Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) ("For the profile on Rune I needed the facts. They're stickler for fact at The Gothamite. They check and recheck the facts. The joke on all this fastidious fact-checking is that you're allowed to humiliate anybody, as long as the subject's birth date, hometown, and all numbers connected to him are flawless. And you can quote out-and-out liars, as long as you quite them correctly. It gives roundness to a piece: a bit of positive, a bit of negative. We like balanced reporting. But balance is most important in things serious. Politics is serious. Muckraking is serious, and it must have prose to match. War zones require that all humor and/or irony cease and desist. The arts are not serious, not in the U.S. of A. They do not involve life and death. We are not French. In reviews of the arts, if you spell the guy's name right, you can write whatever you want. You can send hate mail to whichever pompous ass you choose in the form of a review and make a reputation for yourself in the bargain. Do I offend? Excuse-moi." Id. at 171-172.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold: A Novel (New York: Poseidon, 1992) ("Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want." Id. at 147.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).
Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays (New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2012) (From "My Father/Myself: "What did I want? More. Reading is internal action. It is the intimate ground where, as my husband says, 'two consciousnesses touch.' I would add two unconsciousnesses as well. Reading in our culture has become so attenuated that all reading is now considered 'good.' Children are admonished to read in general, as if all books are equal, but a brain bloated with truisms and cliches, with formulaic stories and simple answers to badly asked questions is hardly what we should aspire to. For the strange thing is that even books we can no longer actively recall are part of us, and like a lost melody, they may return suddenly." Id. at 65, 83. From Old Pictures": "There is Little doubt that late capitalism relies heavily on an endless parade of images, which, while seductive, are essentially empty and intended to make sure that people consume more and more products. Indeed, Madison Avenue's job is to create needs we didn't know we had. Celebrity means turning a human being into a vacant commodity that can be bought and sold literally as image only, and it can proliferate--be everywhere at once--on the Internet. Reality TV is an oxymoron. Wars are sold (and unsold) to the public through the camera lens. A short lost will suffice: Vietnam, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib." Id. at 253, 261. From "Margaret Bowland's Theatrum Mundi": "My question is: What is the imagination if it is not becoming the other?" Id. at 307, 312.).
Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) (from "Giorgio Morandi: Not Just Bottles": "The legacy of Christian thought is far-reaching. Among the deep marks it has left on the Western soul is a feeling many people have that what we see is not everything, that there is something more lurking behind the merely physical--a spiritual dimension to life. But the thought may be turned around as well: whatever one may believe about spirituality, it seems undeniably true that the idea of an object creates its reality to a large extent. The physical world is mysterious, and the longer and harder you look at it, the stranger it becomes." Id. at 121, 132.).
Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays ( New York; Picador/Henry Holt, 2006) (From "9/11, or One Year Later": "Both in the United States and around the world, 9/11 has become a media euphemism batted around in political debates from both the right and the left with a glibness and ease that's rather frightening. But it seems to me that like other crimes committed against human beings around the world in the name of varying ideologies and religions, the attacks on the World Trade Center can only be understood through individual people, because if we lose sight of the particular--of one man's or one woman's or one child;s suffering and loss--we risk losing sight of our common humanity, and that is a form of blindness, not only to others but to ourselves." Id. at 119, 130.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (New York: Henry Holt, 2010) ("When I read a novel, I see it, and later, I remember the images I invented for the book. Some of those images are borrowed from intimate laces in my own life. Others,I suspect, are taken form movies or pictures in books or paintings I've seen, I need to put the characters somewhere." Id, at 111. "In Buddhism, the self is an illusion. There is no self." Id. at 192. There are only the stories 'one' tells 'oneself.' Enlightenment comes when one stops telling oneself stories and just be.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2008) ("[W]e all go to pieces . . . a one time or another. . . . Your grief makes you more fragile. You know I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy." Id. at 139. "'Our own father used to talk about city slickers,' I said, smiling at my sister. 'But every perceived difference, no matter how slight, can become an argument for Otherness--money, education skin color, religion, political party, hairstyle, anything. Enemies are enlivening. Evil-doers, jihadists, barbarians. Hatred is exciting and contagious and conveniently eliminates all ambiguity. You just spew your own garbage onto someone else.'" Id. at 194.).
Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men: A Novel (New York: Picador/Henry Holt, 2011) ("Within minutes, the book club was over. And it had ended before I could say that there is no human subject outside the purview of literature. No immersion in the history of philosophy is needed for me to insist that there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares 'broad' superior to 'narrow' or 'masculine' more desirable than 'feminine.' Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all." Id. at 153.).
Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2003) ("I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification." Id. at 43. "But nagging is a strategy of the powerless, and there is nothing mysterious about it." Id. at 61.).
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
"WE ARE MOVING MEAT"
A. L. Kennedy, On Bullfighting (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1999) ("I believe that human beings are animals. By this, I mean that humanity does not prosper and, indeed, endangers its long-term survival by forgetting that it is reliant upon, and connected to, the animal world. Our fundamentals are 'animal' -- we eat, we defecate, we procreate, we die -- we are moving meat." "I do not mean by this that we can excuse our excesses of inhumanity by tracing their roots back to 'animal' behaviour." Id. at 83.).
Monday, August 25, 2014
THE CLOSENESS AND SACRED TRUTH OF DEATH
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (New York: Viking, 2002) ("The first time I saw the two brothers together, I noted that extreme contrast. There was Judson in the East Village bar, flirting and dancing with every female who moved through his line of vision, and there was Eustace, sitting upright in the corner, earnestly telling me about the pleasure of drinking water straight out of the ground, and about how the quality of sunlight filtered through Appalachian foliage changes your body's chemistry, and about how only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised." Id. at 58.).
Sunday, August 24, 2014
FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON BEING OVER GOOGLIZED
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 2011) ("This book argues that we should influence--even regulate--search systems actively and intentionally, and thus thane responsibility for how the Web delivers knowledge. We must build the sort of online ecosystem that can benefit the whole world over the long tern, not one that serves the short-term interests of one powerful company, no matter how brilliant." Id. at xii. "Google seems to offer us everything so cheaply, easily, and quickly. But nothing truly meaningful is cheap, easy, or quick." Id. at 4. "Because market fundamentalism declares that consumers have 'choice' in the market, doing little or no harm becomes just another tactic by which vendors exploit a niche market. Consumers have become depoliticized, unable to see that personal choices to buy Timberland shoes (not made in sweatshops by children) and Body Shop cosmetics (not tested on animals) makes no difference at all to the children and animals that suffer supplying the bulk of similar, less sensitively manufactured products to the vast majority of the world's consumers. Feeling good about our own choices is enough. And instead of organizing, lobbying, and campaigning for better rules and regulations to ensure safe toys and cars for people everywhere, we rely on expressions of disgruntlement as a weak proxy for real political action. Starting or joining a Facebook protest group suffices for many as political action." Id. at 43. "By focusing on the novelty of communicative technologies and assuming that their arrival in a place causes--rather than coincides with or aids--rapid change, we tend to downgrade the importance of factors as obvious and powerful as changing a government policy, opening a gate, or waging a disastrous and debilitating war in Central Asia. The introduction of a powerful and efficient mode of communication such as the fax machine or the Internet can amplify or accelerate a movement, provided that the movement already has form, support, substance, and momentum. Technologies are far from neutral, but neither do they inherently support with freedom or oppression. The same technologies . . . can be used both to monitor and oppress a group of people and to connect them in powerful ways. The way a society or state uses a technology is as important as the design and capacities of that technology." Id. at 123-124.).
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Sunday, August 17, 2014
BEYOND PRACTICE READY: SUGGESTED READING FOR ADVANCED LAW STUDENTS
"A University School of Law is far more than a training institute for admission to the bar. It implies a scientific knowledge of the law and of legal and juristic methods. But these are the crystallization of ages of human progress. They cannot be understood in their entirety without a clear comprehension of the historic forces of which they are the product, and of the social environment with which they are in living contact. A scientific study of law involved the related sciences of history, economics, philosophy--the whole field of man as a social being." William Rainey Harper.
