments for government, and better appraisals of the wisdom of legislation. The law reflects and will change and respond to community reactions in any event. It is from these community reactions that the persuasion of similar situations gains its strength. For the community's appraisal tells us what is indeed similar. And the distinction between wisdom and constitutionality only has meaning as the wisdom is examined and debated, The quality of the debate will determine the quality of our laws. Desegregation is one example where the failure long ago to seek common measures and understandings, through real discussion, has left the law naked, exposed and unprotected, and has resulted in a national tragedy. One of the disconcerting aspects of modern life is that in so many areas real discussion is not welcome...."
Edward H. Levi, 'Government Basic Rights and the Citizenry', a Speech to the American Jewish Committee, June 11, 1961, reprinted in Edward H. Levi, Restoring Justice: The Speeches of Attorney General Edward H. Levi, edited by Jack Fuller, and with a foreword by Larry D. Kramer (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) at 84, 85. As you read today's blog post, as you read (if you read any of) the books listed here, keep in mind Edward Levi's implicit admonishment: "The quality of the debate will determine the quality of our laws."Floyd Abrams, Friend of the Court: On the Front Lines with the First Amendment (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013).
Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013) (see my blog post dated September 15, 2013).
Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2013) ("Today I am a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere. What made it possible for me to become the man I am today is the very thing now blamed for creating the crisis itself: the state, more specifically, the so-called runaway, bloated, paternalist, out-of-control, welfare state. This claim doesn't pass the sniff test. Because of the British welfare state, threadbare though it is in comparison to its more affluent European cousins, I was never hungry. My grandmother's pension plus free school meals took care of that. I never lacked shelter because of social housing. The schools I attended were free and actually acted as ladders of mobility for those randomly given the skills in the genetic lottery of life to climb them." "So what bothers me on a deep personal level is that if austerity is seen as the only way forward, then only only is it unfair to the current generation of 'workers bailing bankers,' but the next 'me' may not happen. The social mobility that societies such as the United Kingdom and the United States took for granted from the 1950s though the 1980s that made me, and others like me, possible, has effectively ground to a halt. Youth unemployment across the developed world has reached, in many cases, record levels. Austerity policies have only worsened these problems. Cutting the welfare state in the name of producing more growth and opportunity is an offensive canard. The purpose of this book is to make us all remember that and thereby help to ensure that the future does not belong only to the already privileged few. Frankly, the world can use a few more welfare kids that become professors. It keeps the rest honest." Id. at xi.).
Tim Buthe & Walter Mattli, The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) ("On 28 August 2008, the world financial community awoke to stunning headline news: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the powerful U.S. financial market regulator, had put forth a timetable for switching to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), produced by the International Accounting Standards Board--a private-sector regulator based in London. SEC-regulated U.S. corporations were to be required to use IFRS, possibly s soon as 2014." Id. at 1. "The shift of financial rule-making to the IASB is part of a striking and much wider--yet little understood--trend that is the focus if this book: the delegation of regulatory authority from governments to a single international private-sector body that, for its area of expertise, is viewed by both public and private actors as the obvious forum for global regulation. In that particular issue area, such a private body is what we call the focal institution for global rule-making. This simultaneous privatization and internationalization of governance is driven, in part, by governments' lack of requisite technical expertise, financial resources, or flexibility to deal expeditiously with ever more complex and urgent regulatory tasks. Firms and other private actors also often push for private governance, which they see as leading to more cost-effective rules more efficiently than government regulation." "Beside the IASB, two such private regulators stand out: the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). These organizations, in which states and governments as such cannot be members, are best described as centrally coordinated global networks comprising hundreds of technical committees form all over the world and involving tens to thousands of experts representing industries and other groups in developing and regularly maintaining technical standards. ISO and IEC jointly account for about 85 percent of all international product standards." Id. at 5. From the bookjacket: "Buthe and Mattli offer both a new framework for understanding global private regulation and detailed empirical analyses of such regulation based on multi-country, multi-industry business surveys. They find that global rule making by technical experts is highly political, and that even though rule making has shifted to the international level, domestic institutions remain crucial. Influence in this form of global private governance is not a function of the economic power of states, but of the ability of domestic standard-setters to provide timely information and speak with a single voice. Buthe and Mattli show how domestic institutions' abilities differ, particularly between the two main standardization players, the United States and Europe.").
Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, & Richard Strier, eds., Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) (Of course I am completely nonplussed that none of the editors of, or contributors to, this book mentions my piece on Shakespeare's King John. It is humbling being an academic nobody.).
Susan Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("Some outsiders to the process found it hard to believe that public policy would permit the deal to go through. 'If the framers could see what has happened to their First Amendment, they'd be shocked,' one commenter told me. 'It now protects corporations. . . . Comcast owns the Internet now.' " Id. at 218. "[T]he United States has fallen from the forefront of new developments in technology and communications. It now lags behind countries that long ago defined communications as a public, and publicly overseen, good. America is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of Americans currently receive fiber service to their homes. And the country has plateaued: adoption gains have slowed sharply, even though nearly 30 percent of the country is still not connected." Id. at 261.).
Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) ("'If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.'---Thomas Reed Powell ... To think legally is to be capable of detaching ways of thinking from what is being thought about... To think in law means to reason in a special kind of way, and, as I seek to show, the application of legal rules could and did create a universe unto itself. Lawyers might find Professor Powell's challenge to think analytically sensible, and they do, quoting Professor Powell's words often and for all kinds of reasons. But to one outside the guild of lawyers, they call up all kinds of possibilities. What happens if one is concerned with precedents but not with the content of the precedents? Is that something like thinking about the body without the soul?... To have a legal mind is to know Bentham's greatest fear: to know that ghosts do not exist yet to recognize the grim effects of that unreality..." Id. at 12-13. "In our 'secular,' 'progressive' times, comprehensive forms of expiation function as the backdrop to civil community. Rituals of expulsion remain intact to intimidate and control. Who gets banned ad expelled so that we can live in reasonable consensus? Let us name them now. Criminals, Security Threats. Terrorists. Enemy Aliens. Illegal Immigrants. Migrant Contaminants. Unlawful Enemy Alien Combatants. Ghost Detainees. These are new orders of life; they hover outside the bounds of the civil, beyond the simple dichotomies of reason and unreason, legal and illegal. The receptacles for these outcasts are in the wilderness, the desert, or islands cut off from sociocultural networks of daily life. The management of rubbish, what we might call fecal motives, draws distinctions between the free and the bound, the familiar and the strange. And this ongoing global cultivation of human waste, brazen in its display, makes our sense of inclusion a rare and precarious privilege." Id. at 22-23. "Bad logic makes good racism". Id. at 118.).
Morris Dees & Steve Fiffe, A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2001) (originally published as A Season for Justice: A Lawyer's Journey) ("Few witnesses ever spoke more succinctly. [] Of course, it's easier to speak so directly and truthfully when you don't have anything to cover up." Id. at 115.).
John A. Hall, The Importance of Being Civil: The Struggle for Political Decency (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("In the final analysis, I suspect that civil society can only be defended in Kantian terms, that is, on account of its respect for the individual." Id. at 37. "Smith was right to insist that the secret of capitalist society was productivity. Equally, his idea that cohesion within capitalism is achieved by means of chasing the person higher up on a never-ending escalator remains a meaningful image to this day.... Most of us do not conduct our lives or lay political claims on the basis of abstract justice; rather, we compare ourselves with, and seek to catch, those to whom we are closest. Finally, there is everything to b said for his concern with wealth. Recent research has shown that periods of economic growth o not just conceal the cracks of social conflict,but rather bring in their train increased tolerance of all sorts. So capitalism can have varied beneficial effects, But one must issue a warning at this point: the character of this social order can vary between generosity and meanness. It is also well to remember that Smith envisaged a version in which those at the bottom would have both negative resisting power and considerable skills--a world, in other words, based on a good deal of social inclusion." Id. at 60-61. "Cooperative relations in general depend on trust, on the expectation that agreements will be honored. One example of this is the agreement to differ.... So civility rest on trust. Accordingly, those who destroy trust must be ranked as enemies of civility." Id. at 201.).
Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Homes Changed His Mind--and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013) (see my blog post dated September 9, 2013).
Marjorie Heins, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (New York & London: New York University Press, 2013) (see my blog post dated September 7, 2013).
Karen Houppert, Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People's Justice (New York & London: The New Press, 2013) ("There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has." Associate Justice Hugo Black, in Gideon v. Wainwright (U.S., 1963). Equal justice in America exists on paper, but not in reality.).
Mark Juergensmeyer & Margo Kitts, eds., Princeton Readings in Religion and Violence (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) ("Virtually all cultural traditions have contained sacrificial acts and martial metaphors. Some would argue that the rise of religion is intimately related to the origins of sacrifice. But images of warfare are equally ubiquitous and similarly ancient. [] Given both the antiquity and the persistence of such images, it seems reasonable to conclude that violence is in some way intrinsic to religion." "This is a book of readings that helps us understand this dark attraction between religion and violence. The first section of the book focuses on war and religious language, and contains a collection of writings, including scriptures and ancient texts, that justify military action for religious reasons at special moments in history. The section also includes writings from contemporary religious activists--Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist--who justify acts that most observers would regard as terrorism. Included are the last instructions for the hijackers involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks, as well as the theories of those who formulated the jihadi ideology of global struggle and Christian and Jewish militancy in the contemporary world." "In the second section, sacrifice and theoretical ideas are at the center. This section contains excerpts form such formative thinkers as Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud up to contemporary theorists like Rene Girard and Elaine Scarry. Each of the has attempted to make sense of the role of religion in human culture by focusing on what might appear to b religion's most peculiar obsession, violence. They offer thoughts on the essential question: What is it about religious traditions that seems to welcome images of violence? What is it about religion that can lead to violence? [] This section offers ideas from thinkers whose voices continue to resonate in the scholarly world's attempt to make sense of the phenomenon of religious violence." "At the same time there maybe a closer connection between real and symbolic acts of violence than one might think. For one thing, symbolic violence is often thought to be the ritual reenactment of ancient but quite real acts of violence...." "Moreover, contemporary acts of religious violence are often conducted in a ritual way, with intentions that are as symbolic as they are strategic. The martyrs chosen for suicide attacks often carry the hallmarks of a sacrificial victim. The attackers on September 11, 2001, acted as though they were undergoing a sacred rite. One might argue that their act of terrorism was an attempt to redefine public space in religious terms. In many contemporary acts of religious terrorism, the activists appear to be conducting public rites of purification as much as they are making a political statement. To some extent then, acts of religious violence can be seen as religious acts indeed, events that need to be understood and challenged from a religious as well as a political perspective." Id. at 2-4.).
Brink Lindsey, Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter--and More Unequal (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("Why are the blessing of American life so unevenly distributed? Because of complexity, I will argue. It is my contention that, although things were very different in the relatively recent past, today the primary determinant of socioeconomic status is the ability to handle the mental demands of a complex social environment. If you can do that, you'll likely have ample opportunities to find and pursue a career with interesting, challenging, and rewarding work. But if you can't, you'll probably be relegated to a marginal role in the great social enterprise--where, among other downsides, you'll face a dramatically higher risk of falling into dysfunctional and self-destructive patterns of behavior. Complexity has opened a great divide between those who have mastered its requirements and those who haven't." "To put this point another way, the main determinant of who succeeds and who gets left behind in American society today is possession of human capital. Human capital, of course, is the term economist use for commercially valuable knowledge and skills. It is widely understood that, in today's 'knowledge economy,' the most important assets are not plants and equipment or stocks and bonds. Rather, the most important assets are the ones we carry around in our heads." Id. at 3. "The abstract art of modern living thus has three distinctive dimensions. Intellectual abstraction allows us to make sense of the world around us through the use of broad concepts, symbols, and formal reasoning. Social abstraction enables us to interact constructively with strangers by way of a highly elaborate game of role playing. And personal abstraction empowers us to exercise meaningful autonomy through weighing how various choices will affect an imagined future self. Together, these three dimensions of abstraction have made it possible for human beings to operate in the strange and highly artificial world of modern social complexity. Just how at home we feel in this world, and how well we are able to satisfy its arcane and intricate demands, turns ultimately on our overall fluency with this new style of thinking..." Id. at 22. Academic standards have fallen. "Back in 1961, full-time college students reported studying twenty-five hours a week on average; by 2003, average studying time had fallen by almost half, down to thirteen hours a week. And half of students today don't take any courses that require more than twenty pages of writing over the course of a full semester. Given what we know about the essential role practice in developing expertise, the conclusion that college students are learning less than they used to seems unavoidable." Id. at 90.).