Gabriel Abend, The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (I kept thinking about a New Yorker cartoon where a philosopher, in the corporate board room, has obviously questioned whether certain actions were moral/ethical. The caption has the chairman of the board reminding everyone there that, though perhaps not moral, the board's actions are perfectly legal.).
Paul Avrich & Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2013) (“But the notorious Haymarket incident had the most profound influence on Sasha’s view of American society. Three months before he left Hamburg, a hanging had occurred in Chicago that, more than anything else, entrenched his disillusionment with his newly adopted country. The Haymarket affair, a landmark in the history of anarchism, had been set in motion on May 4, 1886, when anarchists held a meeting near Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest against police brutality. As the meeting was drawing to a close, a contingent of policemen marched in and ordered the participants to disperse. At that moment a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police, killing one and injuring others. The officers responded by opening fire on the crowd, killing and wounding a number of civilians as well as many of their own men—sixty-seven policemen were hurt, eight of whom afterward died.” “The bomb thrower was never apprehended. But eight Chicago anarchists were brought to trial and speedily convicted of murder. On November 11, 1887, after unsuccessful appeals to higher courts, four of the defendants . . . were hanged. A fifth . . . committed suicide in his cell the day before the execution with a small explosive device he put in his month, and the remaining three were sentenced to long terms in prison.” “Just over six years later, in 1893, the three survivors . . . were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who assailed the judge for conducting the trial with ‘malicious ferocity’ and found that the evidence did not show that any of the eight anarchists had been involved in the bombing.” Id. at 21-22. And, so the story begins.).
Omri Ben-Shahar & Carl E. Schneider, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (From the book jacket: "Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure--requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. [] Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. More Than You Wanted to Know surveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices?" "Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite.").
Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "Demonstrating that there is not one continuous tradition of racism in the West . . . Bethencourt shows that racism preceded any theories of race and must be viewed within the prism and context of social hierarchies and local conditions . . . [A]ll racisms has been triggered by political projects monopolizing specific economic and social resources."
Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 (New York: Viking, 2013) ("If this book has achieved no other purpose, I hope it has illuminated the fact that the perceived imperatives of world power shaped the foreign policy of the USA quite as much as they did its European imperialist predecessors. The central contradiction addressed by this book has not been between American ideals and practice, but the fact that, unlike the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese empires, the USA profited little and lost much from its misconceived adoption of liberal imperialism. For the Europeans it was an alibi adopted to prolong their imperial delusions; the 'best and the brightest' of the American liberal establishment were confident that they could do better, and in that hubris lay their own and their nation's tragedy. That antipathy to empire was in America's DNA was not the least of history's ironies, a lesson it is relearning even as the writing of this book paralled the withdrawals from contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, and popular Western domestic disenchantment with improving small wars in what are no longer faraway places, but have become some of the most dynamic economies of the twenty-first century world." Id. at 492. Also, see Daniel Larison, "Bullet Diplomacy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/29/2013.).
Charles W. Calomiris & Stephen H. Haber, Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("If a stable banking system capable of providing stable access to credit to talented entrepreneurs and responsible households is such a good idea, then why are such systems so rare? How can it be that a sector of the economy that is highly regulated and closely supervised works so badly in so many countries? Our answer to this question is that the fragility of banks and the scarcity of bank credit reflects the structure of a country's fundamental political institutions. The crux of the problem is that all governments face inherent conflicts of interest when it comes to the operation of the banking system, but some types of governments--particularly democracies whose political institutions limit the influence of popular coalitions--are better able to mitigate those c0nflictds of interest than others." Id. at 12. "Banks are regulated and supervised according to abstruse laws, but those criteria and laws are not created and enforced by robots programmed to maximize social welfare; they are the outcomes of a political process--a game, as it were--whose stakes are wealth and power." "We call this process of deal making the Game of Bank Bargains. The players are those with a stake in the performance of the baning system: the group in control of the government, bankers, minority shareholders, debtors, and depositors. The rules, which are set by society's political institutions, determine which other groups must be included in the government-banker partnership and which can be left out in the cold because the rules of the political system make them powerless. Coalitions among the players form as the game is played, and those coalitions determine the rules governing bank entry (and hence the competitive structure and size of the banking sector), the flow of credit and its terms, the permissible activities of banks, and the allocation of losses when banks fail. What is at stake in the Game of Bank Bargaining is, therefore, the distribution of the benefits that come for a system of chartered banks. The group in control of the government always receives a share of those benefits, and the coalition that forges a partnership with the government splits the remainder." Id. at 13-14.).
Lincoln Caplan, Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1993) ("Lawyers have long been on the defensive against the charge that the practice of law has been debased by commerce, ad that business lawyers in particular have t4eded to their clients' interests at the expense of the public's. The accusation was first made at the end of he nineteenth century and has been voiced regularly almost ever since. Lawyers soon adopted this criticism as the focal point of their own self-examination." "In 1905, for example, Louis Brandeis gave a talk to the Harvard Ethics Society which became a classic article called 'The Opportunity in the Law.' In it, he wrote, 'Lawyers are now to a greater extent than formerly business men, a part of the great organized system of industrial and financial enterprise. They are less than formerly the students of a particular kind of learning, the practitioners of a particular art. And they do not seem to be so much of a distinct professional class.' . . . "He charged: 'Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people.' . . . " Id. at 127. For [Peter] Brown, the bar has become blemished by 'crime, perfidy, greed, and sloth' and 'many lawyers' treat the practice 'as a trade solely for profit rather than as a profession for service to the public interest. Many of 'the greedy ones are 'found practicing in the large law firms,' which promote 'selfishness' among their partners, the 'oppression and abuse' of their associates, and a general decline of 'manners and morals.' " Id. at 128. "The belief is widespread that competition among large firms has increased tensions between the goals of worldly success and of social purpose among lawyers, between the goals of completing a project on a tight schedule and of doing first-rate work, and between the goals of doing work because a client hires a firm to do it and of seeking assignments that are meaningful and productive. The overarching tension lies between the dictates of the market and the duties of the profession--described in terms of how lawyers do their work, and what they do in the community besides providing legal services for a fee." Id. at 129.).
Lance Dodes & Zachary Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "AA has becomes so infused in our society that it is practically synonymous with addiction recovery. Yet the evidence shows that AA has only a 5-10 percent success rate--hardly better than no treatment at all. Despite this, doctors, employers, and judges regularly refer addicted people to treatment programs and rehab facilities based on the 12-step model." "But The Sober Truth is more than a book about addition. It is also a book about science and how and why AA and rehab became so popular, despite the discouraging data. Dr. Dodes explores the entire story of AA's rise, from its origins in early fundamentalist religious and mystical beliefs to its present-day place of privilege in politics and media." In reading this book one realizes that addicts are individuals, and come to their addictions from different triggers and, as a consequence, the one-size-fits-all approach to rehabilitation, such are the 12-step programs, will not work for the overwhelming majority of addicts.).
Charles D. Ellis, What It Takes: Seven Secrets of Success from the World's Greatest Professional Firms (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "While you might expect to find major differences, form industry to industry, in how the great firms set themselves apart, the principles they follow are few and nearly identical. [] The stories of the people, their decisions, and their interactions found throughout these pages bring these seven keys to success to life: * Defining an inspiring mission * Recruiting the right people onto the team * Developing people--from early accelerated training through career-long coaching * Establishing a strong culture that unites all in teamwork to serve clients * Assuring a strong client focus * Innovation at all levels--from tactics to grand strategy * Providing leadership that brings all six together and identifies problems and corrects them quickly." Since this is a "suggested reading for law students," I would like to suggest law students consider these principles as a basis for evaluating options as to employment. For instance, perhaps it would be better to forgo weigh one firm's offer of a seemingly attractive higher salary against another firm's commitment to developing young lawyers, etc. One of the unfortunate aspects of the recent call for law schools to render graduates 'practice ready' is that many law firms are increasingly reluctant to actual invest time and energy into training lawyers. The great law firms will provide such training, the majority of firms will not with the obvious result: institutionalized mediocrity.).
Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody & Donald Haider-Markel, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014).
Richard A. Epstein, The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("All to often . . . the Supreme Court treats all regulatory judgments as if they were cut for the same cloth. It is regrettable how easy it is to stray from sound constitutional principles by an indifference to technical issues of lasting importance . . ." Id. at 346.).
Robert A. Ferguson, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson . . . diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime. He reveals the veiled pleasure behind the impulse to punish (which confuses our thinking about the purpose of punishment), explains why over time all punishment regimes impose greater levels of punishment than originally intended, and traces a disturbing gap between out ability to quantify pain and the precision with which penalties are handed down." "Ferguson turns the spotlight from the debate over legal issues to the real plight of prisoners, addressing not law professionals but the American people. Do we want out prisons to be this way? Or are we unaware, or confused, or indifferent, or misinformed about what is happening? Acknowledging the suffering of prisoners and understanding what punishers do when they punish are the first steps toward a better, more just system.").
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014) ("Plato shared, with radical modification, in the Ethos of the Extraordinary, and it led him to create philosophy as we know it. The kind of exertion that is required if one is to achieve a life worth living is philosophy as he understood it. It is our exertion in reason that makes us matter--makes us, to the extent that we can be, godlike. And if such exertions don't win the acclaim of the masses, so much the worse for the masses. The kind of extraordinary that matters is likely to go undetected by them--so, in a certain sense, though not in all sense, they really don't matter. This is a harsh statement, but, as already noted, harshness didn't much faze the Greeks, and Plato is no exception here." Id. at 9. "And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less, than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world." Id. at 40. "What is an intellectual but someone who has so disciplined his or her mind that he or she can take extreme pleasure in the free play of ideas?" Id. at 207. Also, see Anthony Gottlieb, "Let's Have A Dialogue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/20/2014.).
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up. It's about understanding what morality is, how it got here, and how it's implemented in our brains. It;s about understanding the deep structure of moral problems as well as the differences between the problems we face today. Finally, it'd about taking this new understanding of morality and turning it into a universal oral philosophy that members of all human tribes can share." Id. at 5. Query: If law has a moral foundation, then, perhaps, this book can shed some light on the deep structure of legal problems as well as the differences between the legal problems we face today. Perhaps our brains have not yet adapted sufficiently to adequately address the legal problems we face today (for example, the legal aspects of climate change, privacy in the Internet-age, tolerance in the twenty-first-century's version of globalization). From the bookjacket: "A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflicts and lights the way forward. Joshua Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings ('portrait,' 'landscape') as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions--efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain's manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight--sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words--often with life-and-death stakes." Query: In legal analysis, how often are we engaged in point-and-shoot mode? How often are we in manual mode? How often can we successfully blend the two? Can we escape, or, at the least, master, or tribal emotions?).
Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "With a clear [?] yet many layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary life but a pernicious--and profoundly unlawful--return to dangerous preconstitutional absolutism.").
Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney Lopez links as never before [??] the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters. Dog Whistle Politics will generate a lively and much-needed debate about how racial politics has destabilized the American middle class--white and nonwhite members alike.").
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Principles of Equity (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), edited and with and Introduction by Michael Lobbam (Indianapolis, In: Liberty Fund, 2014).
Andrew Hussey, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs (New York: Faber & Faber, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Beyond the affluent center of Paris and other French cities, a war is going on. This is the French Intifada, a guerrilla war between the French state and the former subjects of its Empire, for whom the motto 'Liberte, egalite, fraternite' conceals a bitter history of domination, oppression, and brutality." Also, see Mitchell Cohen, "L'Estranger," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/29/2014.).
Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: The World After 1945 (A History of the World) ( Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U Press, 2014).
Louis Kaplow, Competition Policy and Price Fixing (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (What constitutes 'price fixing'? It is not a clear as one might think.).
Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (New York Harper, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day's end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to known as the 'the Groveland Boys." "And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall . . . into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the 'Florida Terror' at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movements, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates involved in the case and Marshall had endured continued threats that he would be next." From the "Epilogue": "In March 1960 Deputy James Yates found himself in strangely familiar circumstances. A middle-aged white woman claimed she had been raped in the city of Fruitland Park. She was fuzzy as to details of the crime, except that maybe one of her attackers was in his forties or fifties, and the other was about seventeen years old. So Yates picked up two black citrus workers, no matter that they were in their early twenties, and after they confessed to the crime under interrogation, the deputy confiscated their shoes. The victim, who had been ruled incompetent by the court and committed to a mental institution shortly after the attack, did not take the stand for the prosecution. The alleged rapists were convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair, almost solely on the basis of footprint evidence." "The NAACP got involved, and this time got lucky. A week before the scheduled execution of the two men, Noel Griffin, one of McCall's deputies who had worked on the Fruitland Park rape case, disclosed to a Florida NAACP lawyer that the defendants had been framed by the Lake Country Sheriff's Department. According to Griffin, Deputy Yates had used the defendants' confiscated shoes to make plaster casts of their footprints not at the crime scene but in another deputy's backyard. Griffin's allegations were confirmed by the FBI, whose analysis showed the soil mixed in the plaster casts to be consistent with that of the deputy's backyard. Furthermore, the FBI concluded . . . that when the defendants' footprints had supposedly been left, their feet had not been in their shoes. The fact of the falsified evidence enabled the NAACP to rescue both men from electrocution; a federal judge overturned their convictions." "In December 1962, the two deputies, James Yates and his accomplice, were suspended and indicted by an Orange County grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy. Convictions would have carried life sentences for both, if James Yates and his deputy accomplice had ever made it to court, but the case was so long delayed that the statute of imitations expired. Both deputies were reinstated by Willis McCall, with back pay." Id. at 356. And that, my friend, is how the criminal justice system works in America.).
Evan J. Mandery, A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America (New York: Norton, 2013).
Brook Manville & Josiah Ober, A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003) ("The Parthenon was incredibly expensive to build--roughly the equivalent of half a billion dollars today. [] The capital resources that enabled the Athenians to build the Parthenon and maintain this empire were not limited to money alone; a deep reserve of knowledge and skills was required as well. Through its networks of relationships, its reputation for excellence, and its ability to generate growth, the citizens organization of Athens attracted talented people from across the Mediterranean world--men and women who flocked to a city renowned for openness and opportunity. The Athenians uniquely learned how to take full advantage of this bounty of human talent. They did so as a highly focused moral community of entrepreneurial individuals--a company of citizens." Id. at 2. "Perhaps most important, the Parthenon symbolizes the power of people reaching high-performance outcomes through a democratic process defined by the values of freedom and equality, by a conviction that citizens are their own masters, responsible for their own fate. Unlike the great pyramids of Egypt or the magnificent places of ancient Persia, the Parthenon was not built by an absolutist monarch to glorify his individual power. The Parthenon was erected by and for a company of citizens. The decision to build it did not spring from the head of an egotistical tyrant; its construction was proposed by accountable leaders in an open forum, and a citizen assembly approved the work plan. The project was led and staffed by highly skilled artisans, but they were chosen and encouraged by the support of the entire community that sponsored the project. Every step in the process was carefully monitored by competent Athenian officials, men who had been chosen for the task of oversight by their fellow citizens and who remained accountable to their fellow citizens for the quality of the work. Public records made each step in the building process transparent to any Athenian who wanted to monitor the progress of the great enterprise that would come to represent his organization to the world. Every Athenian citizen, tens of thousands of people, contributed directly and indirectly to the completion of the project." "The Parthenon, with its grace, magnificent scale, and rich refinement, proclaimed far and wide: This is what we Athenians can do. This is who we are. We can do something like this because we are an enduring and wealthy community consisting of tens of thousands of active, motivated, and participating citizens--each one a free and energetic individual. Our success is not just a matter of our size, strength, and material resources; even more important has been the contribution of our deep store of knowledge and human capital, and our ability to innovate and perform with speed. We demonstrate that capability through the exercise of our capacities as individuals and as citizens. Our values, our way of making decisions, and our ability to work with one another allows us to do all this, and do it like no other people in the world." Id. at 3-4. Very, very few of you reading this list of suggested readings will ever have the opportunity to work in a truly first-rate organization, or an organization which treats its members as citizens. Why? For an organization to become first-rate requires vision, long-term vision and patience and Americans are short on vision and very impatient. Still, one should try to be part of an organization leaning toward being first-rate. In my view such organizations try to hold firm to a basic set principles: Hire good people. Give them the resources to do their jobs. Then get the out of their way. Great organizations never micromanage. American organizations have yet to appreciate and sustain the value of democratic organization. Still, Manville and Ober, A Company of Citizens, provides a blueprint for building great organizations.).