Edward H. Levi, Restoring Justice: The Speeches of Attorney General Edward H. Levi, edited by Jack Fuller, and with a foreword by Larry D. Kramer (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) (From the 'Damaging Cycle', Inauguration Ceremony of Bard College, October 11, 1975: "The problem of the importance of opinion is not only governmental. It pervades all our institutions, including our colleges. The assumption is that it is the right thing to go with the prevailing view, and so much easier to do it when the prevailing view is known. The source of the prevailing view is what we are told the prevailing view is. I recall being told by some entering students at the University of Chicago--an institution which rightly has a reputation for independence--what their views were on a variety of controversial subjects. When I pressed them as to whether these were really their own views, they assured me they were, and as a final irrefutable proof pointed out that Life Magazine had already said so. There is an accepted syndrome which connects the told prevailing view with popularity, and accepts the desire for popularity as a principal value. The syndrome is a problem for education. It is also a problem for representative government." "The growth of knowledge and the new methods of disseminating knowledge have heightened the problem. Powerful tools have been developed to tell us less about more, to simplify what is complex, to substitute immediate impressions for a deeper judgment. Students today are sure they know things which they do not know. Though this has always been the case--and it most surely is a phenomenon not at all limited to students, and we all share in it--it is more intense today. One side of an argument, one view of history, one theory of justice--these become accepted because there is no real discussion. There is a loss of the wisdom that to understand one side of an argument it is best to be able to state and to understand the other side. Discussion must overcome the statement of opinion and particularly the statement of opinion in the form of slogans." Id. at 12-13.).
Jonathan R. Macey, The Death of Corporate Reputation: How Integrity Has Been Destroyed on Wall Street (New York: FT Press, 2013) ("I argue here that there has been a collapse in the market demand for reputation, at least in heavily regulated countries like the United States that increasingly rely on regulation rather than reputation to protect market participants from fraud and other forms of abuse. It used to be the case that for a diverse array of companies and industries involved in the capital markets, nurturing and maintaining the organizations' reputation was absolutely critical to their growth and continued success. I argue that this simply is no longer the case, at least in the U.S." "On Wall Street, company reputation matters far less than it used to matter, for three reasons. First, improvements in information technology have lowered the costs of discovering information about people. This, in turn, has made it worthwhile for individuals involved in financial market--lawyers, investment bankers, accountants, analysts, regulators--to focus far more on the development of their own individual reputation than on the reputation of the companies for which they work." "Second, law and regulation serve as a substitute for reputational capital, at least in the minds of regulators and market participants. In modern times, particularly since the promulgation of the modern securities laws, market participants have come to rely far more on the protections of the law, and far less on the comfort provided by reputation, when making investment decisions and in deciding whether to deal with a particular counterparty. The current financial crisis, in my view, demonstrates that, in reality, regulation is no substitute for reputation in ensuring contractual performance and respect for property rights." "Third, the world in general and the world of finance in particular have become so complex that rocket scientists who design complex financial instruments have replace simple, high-reputation practitioners of 'Old School Finance'." Id. at 1-2. "The bad news is that whereas returns can be measured easily, risk cannot. People intuitively understand returns. Returns are tangible, extrinsic, and visible. It is easy to see when a security's price has moved from one place to another. It is easy to see when a company is paying high dividends or making interests payments dependably. It is far harder to measure risk. Risk is more intrinsic." Id. at 183.).
Joseph Margulies, What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the making of National Identity (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) (see my blog post dated September 11, 2013).