W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "According to W. J. T. Mitchell, a 'color-blind" post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against popular claims that race is an outmoded construct that distracts form more important issues, Mitchell contends that race remains essential to our understanding of social reality. Race is not simply something to be seen but is among the fundamental media through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it.").
Geoff Mulgan, The Locust and the Bee: Predators and Creators in Capitalism's Future (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013).
Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread--The Lessons From a New Science (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) (Humans are glorified bees?).
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("If, moreover, the rate of return on capital remains significantly above the growth rate for an extended period of time (which is more likely when the growth rate is low, though not automatic), then the risk of divergence in the distribution of wealth is very high." "This fundamental inequity which I will write as r > g (where r stands for the average annual rate of return on capital, including profits, dividends, interests, rents, and other income from capital, expressed as a percentage of its total value, and g stands for the rate of growth of the economy, that is, the annual increase in income or outputs), will play a crucial role in this book. In a sense, it sums up the overall logic of my conclusions." Id. at 25.).
Richard A. Posner, Reflections on Judging (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013).
Daria Roitmayr, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage (New York: NYU Press, 2014) (From the book jacket: "This book is designed to change the way we think about racial inequality. Long after the passage of civil rights laws and the inauguration of our first black president, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why Have we made so little progress?" "Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial disparity functions as a powerful monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation in everyday choices, like the ones people make about where to live and whether to give their children money for college, Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disci0lines, Roithmayr compares the dynamics of white advantage to the enduring power of monopoly giants like Microsoft." "With penetrating insight, Roitmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in 'positive feedback loops' that connect the racial disparities of the past to the modern racial gaps we see today in jobs, housing, and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors, Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who then refer their friends, and so on.. Everyday choices like these reproduce white advantage over tie, even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system.").
Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London England: Harvard U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "For eighteenth-century revolutionaries, equality meant understanding human beings as fundamentally alike and them creating universal political and economic rights. Rosanvallon sees the roots of today's crisis in the period 1830-1900, when industrialized capitalism threatened to quash these aspirations. By the early twentieth century, progressive forces had begun to rectify some imbalances of the Gilded Age, and the modern welfare state gradually emerged form Depression-era reforms. But new economic shocks in the 1970s began a slide toward inequality that has only gained momentum in the decades since." "There is no returning to the days of the redistributive welfare state, Rosanvallon says. Rather than resort to outdated notions of social solidarity, we must instead revitalize the idea of equality according to principles of singularity, reciprocity, and communality that more accurately reflect today's realities.").
Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870-1945 (A History of the World) ( Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U Press, 2012) ("Over the period from 1870 to 1945 the world became both more familiar and a stranger place. Fast ships, railroads, telegraph lines, inexpensive publications, and film all reached into hinterlands and erased distance. The exchange of people and products accelerated, while the fascination with traveling around and describing foreign areas--long evident in human history--reached new heights. [] As the number of travelers grew exponentially in the first half of the twentieth century, accounts and images of distant places multiplied and became accessible to all but the most remote of the world's inhabitants. Yet the very possibility of familiarity also bred strangeness. New connections highlighted all kinds of regional differences, and the awareness of difference could promote suspicion and repulsion perhaps even more easily than it facilitated understanding and communication." "This volume focuses on an era in world history marked by ever greater global interconnectedness--and by the excitement and anxiety, hope and violence that accompanied the complex mix often called modernity." Id. at 3.).
John D. Skrentny, After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014).
Ilan Stavans & Lalo Alcaraz (illustrator), A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of The United States (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (see Mat Johnson, "A People's History," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/6/2014.).
Kara W. Swanson, Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "More than a metaphor, the 'bank' has shaped ongoing controversies over body products as either marketable commodities or gifts donated to help others. A physician, Dr. Bernard Fantus, proposed a 'bank' in 1937 to make blood available to all patients. Yet the bank metaphor labeled blood as something to be commercially bought and sold, not communally shared. As blood banks became a fixture of medicine after World War II, American doctors made them a frontline in their war against socialized medicine. The profit-making connotations of the 'bank' reinforced a market-based understanding of supply and distribution, with unexpected consequences for all body products, from human eggs to kidneys." "Ultimately, the bank metaphor straitjacketed legal codes and reinforced inequalities in medical care. By exploring its past, Banking on the Body charts the path to a more efficient and less exploitative distribution of the human body's life-giving potential.").
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War In Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: Norton, 2013) ("During the early nineteenth century, Virginians thought of blacks in two radically different ways. On the one hand, masters often felt secure with, and even protective of, particular slaves well known to them. But when thinking of all slaves collectively, the Virginians imagined a dreaded 'internal enemy' who might, at any moment, rebel in a midnight massacre to butcher white men, women, and children in their beds. Virginians dwelled on lurid reports of massacres associate with the massive slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, a French West Indian colony that became the republic of Haiti in 1804. Virginians had not yet adopted the consoling myth, of the mid-ninteenth century, that slaves were weak, happy, and docile." Id. at 7. Here, I think, one can see the roots of the "paranoid style" in American politics.).
Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (New York: Plume, 2009) ("I must admit that the growing void in my traumatized brain was entirely seductive. I welcomed the reprieve that the silence brought from the constant chatter that related me to what I now perceived as the insignificant affairs of society. I eagerly turned my focus inward to the steadfast drumming of the trillions of brilliant cells that worked diligently and synchronously to maintain my body's steady state of homeostasis. As the blood poured in over my brain, my consciousness slowed to a soothing and satisfying awareness that embraced the vast and wondrous world within. I was both fascinated and humbled by how hard my little cells worked, moment by moment, just to maintain the integrity of my existence in this physical form." Id. at 43.).
Robert L. Tsai, America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("Throughout [American] history, a host of colorful characters--squatters and native people, slaveholders and abolitionists, black nationalists and white supremacists, socialists and world federalists--have felt left out of the larger project to build a single nation. Recreating life on the margins of society, popular legal theorists within these communities railed against the defects of the legal order. Convinced they would be better off under their own designs, they proposed state governments, breakaway republics, and miniature or worldwide republics not confined by physical boundaries. As resourceful Americans dreamed of the good life, they developed novel theories of community and power through a process of adaptive design, legal writing, and social resistance." Id. at 4. "Despite our collective amnesia about these episodes, the constitutions are worth remembering, analyzed and situated within the American political tradition. Doing so tells us something about the substantive ideas, but even more it reveals the recurring forms that constitutional struggle can take. The usual approach is to study the history of American constitutional law as the creation of a single coherent tradition. From this vantage point, the law is a system of well-settled rules to be applied authoritatively, and thus it is sensible to study only a tiny set of documents. The losers in legal conflict are relegated to the dustbins of history, their ideas presumed to be defeated for all time. But this is a mistake; defining what is suitable for study based strictly upon major legal achievements glorifies insiders at the expense of outsiders, ignores ideological rifts, and privileges technical authority over living practice. The awkward truth is that the American legal tradition is an untidy phenomenon and constitutional defeats are rarely permanent. Insurgent ideas of law can easily be nurtured n underground settings, only to reemerge in more favorable climates. By studying the U.S. Constitution's ascendance through the eyes of the discontented, it becomes possible to observe the American constitutional tradition at war with itself." Id. at 5.).
Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) ("Increasingly the debate over guns resembles less a contest over crime policy, and more a culture war over core values." "Through it all, we see how the great themes of American history rise and recur: the role of government. Race. Freedom. The singular power of the Supreme Court. Most strikingly, the fact that our view of the Second Amendment is set, at each stage, not by a pristine constitutional text, but by the push-and-pull, the rough-and-tumble of political advocacy and public agitation." Id. at xiv.).
Gabriel Abend, The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (I kept thinking about a New Yorker cartoon where a philosopher, in the corporate board room, has obviously questioned whether certain actions were moral/ethical. The caption has the chairman of the board reminding everyone there that, though perhaps not moral, the board's actions are perfectly legal.).
Paul Avrich & Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2013) (“But the notorious Haymarket incident had the most profound influence on Sasha’s view of American society. Three months before he left Hamburg, a hanging had occurred in Chicago that, more than anything else, entrenched his disillusionment with his newly adopted country. The Haymarket affair, a landmark in the history of anarchism, had been set in motion on May 4, 1886, when anarchists held a meeting near Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest against police brutality. As the meeting was drawing to a close, a contingent of policemen marched in and ordered the participants to disperse. At that moment a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police, killing one and injuring others. The officers responded by opening fire on the crowd, killing and wounding a number of civilians as well as many of their own men—sixty-seven policemen were hurt, eight of whom afterward died.” “The bomb thrower was never apprehended. But eight Chicago anarchists were brought to trial and speedily convicted of murder. On November 11, 1887, after unsuccessful appeals to higher courts, four of the defendants . . . were hanged. A fifth . . . committed suicide in his cell the day before the execution with a small explosive device he put in his month, and the remaining three were sentenced to long terms in prison.” “Just over six years later, in 1893, the three survivors . . . were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who assailed the judge for conducting the trial with ‘malicious ferocity’ and found that the evidence did not show that any of the eight anarchists had been involved in the bombing.” Id. at 21-22. And, so the story begins.).
Omri Ben-Shahar & Carl E. Schneider, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (From the book jacket: "Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure--requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. [] Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. More Than You Wanted to Know surveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices?" "Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite.").
Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "Demonstrating that there is not one continuous tradition of racism in the West . . . Bethencourt shows that racism preceded any theories of race and must be viewed within the prism and context of social hierarchies and local conditions . . . [A]ll racisms has been triggered by political projects monopolizing specific economic and social resources."
Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 (New York: Viking, 2013) ("If this book has achieved no other purpose, I hope it has illuminated the fact that the perceived imperatives of world power shaped the foreign policy of the USA quite as much as they did its European imperialist predecessors. The central contradiction addressed by this book has not been between American ideals and practice, but the fact that, unlike the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese empires, the USA profited little and lost much from its misconceived adoption of liberal imperialism. For the Europeans it was an alibi adopted to prolong their imperial delusions; the 'best and the brightest' of the American liberal establishment were confident that they could do better, and in that hubris lay their own and their nation's tragedy. That antipathy to empire was in America's DNA was not the least of history's ironies, a lesson it is relearning even as the writing of this book paralled the withdrawals from contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, and popular Western domestic disenchantment with improving small wars in what are no longer faraway places, but have become some of the most dynamic economies of the twenty-first century world." Id. at 492. Also, see Daniel Larison, "Bullet Diplomacy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/29/2013.).
Charles W. Calomiris & Stephen H. Haber, Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("If a stable banking system capable of providing stable access to credit to talented entrepreneurs and responsible households is such a good idea, then why are such systems so rare? How can it be that a sector of the economy that is highly regulated and closely supervised works so badly in so many countries? Our answer to this question is that the fragility of banks and the scarcity of bank credit reflects the structure of a country's fundamental political institutions. The crux of the problem is that all governments face inherent conflicts of interest when it comes to the operation of the banking system, but some types of governments--particularly democracies whose political institutions limit the influence of popular coalitions--are better able to mitigate those c0nflictds of interest than others." Id. at 12. "Banks are regulated and supervised according to abstruse laws, but those criteria and laws are not created and enforced by robots programmed to maximize social welfare; they are the outcomes of a political process--a game, as it were--whose stakes are wealth and power." "We call this process of deal making the Game of Bank Bargains. The players are those with a stake in the performance of the baning system: the group in control of the government, bankers, minority shareholders, debtors, and depositors. The rules, which are set by society's political institutions, determine which other groups must be included in the government-banker partnership and which can be left out in the cold because the rules of the political system make them powerless. Coalitions among the players form as the game is played, and those coalitions determine the rules governing bank entry (and hence the competitive structure and size of the banking sector), the flow of credit and its terms, the permissible activities of banks, and the allocation of losses when banks fail. What is at stake in the Game of Bank Bargaining is, therefore, the distribution of the benefits that come for a system of chartered banks. The group in control of the government always receives a share of those benefits, and the coalition that forges a partnership with the government splits the remainder." Id. at 13-14.).
Lincoln Caplan, Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1993) ("Lawyers have long been on the defensive against the charge that the practice of law has been debased by commerce, ad that business lawyers in particular have t4eded to their clients' interests at the expense of the public's. The accusation was first made at the end of he nineteenth century and has been voiced regularly almost ever since. Lawyers soon adopted this criticism as the focal point of their own self-examination." "In 1905, for example, Louis Brandeis gave a talk to the Harvard Ethics Society which became a classic article called 'The Opportunity in the Law.' In it, he wrote, 'Lawyers are now to a greater extent than formerly business men, a part of the great organized system of industrial and financial enterprise. They are less than formerly the students of a particular kind of learning, the practitioners of a particular art. And they do not seem to be so much of a distinct professional class.' . . . "He charged: 'Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people.' . . . " Id. at 127. For [Peter] Brown, the bar has become blemished by 'crime, perfidy, greed, and sloth' and 'many lawyers' treat the practice 'as a trade solely for profit rather than as a profession for service to the public interest. Many of 'the greedy ones are 'found practicing in the large law firms,' which promote 'selfishness' among their partners, the 'oppression and abuse' of their associates, and a general decline of 'manners and morals.' " Id. at 128. "The belief is widespread that competition among large firms has increased tensions between the goals of worldly success and of social purpose among lawyers, between the goals of completing a project on a tight schedule and of doing first-rate work, and between the goals of doing work because a client hires a firm to do it and of seeking assignments that are meaningful and productive. The overarching tension lies between the dictates of the market and the duties of the profession--described in terms of how lawyers do their work, and what they do in the community besides providing legal services for a fee." Id. at 129.).
Lance Dodes & Zachary Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "AA has becomes so infused in our society that it is practically synonymous with addiction recovery. Yet the evidence shows that AA has only a 5-10 percent success rate--hardly better than no treatment at all. Despite this, doctors, employers, and judges regularly refer addicted people to treatment programs and rehab facilities based on the 12-step model." "But The Sober Truth is more than a book about addition. It is also a book about science and how and why AA and rehab became so popular, despite the discouraging data. Dr. Dodes explores the entire story of AA's rise, from its origins in early fundamentalist religious and mystical beliefs to its present-day place of privilege in politics and media." In reading this book one realizes that addicts are individuals, and come to their addictions from different triggers and, as a consequence, the one-size-fits-all approach to rehabilitation, such are the 12-step programs, will not work for the overwhelming majority of addicts.).