Walter Mattli & Ngaire Woods, eds., The Politics of Global Regulation (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (From David Vogel, "Private Regulation of Global Corporate Conduct": "Why has civil regulation grown? The growth of global civil regulation in part represents a political response to the recent expansion of economic globalization and the firms and industries that have fostered and benefited from it. During the last two decades, the dynamics of economic globalization have significantly transformed the international economic landscape in two respects. First, they have shifted the locus of manufacturing from developed to developing countries. Second, the production and supply networks of global firms increasingly transcend national boundaries: most international trade is now among firms or interfirm networks, with the higher value-added components of the value chain primarily located in developed countries and the lower value-added portion in developing countries." "The emergence of global civil regulation has been motivated by a widely held perception that economic globalization has created a structural imbalance between the size and power of global firms and markets, and the capacity and/or willingness of governments to adequately regulate them. According to this argument, economic globalization and the increased legitimacy and influence of neoliberal values and policies, has undermined both the willingness and the capacity of governments to make global firms politically accountable. Accordingly, transnational corporations are said to 'wield power without responsibility. They are often as powerful as states and ye less accountable." Another critic observes: 'Corporations have never been more powerful, yet less regulated.' Civil regulation proposes to fill the regulatory gap between global markets and global firms on the one hand, and government regulation of multinational firms on the other. It is intended to 'compensate for the decreasing capacities of national governments for providing public goods [as] . . . internationalization yields an increasing gap between territorially bound regulatory competencies at the national level and emerging problems of international scope.'' "The claim that the state is 'in retreat' is contestable, as the scope and extent of business regulation continues to expand in many countries, as well as at the international level. But arguably the global economy is characterized by systemic regulatory failures or a structural 'governance deficit.'" Id. at 150, 159-160 (citations omitted).).
Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("When the Counterterrorist Center began operations, there were no ongoing covert operations against international terrorist groups, and the CTC began working with Army paramilitary units like Delta Force to penetrate the Abu Nidal organization and Hezbollah. Lawyers working for President Reagan drew up secret memos concluding that hunting and killing terrorists did not violate the 1976 assassination ban, just as lawyers working for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama would do decades later. These terrorist groups were plotting attacks against Americans, the lawyers argued, so killing them would be self-defense, not assassination." Id. at 57. "Thirty-five years earlier, after the toxic details about the CIA's efforts to kill foreign leaders seeped into public view, President Gerald Ford ordered a ban on assassinations that he hoped would prevent future presidents from being too easily seduced by black operations. But in the decade since the September 11 attacks, legions of U.S. government lawyers had written detailed opinions about why the targeted-killing operations carried out by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command far from declared war zones didn't violate President Ford's assassination ban. Just as lawyers for President Bush had redefined torture to permit extreme interrogations by the CIA and the military, so had lawyers for President Obama given America's secret agencies latitude to carry out extensive killing operations." "One of them was Harold Koh, who had come to Washington from Yale Law School, where he had been the school's dean. He had been a fierce critic from the left of the Bush administration's war on terror and had decried the CIA's interrogation methods--including waterboarding--as illegal torture. But when he joined the government as the State Department's top lawyer, he found himself spending hours poring over volumes of secret intelligence in order to pass judgment over whether men should live or die. In speeches, he offered a muscular defense of the Obama administration's targeted-killing operations, saying that in a time of war the American government was under no obligation to give suspects normal due process before putting them on a kill list." "Still, in moments of public reflection, he spoke of the psychological burdens of spending so much time reading the biographies of the young men the United States was debating whether or not to kill. 'As the dean of Yale Law School I spent many, many hours looking at the resumes of young twenty-year-olds, students in their twenties, trying to figure out which ones should be admitted,' he said during one speech. 'I now spend a comparable amount of time studying the resumes of terrorists, same age. Reading about how they were recruited. Their first mission. Their second mission. Often I know their background as intimately as I knew my students.'" Id. at 200-301.).
Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("An American citizen voting--surely there is nothing remarkable about that. But for an African American living in the Deep South in the 1960s ... it was a forbidden act, a dangerous act. There were nearly impossible obstacles to overcome: poll taxes, literacy tests, and hostile registrars. If a person succeeded and was allowed to vote, his name was published in the local newspaper, alerting his employers and others equally determined to stop him. The black men and women who dared to vote lost their jobs, their homes, and, often, their lives." Id. at ix. "This book tells the story of the struggles of ordinary people, many unknown to most Americans, who were, in fact, quite extraordinary. They risked all to obtain a fundamental American right that has been codified in the Constitution's Fifteen Amendment, though it was not fulfilled until 1965. Since then the Voting Rights Act has been repeatedly challenged. Not only has it survived, but is has also been expanded to protect other minorities facing similar obstacles. Those challenges, however, persist, and the Act's most potent provision may soon face it ultimate test before the U.S. Supreme Court, which may well [AND, in fact, DID] strike it down. But if that should occur, it will not deter those who fought for its creation, battled to expand it, and struggled to maintain it. The fight will go on in courtrooms and, perhaps again, in the streets. The essence of the Voting Rights Act can never be destroyed, for as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 while imprisoned in a Birmingham jail, 'I have no despair about the future. ... We will reach the goal of freedom ... all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.' And we can also take comfort from the nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker's words that King famously quoted at the conclusion of the historic Voting Rights march: 'The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.'" Id. at ix-x. "The president's budget cuts, his approval of tax exemptions for segregated schools, and, most of all, the administration's attack on the Voting Rights Act had seriously injured the Republican Party. The root cause was not racism, anonymous senators told reporters, but the White House's 'insensitivity and incompetence.' A Reagan aide was unusually candid: 'The most unconscionable mistake we've made as a party was not to be out front on the Voting Rights Act.'" Id. at 227.).
Nicco Mele, The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013) ("Authoritative knowledge in diverse professional fields--medicine, law, science--is falling away with the advent of online services that allow for easy circulation of (often crowd-sorced) information. The new accessibility of knowledge has many benefits, but we can also wonder whether the quality of knowledge is eroding. How do we certify knowledge about the world when intellectual authority ceases to exist? What kind of collective mind are we left with when all the established Big Minds are gone? Are we doomed to a chaotic, unknowable world of half-truths, rumors, and innuendo?" Id. at 187.).
Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2011) ("Despite the greatest financial catastrophe since 1929, mass participation in the stock market remains a fixture of economic life in the United States. Given their long-standing suspicions toward a robust regulatory and welfare state, as long as Americans struggle to balance equality of opportunity against inequality of outcome, the dream of an investor's democracy will endure." "Yet Americans might reassess broad-based investment as a social, political, and economic goal. Although the dream of investors' democracy has supported regulatory reform and managerial restraint at times, it has tended to marginalize questions about the distribution of economic wealth, security, and power. Certainly financial securities have offered millions of individuals lucrative savings vehicle along with economic fulfillment. But because securities investment requires significant disposable income, the wealthiest segments of society have enjoyed its benefits most. Dispersed shareownership generally renders shareholders impotent to influence corporate behavior. And even when political and corporate leaders have proclaimed investors' interests to be consistent with those of workers, consumers, and communities, initiatives to expand shareholding and claim to speak on behalf of investors most often have aimed to deflect demands made by other parties to the corporation." "Even universal acquisition of financial securities cannot correct inequalities of opportunity in the real economy, or the disparities in social condition and economic power that results. If Americans wish to do so, they must reevaluate not only the policy requirements of a mass investment society, but the very ideal itself. They must engage in a broader debate about what form of political economy is most consistent with their traditions and their values." Id. at 225.).