Charles D. Ellis, What It Takes: Seven Secrets of Success from the World's Greatest Professional Firms (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "While you might expect to find major differences, form industry to industry, in how the great firms set themselves apart, the principles they follow are few and nearly identical. [] The stories of the people, their decisions, and their interactions found throughout these pages bring these seven keys to success to life: * Defining an inspiring mission * Recruiting the right people onto the team * Developing people--from early accelerated training through career-long coaching * Establishing a strong culture that unites all in teamwork to serve clients * Assuring a strong client focus * Innovation at all levels--from tactics to grand strategy * Providing leadership that brings all six together and identifies problems and corrects them quickly." Since this is a "suggested reading for law students," I would like to suggest law students consider these principles as a basis for evaluating options as to employment. For instance, perhaps it would be better to forgo weigh one firm's offer of a seemingly attractive higher salary against another firm's commitment to developing young lawyers, etc. One of the unfortunate aspects of the recent call for law schools to render graduates 'practice ready' is that many law firms are increasingly reluctant to actual invest time and energy into training lawyers. The great law firms will provide such training, the majority of firms will not with the obvious result: institutionalized mediocrity.).
Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody & Donald Haider-Markel, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014).
Richard A. Epstein, The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("All to often . . . the Supreme Court treats all regulatory judgments as if they were cut for the same cloth. It is regrettable how easy it is to stray from sound constitutional principles by an indifference to technical issues of lasting importance . . ." Id. at 346.).
Robert A. Ferguson, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson . . . diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime. He reveals the veiled pleasure behind the impulse to punish (which confuses our thinking about the purpose of punishment), explains why over time all punishment regimes impose greater levels of punishment than originally intended, and traces a disturbing gap between out ability to quantify pain and the precision with which penalties are handed down." "Ferguson turns the spotlight from the debate over legal issues to the real plight of prisoners, addressing not law professionals but the American people. Do we want out prisons to be this way? Or are we unaware, or confused, or indifferent, or misinformed about what is happening? Acknowledging the suffering of prisoners and understanding what punishers do when they punish are the first steps toward a better, more just system.").
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014) ("Plato shared, with radical modification, in the Ethos of the Extraordinary, and it led him to create philosophy as we know it. The kind of exertion that is required if one is to achieve a life worth living is philosophy as he understood it. It is our exertion in reason that makes us matter--makes us, to the extent that we can be, godlike. And if such exertions don't win the acclaim of the masses, so much the worse for the masses. The kind of extraordinary that matters is likely to go undetected by them--so, in a certain sense, though not in all sense, they really don't matter. This is a harsh statement, but, as already noted, harshness didn't much faze the Greeks, and Plato is no exception here." Id. at 9. "And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less, than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world." Id. at 40. "What is an intellectual but someone who has so disciplined his or her mind that he or she can take extreme pleasure in the free play of ideas?" Id. at 207. Also, see Anthony Gottlieb, "Let's Have A Dialogue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/20/2014.).
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up. It's about understanding what morality is, how it got here, and how it's implemented in our brains. It;s about understanding the deep structure of moral problems as well as the differences between the problems we face today. Finally, it'd about taking this new understanding of morality and turning it into a universal oral philosophy that members of all human tribes can share." Id. at 5. Query: If law has a moral foundation, then, perhaps, this book can shed some light on the deep structure of legal problems as well as the differences between the legal problems we face today. Perhaps our brains have not yet adapted sufficiently to adequately address the legal problems we face today (for example, the legal aspects of climate change, privacy in the Internet-age, tolerance in the twenty-first-century's version of globalization). From the bookjacket: "A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflicts and lights the way forward. Joshua Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings ('portrait,' 'landscape') as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions--efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain's manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight--sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words--often with life-and-death stakes." Query: In legal analysis, how often are we engaged in point-and-shoot mode? How often are we in manual mode? How often can we successfully blend the two? Can we escape, or, at the least, master, or tribal emotions?).
Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "With a clear [?] yet many layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary life but a pernicious--and profoundly unlawful--return to dangerous preconstitutional absolutism.").
Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney Lopez links as never before [??] the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters. Dog Whistle Politics will generate a lively and much-needed debate about how racial politics has destabilized the American middle class--white and nonwhite members alike.").
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Principles of Equity (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), edited and with and Introduction by Michael Lobbam (Indianapolis, In: Liberty Fund, 2014).
Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: The World After 1945 (A History of the World) ( Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U Press, 2014).
Louis Kaplow, Competition Policy and Price Fixing (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (What constitutes 'price fixing'? It is not a clear as one might think.).
Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (New York Harper, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day's end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to known as the 'the Groveland Boys." "And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall . . . into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the 'Florida Terror' at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movements, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates involved in the case and Marshall had endured continued threats that he would be next." From the "Epilogue": "In March 1960 Deputy James Yates found himself in strangely familiar circumstances. A middle-aged white woman claimed she had been raped in the city of Fruitland Park. She was fuzzy as to details of the crime, except that maybe one of her attackers was in his forties or fifties, and the other was about seventeen years old. So Yates picked up two black citrus workers, no matter that they were in their early twenties, and after they confessed to the crime under interrogation, the deputy confiscated their shoes. The victim, who had been ruled incompetent by the court and committed to a mental institution shortly after the attack, did not take the stand for the prosecution. The alleged rapists were convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair, almost solely on the basis of footprint evidence." "The NAACP got involved, and this time got lucky. A week before the scheduled execution of the two men, Noel Griffin, one of McCall's deputies who had worked on the Fruitland Park rape case, disclosed to a Florida NAACP lawyer that the defendants had been framed by the Lake Country Sheriff's Department. According to Griffin, Deputy Yates had used the defendants' confiscated shoes to make plaster casts of their footprints not at the crime scene but in another deputy's backyard. Griffin's allegations were confirmed by the FBI, whose analysis showed the soil mixed in the plaster casts to be consistent with that of the deputy's backyard. Furthermore, the FBI concluded . . . that when the defendants' footprints had supposedly been left, their feet had not been in their shoes. The fact of the falsified evidence enabled the NAACP to rescue both men from electrocution; a federal judge overturned their convictions." "In December 1962, the two deputies, James Yates and his accomplice, were suspended and indicted by an Orange County grand jury on charges of perjury and conspiracy. Convictions would have carried life sentences for both, if James Yates and his deputy accomplice had ever made it to court, but the case was so long delayed that the statute of imitations expired. Both deputies were reinstated by Willis McCall, with back pay." Id. at 356. And that, my friend, is how the criminal justice system works in America.).
Evan J. Mandery, A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America (New York: Norton, 2013).
Brook Manville & Josiah Ober, A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003) ("The Parthenon was incredibly expensive to build--roughly the equivalent of half a billion dollars today. [] The capital resources that enabled the Athenians to build the Parthenon and maintain this empire were not limited to money alone; a deep reserve of knowledge and skills was required as well. Through its networks of relationships, its reputation for excellence, and its ability to generate growth, the citizens organization of Athens attracted talented people from across the Mediterranean world--men and women who flocked to a city renowned for openness and opportunity. The Athenians uniquely learned how to take full advantage of this bounty of human talent. They did so as a highly focused moral community of entrepreneurial individuals--a company of citizens." Id. at 2. "Perhaps most important, the Parthenon symbolizes the power of people reaching high-performance outcomes through a democratic process defined by the values of freedom and equality, by a conviction that citizens are their own masters, responsible for their own fate. Unlike the great pyramids of Egypt or the magnificent places of ancient Persia, the Parthenon was not built by an absolutist monarch to glorify his individual power. The Parthenon was erected by and for a company of citizens. The decision to build it did not spring from the head of an egotistical tyrant; its construction was proposed by accountable leaders in an open forum, and a citizen assembly approved the work plan. The project was led and staffed by highly skilled artisans, but they were chosen and encouraged by the support of the entire community that sponsored the project. Every step in the process was carefully monitored by competent Athenian officials, men who had been chosen for the task of oversight by their fellow citizens and who remained accountable to their fellow citizens for the quality of the work. Public records made each step in the building process transparent to any Athenian who wanted to monitor the progress of the great enterprise that would come to represent his organization to the world. Every Athenian citizen, tens of thousands of people, contributed directly and indirectly to the completion of the project." "The Parthenon, with its grace, magnificent scale, and rich refinement, proclaimed far and wide: This is what we Athenians can do. This is who we are. We can do something like this because we are an enduring and wealthy community consisting of tens of thousands of active, motivated, and participating citizens--each one a free and energetic individual. Our success is not just a matter of our size, strength, and material resources; even more important has been the contribution of our deep store of knowledge and human capital, and our ability to innovate and perform with speed. We demonstrate that capability through the exercise of our capacities as individuals and as citizens. Our values, our way of making decisions, and our ability to work with one another allows us to do all this, and do it like no other people in the world." Id. at 3-4. Very, very few of you reading this list of suggested readings will ever have the opportunity to work in a truly first-rate organization, or an organization which treats its members as citizens. Why? For an organization to become first-rate requires vision, long-term vision and patience and Americans are short on vision and very impatient. Still, one should try to be part of an organization leaning toward being first-rate. In my view such organizations try to hold firm to a basic set principles: Hire good people. Give them the resources to do their jobs. Then get the out of their way. Great organizations never micromanage. American organizations have yet to appreciate and sustain the value of democratic organization. Still, Manville and Ober, A Company of Citizens, provides a blueprint for building great organizations.).
W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "According to W. J. T. Mitchell, a 'color-blind" post-racial world is neither achievable nor desirable. Against popular claims that race is an outmoded construct that distracts form more important issues, Mitchell contends that race remains essential to our understanding of social reality. Race is not simply something to be seen but is among the fundamental media through which we experience human otherness. Race also makes racism visible and is thus our best weapon against it.").
Geoff Mulgan, The Locust and the Bee: Predators and Creators in Capitalism's Future (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013).
Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013) (There are many ideological divisions within the modern world. One of the most persistent, most troubling, and increasingly most divisive, however, is the struggle over the legacy of the Enlightenment. The 'Enlightenment'--that period of European history between, roughly, the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first of the nineteenth [note: also referred to as the "long eighteen century"]--has had a far greater and more lasting impact on the formation of the modern world than any of the intellectual convulsions that preceded it. [] If we regard ourselves as modern, if we are forward-thinking, if we are tolerant and generally open-minded, if stem-cell research does not frighten us but fundamentalist religious beliefs do, then we tend to think of ourselves as 'enlightened.' And in thinking this, we are in effect declaring ourselves to be heirs, however distant, of a particular intellectual and cultural movement." Id. at ix. "But for all the clear differences that did exist within it, the Enlightenment has been identified with an exalted view of human rationality and of human benevolence, and with a belief, measured and at times skeptical, in progress and in the general human capacity for self-improvement. It has been broadly understood to stand for the claim that all individuals have the right to shape their own ends for themselves, rather than let others do it for them and--what comes to much the same thing--to live their lives as best they can without help or hindrance from divine decrees. It has been seen as the source of most modern liberal, tolerant, undogmatic, and secular understandings of politics and as the intellectual origins of all modern forms of universalism, from a recognition of the essential unity of the human race and the evils of slavery and racism right through to the humanistic sentiments behind Medicins sans frontieres. It is widely regarded as having been the intellectual origins of our still slowly emerging conviction that all human beings share the same basic rights and that women think and feel no differently from men or Africans from Asians. As an intellectual movement it also saw the beginning of those disciplines--economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, and certain kinds of moral philosophy--that dictate much of how we view, and attempt to control, our lives today. Modernity was the creature of a great many intellectual and scientific configurations, form the invention of the steam engine to the Internet, very little of which can be attributed to the Enlightenment . . . What can be attributed to [the Enlightenment], however, is the broadly secular, experimental, individualistic, and progressive intellectual world that ultimately made those innovations possible--a world in which the old and apparently unassailable forms of association, of beliefs and tradition, that had for centuries divided human beings into mutually suspicious and often brutally homicidal groups were slowly and painfully, but irreversibly, abandoned. This is not to say that without the Enlightenment modernity--however understood--would never have taken place, that without it we would all still be burning unbelievers or listening to hellfire sermons for our weekly entertainment. But it mostly certainly would not have taken place how and where it did." "It is to the Enlightenment that we also owe the modern conception of the global society. [T]he prospect of what the United Nations once optimistically referred to as 'Our Global Community' must still seem a long way off. But the fact that most liberal-minded and educated persons now accept that peoples should be willing and able to cooperate across frontiers must be cause for hope." Id. at x-xi. "What Kant called the true 'cosmopolites' and the 'cosmotheroi' (students of the world) were not being asked to sacrifice their love of family, or of patria; much less were they being asked to subsume their identity into anything quite as amorphous as the 'cosmos.' These true 'cosmopolites' were moved only by their 'inclination to promote the well-being of the entire world,' which derived initially from the sense of loyalty that originated in a love for those of one's own country. But what they had always to keep their eyes fixed upon was the wider horizon of humankind itself. It was what Kant, significantly, called 'global patriotism'." Id. at 320-321.).
Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread--The Lessons From a New Science (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) (Humans are glorified bees?).
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("If, moreover, the rate of return on capital remains significantly above the growth rate for an extended period of time (which is more likely when the growth rate is low, though not automatic), then the risk of divergence in the distribution of wealth is very high." "This fundamental inequity which I will write as r > g (where r stands for the average annual rate of return on capital, including profits, dividends, interests, rents, and other income from capital, expressed as a percentage of its total value, and g stands for the rate of growth of the economy, that is, the annual increase in income or outputs), will play a crucial role in this book. In a sense, it sums up the overall logic of my conclusions." Id. at 25.).
Richard A. Posner, Reflections on Judging (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013).
Daria Roitmayr, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage (New York: NYU Press, 2014) (From the book jacket: "This book is designed to change the way we think about racial inequality. Long after the passage of civil rights laws and the inauguration of our first black president, blacks and Latinos possess barely a nickel of wealth for every dollar that whites have. Why Have we made so little progress?" "Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial disparity functions as a powerful monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation in everyday choices, like the ones people make about where to live and whether to give their children money for college, Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disci0lines, Roithmayr compares the dynamics of white advantage to the enduring power of monopoly giants like Microsoft." "With penetrating insight, Roitmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in 'positive feedback loops' that connect the racial disparities of the past to the modern racial gaps we see today in jobs, housing, and education. Wealthy white neighborhoods fund public schools that then turn out wealthy white neighbors, Whites with lucrative jobs informally refer their friends, who then refer their friends, and so on.. Everyday choices like these reproduce white advantage over tie, even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Roithmayr concludes that racial inequality might now be locked in place, unless policymakers take drastic steps to dismantle this oppressive system.").
Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London England: Harvard U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "For eighteenth-century revolutionaries, equality meant understanding human beings as fundamentally alike and them creating universal political and economic rights. Rosanvallon sees the roots of today's crisis in the period 1830-1900, when industrialized capitalism threatened to quash these aspirations. By the early twentieth century, progressive forces had begun to rectify some imbalances of the Gilded Age, and the modern welfare state gradually emerged form Depression-era reforms. But new economic shocks in the 1970s began a slide toward inequality that has only gained momentum in the decades since." "There is no returning to the days of the redistributive welfare state, Rosanvallon says. Rather than resort to outdated notions of social solidarity, we must instead revitalize the idea of equality according to principles of singularity, reciprocity, and communality that more accurately reflect today's realities.").
Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870-1945 (A History of the World) ( Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U Press, 2012) ("Over the period from 1870 to 1945 the world became both more familiar and a stranger place. Fast ships, railroads, telegraph lines, inexpensive publications, and film all reached into hinterlands and erased distance. The exchange of people and products accelerated, while the fascination with traveling around and describing foreign areas--long evident in human history--reached new heights. [] As the number of travelers grew exponentially in the first half of the twentieth century, accounts and images of distant places multiplied and became accessible to all but the most remote of the world's inhabitants. Yet the very possibility of familiarity also bred strangeness. New connections highlighted all kinds of regional differences, and the awareness of difference could promote suspicion and repulsion perhaps even more easily than it facilitated understanding and communication." "This volume focuses on an era in world history marked by ever greater global interconnectedness--and by the excitement and anxiety, hope and violence that accompanied the complex mix often called modernity." Id. at 3.).