Anne Phillips, Our Bodies, Whose Property? (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("This is a book about markets, bodies, and property. It considers what, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex or reproduction or human body parts and the other markets we commonly applaud. What--if anything--makes the body special? People otherwise untroubled by the workings of the market society often oppose commercial transactions in what we might call intimate body services or body products and parts. But can we justify what Nir Eyal terms ''body exceptionalism'? Or is thinking the body special a kind of sentimentalism that blocks clear thinking about matters such as prostitution, surrogate motherhood, and the sale of spare kidneys?" Id. at 1. 'The point about body part sales is not just that people are driven to them by economic necessity, or that vendors are typically poor while purchasers are typically rich. Our entire world is premised on people doing things for money they would not do for love, and on richer people buying what poorer people sell. Markets thrive in conditions of inequality, and much of what they do is to bring together the money-poor with the money-rich. Insofar as they produce winners and losers, moreover, markets will generate and sustain all manner of further inequalities." Id. at 114-115.).
Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (American Beginnings, 1500-1900) (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) ("From the bookjacket: "Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition--and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and reactionary elements." "In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship of religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity." "As the fledging nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively, exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, creating for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals.").
David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("Germany was not the only country to give greater roles to the state and to academic education than Britain. All late-industrializing countries found that self-helping entrepreneurship, artisanal tinkering, and the presence of gentlemen-merchants was not sufficient; it was the sagely virtue of careful planning, thinking long-term, rewarding expertise, and investing in analysis and research that were crucial. Large, expensive, technologically complex corporations could not rely on Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of the market; they needed the visible hand of bureaucratic organization. And that guiding hand might be found in government, in business, in the investment banks that committed long-term finance to industry (unlike Britain's more trade-oriented 'merchant banks'), and in developing long-term synergies within and between businesses---a system the business historian Alfred Chandler called 'cooperative capitalism'." Id. at 80-81. "In fact, the hard merchants in the bond markets did not succeed in cutting welfare as much as they would have liked. But they were, to some extent, comforted by the efforts of soft-merchant governments on both the left and the right to extend merchant influence to the old sagely strongholds of education and health care. In Britain, that has involved introducing 'internal markets' into the health service and treating students as 'consumers' and academics as 'service providers.' In the United States, it has gone much further--for instance, with the rise of for-profit universities. Their defenders argue, with some justice, that they provide a more flexible form of education for people who have to work, thus serving a group neglected by more conventional, sage-run universities. However, the corrosive effects of markets on education have been entirely predictable. Some of the universities have been accused of 'high-pressure sales techniques,' and toleration of low standards for fear of losing lucrative students. If professionals are worried about meeting targets and maximizing profits, they are likely to be less interested in the welfare of their individual patients or students." Id. at 213-214.).
Matthew Taylor Raffety, The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) ("This book explores the aftermath of violent crimes on American merchant vessels before the Civil War. It examines the legal development of the new nation through the discourses of rights of labor and honor that exploded in the decks of American-flagged vessels, and were then reexamined and reinterpreted by American consuls abroad and the federal courts at home. Seamen and officers, through their actions on American vessels, forced legal and national figures to craft definitions of citizenship and national identity. The way Congress, the federal courts, and US consuls abroad handled these issues marks an important early expression of federal authority." Id. at 3-4.).
Thane Rosenbaum, Payback: The Case for Revenge (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) (In reading this book, in thinking about the line of 'argument' stated therein, I cannot help but reflect on how juvenile, unenlightened, and simply mean-spirited is the criminal justice system and, yes, the American people. Which is not to say that, as a people, American are any worse than other peoples.).
Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013) ("Historians of education have framed the intellectual development of schooling in the early twentieth century as a split between the theories of [John] Dewey and those of his Teachers College colleague Edward l. Thorndike. Both camps made use of evolutionary accounts of mental development, but part of what divided them was different beliefs in the aims of schooling and the kind of social progress the schools could contribute to. Though both sides of this debate are complex and group together the views of many individual scholars, the distinction is often represented, on the one hand, as a focus on standardized instruction intended to prepare the masses for contribution to society (Thorndike) and, on the other, a focus on cultivating independence of thought so that individuals contribute more robustly to a democratic society (Dewey)." Id. at 73. In early twenty-first century it would seem that a bastardized version of Thorndike reigns, while the Dewey vision forced to lurk in the shadows, advocated by few. One can see this in legal education. More and more law schools are devolving into trade schools, with their increasing emphasis on training law students to be "practice ready," and their growing opposition to anything even hinting at the intellectual.).
Clive Stafford Smith, The Injustice System: A Murder in Miami and a Trial Gone Wrong (New York: Viking, 2012).
David Stuckler & Sanjay Basu, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills: Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("But West Nile Virus was not the worst public health outcome of the foreclosure crisis. The gravest risks to public health came from the rise of homelessness. When people lose their homes and live on the streets or in substandard housing, their health deteriorates. The homeless experience constant stress, and are more likely to skip medications and visits to the doctors. In the worst cases, if they lose all forms of shelter, they face a heightened risk of assault, death from cold exposure, severe mental health problems, substance abuse, and of landing in jail, the hospital, or the morgue." "Public housing and housing benefit are the best medicine for counteracting the health risks of homelessness. But different government responded in very different ways to the housing crisis brought on by recession, with dramatically different results for the health of their citizens. [] With the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, the US government began investing in social protection programs to stop foreclosures from leading to homelessness. Costly hospitalizations, premature deaths, and infectious disease rates related to homelessness were all significantly reduced in the subsequent months. By contrast, the Conservative government that came to power in 2010 in the UK, while not facing as severe a housing crisis as the US, began instituting radical measures, which included cuts to housing support budgets. Homelessness increased following these measures, bringing with it a surge in avoidable hospitalizations and disease outbreaks." Id. at 126-127.).
Cass R. Sunstein, Simpler: The Future of Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) ("If I did not know it before, I learned in my first week, and probably on my first day, that there is a huge difference between the role of an academic and the role of a public official. The difference is hard to overstate. As an academic, you are supposed to come up with original ideas. You tend to work individually or at most with a few collaborators. You need not--and probably should not--focus only on what is feasible. If an idea is interesting and fresh and makes people think, it might be okay to defend it even if, on reflection, the idea is lousy or a bit nuts. If you are clueless about government (and most academics, even in law and political science, are completely clueless about government), it might still be acceptable to venture an interesting, clueless idea, so long as it is really interesting. When I was in government, academic friends would sometimes call me with their latest thoughts, almost all of which were inventive and fascinating, but some of which were daft, and most of which would, as a practical matter, be dead on arrival." Id. at 27. "In government, you are accountable to your boss, the president of the United States. An idea that is lousy or a bit nuts, or that is really not feasible, is not welcome, even if it makes people think. You must not strike out on your own. You cannot speak publicly without authorization, and what you say is constrained. You are part of a team with a clear leader, and whatever you initiate or proceed with has to be consistent with the judgment and goals of the team. Official documents have to go through clearance process, which can be long and frustrating, but which is a crucial means of ensuring that the team is committed to it. (After a particularly frustrating clearance process, I pointed out to some of my government colleagues the remarkable coincidence that the world clearance contains the exact same number of letters as the word excrement. No one didn't know what I meant.)" Id. at 28. "We need to start making gorillas more visible. People are far more likely to respond when key facts, risks, or possibilities are salient. Designers of effective warnings are alert to the problem of invisible gorillas." Id. at 213.).
Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data (New York: Norton, 2013) ("But who says that everyone using statistics is smart or honest? As mentioned, this book began as an homage to How to Lie with Statistics, which was first published in 1954 and has sold over a million copies. The reality is that you can lie with statistics. Or you can make inadvertent errors. In either case, the mathematical precision attached to statistical analysis can dress up some serious nonsense. This book will walk through many of the most common statistical errors and misrepresentations (so you can recognize them, not put them to use). Id. at 14.).
Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("It is premature to declare that the era of the voting rights revolution and biracial coalitions in the South has come to an end. Black entry into the political process in southern counties and cities is not reversible, as may also be said of local gains in racial equity and cooperation. Prospects at the state level are less encouraging, for basic structural reasons. But Figure 6.4 suggests the one-party dominance is much more accentuated for senators, who are oriented toward national issues, than for governors, where fluid issues and diverse constituencies still foster reversals of party control. Nor is it the case that southern Republicans governors are invariably committed to rigid policy agendas hostile to minority interests. Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, the most urgent political task in the South will be cultivation of genuinely interracial coalitions." Id. at 222.).