John D. Skrentny, After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014).
Ilan Stavans & Lalo Alcaraz (illustrator), A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of The United States (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (see Mat Johnson, "A People's History," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/6/2014.).
Kara W. Swanson, Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "More than a metaphor, the 'bank' has shaped ongoing controversies over body products as either marketable commodities or gifts donated to help others. A physician, Dr. Bernard Fantus, proposed a 'bank' in 1937 to make blood available to all patients. Yet the bank metaphor labeled blood as something to be commercially bought and sold, not communally shared. As blood banks became a fixture of medicine after World War II, American doctors made them a frontline in their war against socialized medicine. The profit-making connotations of the 'bank' reinforced a market-based understanding of supply and distribution, with unexpected consequences for all body products, from human eggs to kidneys." "Ultimately, the bank metaphor straitjacketed legal codes and reinforced inequalities in medical care. By exploring its past, Banking on the Body charts the path to a more efficient and less exploitative distribution of the human body's life-giving potential.").
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War In Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: Norton, 2013) ("During the early nineteenth century, Virginians thought of blacks in two radically different ways. On the one hand, masters often felt secure with, and even protective of, particular slaves well known to them. But when thinking of all slaves collectively, the Virginians imagined a dreaded 'internal enemy' who might, at any moment, rebel in a midnight massacre to butcher white men, women, and children in their beds. Virginians dwelled on lurid reports of massacres associate with the massive slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, a French West Indian colony that became the republic of Haiti in 1804. Virginians had not yet adopted the consoling myth, of the mid-ninteenth century, that slaves were weak, happy, and docile." Id. at 7. Here, I think, one can see the roots of the "paranoid style" in American politics.).
Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (New York: Plume, 2009) ("I must admit that the growing void in my traumatized brain was entirely seductive. I welcomed the reprieve that the silence brought from the constant chatter that related me to what I now perceived as the insignificant affairs of society. I eagerly turned my focus inward to the steadfast drumming of the trillions of brilliant cells that worked diligently and synchronously to maintain my body's steady state of homeostasis. As the blood poured in over my brain, my consciousness slowed to a soothing and satisfying awareness that embraced the vast and wondrous world within. I was both fascinated and humbled by how hard my little cells worked, moment by moment, just to maintain the integrity of my existence in this physical form." Id. at 43.).
Robert L. Tsai, America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("Throughout [American] history, a host of colorful characters--squatters and native people, slaveholders and abolitionists, black nationalists and white supremacists, socialists and world federalists--have felt left out of the larger project to build a single nation. Recreating life on the margins of society, popular legal theorists within these communities railed against the defects of the legal order. Convinced they would be better off under their own designs, they proposed state governments, breakaway republics, and miniature or worldwide republics not confined by physical boundaries. As resourceful Americans dreamed of the good life, they developed novel theories of community and power through a process of adaptive design, legal writing, and social resistance." Id. at 4. "Despite our collective amnesia about these episodes, the constitutions are worth remembering, analyzed and situated within the American political tradition. Doing so tells us something about the substantive ideas, but even more it reveals the recurring forms that constitutional struggle can take. The usual approach is to study the history of American constitutional law as the creation of a single coherent tradition. From this vantage point, the law is a system of well-settled rules to be applied authoritatively, and thus it is sensible to study only a tiny set of documents. The losers in legal conflict are relegated to the dustbins of history, their ideas presumed to be defeated for all time. But this is a mistake; defining what is suitable for study based strictly upon major legal achievements glorifies insiders at the expense of outsiders, ignores ideological rifts, and privileges technical authority over living practice. The awkward truth is that the American legal tradition is an untidy phenomenon and constitutional defeats are rarely permanent. Insurgent ideas of law can easily be nurtured n underground settings, only to reemerge in more favorable climates. By studying the U.S. Constitution's ascendance through the eyes of the discontented, it becomes possible to observe the American constitutional tradition at war with itself." Id. at 5.).
Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) ("Increasingly the debate over guns resembles less a contest over crime policy, and more a culture war over core values." "Through it all, we see how the great themes of American history rise and recur: the role of government. Race. Freedom. The singular power of the Supreme Court. Most strikingly, the fact that our view of the Second Amendment is set, at each stage, not by a pristine constitutional text, but by the push-and-pull, the rough-and-tumble of political advocacy and public agitation." Id. at xiv.).
Friday, August 15, 2014
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
JAMIE WYETH
Elliot Bostwick Davis, Jamie Wyeth, with an essay by David Houston (Boston: MFA Publications/Museum of Fine Art, Boston, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "The more than one hundred painting, works on paper, and multimedia assemblages lavishly reproduced in this book invite us to explore the wold of a prodigiously gifted, adamantly individualist American artist.).
Sunday, August 10, 2014
DECOMPRESSING IN ANTICIPATION OF A BRUTALLY FRUSTRATING ACADEMIC YEAR
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012) ("Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles." Id. at 135.).
Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Moonraker (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012) ("'Why haven't you ever married?' 'I expect because I think I can handle life better on my own. Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.'" Id. at 197.).
Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012) ("Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored." Id. at 104.).
Ian Fleming, Dr. No (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Octopussy and The Living Daylights (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Moonraker (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012) ("'Why haven't you ever married?' 'I expect because I think I can handle life better on my own. Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.'" Id. at 197.).
Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012) ("Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored." Id. at 104.).
Ian Fleming, Dr. No (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012) ("[Goldfinger] said, 'Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.' . . . " Id. at 177.).
Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Thunderball (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, The Man With the Golden Arm (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, The Man With the Golden Arm (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Ian Fleming, Octopussy and The Living Daylights (Las Vegas, NV: Thomas & Mercer, 2012).
Friday, August 8, 2014
FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON WRITING--AND READING--WITHOUT BIAS
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven--and How We Can Regain It (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2006) ("No one can be entirely 'objective,' and writers claiming to have no point of view are either deluding themselves or concealing their bias in order to manipulate the reader. Authors should write with a mind entirely open to modifying their points of view in the light of evidence. The gap is wide between point of view and bias: the former is inevitable, whereas the latter point of view made illegitimate by insisting on prejudices and refusing to face evidence. Writers, therefore, should be transparently honest about their views." Id. at 1. Likewise, no reader can be entirely 'objective.' And, like writers, readers should read in a manner "open to modifying their point of view in the light of evidence." That is, for most of us, a constant struggle.).
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
THE NATURE OF SLAVERY
Orlando Patterson Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1982) ("Slavery is one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, an total powerless from the viewpoint of the slave. Yet it differs form other forms of extreme domination in very special ways. If we are to understand how slavery is distinctive, we must first clarify the concept of power." "The power relation has three facets. The first is social and involves the use of threat of violence in the control of one person by another. The second is the psychological facet of influence, the capacity to persuade another person to change the way he perceives his interests and his circumstances. And third is the cultural facet of authority, 'the means of transforming force into right, and obedience into duty' . . ." Id. at 1-2. "A consideration of the relation of slavery to caste leads us back to where we began: the liminality of the slave is not just a powerful agent of authority for the master, but an important route to the usefulness of the slave for both his master and the community at large. The essence of caste relations and notions of ritual pollution is that they demarcate impassable boundaries. The essence of slavery is that the slave, in his social death, lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular. Already dead, he lives outside the mana of the gods and can cross the boundaries with social and supernatural impunity." Id. 51. "There is absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest that any group of slaves ever internalized the conception of degradation held by their masters." Id. at 97.).
Solomom Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Vancouver: Engage Books, 2013).
Solomom Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Vancouver: Engage Books, 2013).
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