A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable "sunshine era." Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting tools, officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from over classification to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this dark side of the sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in the first comprehensive, comparative history of presidential resistance to the new legal regime, from Reagan-Bush to the first term of Obama-Biden.

After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary secret, Arnold considers the causes of excessive secrecy, and why we observe variation across administrations. While some administrations deserve the scorn of critics for exceptional secrecy, the book shows excessive secrecy was a persistent problem well before 9/11, during Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Regardless of party, administrations have consistently worked to weaken the system's legal foundations.

The book reveals episode after episode of evasive maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and downright defiance; an army of secrecy workers in a dizzying array of institutions labels all manner of documents "top secret," while other government workers and agencies manage to suppress information with a "sensitive but unclassified" designation. For example, the health effects of Agent Orange, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria leaking out of Midwestern hog farms are considered too "sensitive" for public consumption. These examples and many more document how vast the secrecy system has grown during the sunshine era.

Rife with stories of vital scientific evidence withheld, justice eluded, legalities circumvented, and the public interest flouted, "Secrecy in the Sunshine Era" reveals how our information society has been kept in the dark in too many ways and for too long.

The stark reality is that throughout the world, women disproportionately live in poverty. This indicates that gender can both cause and perpetuate poverty, but this is a complex and cross-cutting relationship.The full enjoyment of human rights is routinely denied to women who live in poverty. How can human rights respond and alleviate gender-based poverty? This monograph closely examines the potential of equality and non-discrimination at international law to redress gender-based poverty. It offers a sophisticated assessment of how the international human rights treaties, specifically the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which contains no obligations on poverty, can be interpreted and used to address gender-based poverty. An interpretation of CEDAW that incorporates the harms of gender-based poverty can spark a global dialogue. The book makes an important contribution to that dialogue, arguing that the CEDAW should serve as an authoritative international standard setting exercise that can activate international accountability mechanisms and inform the domestic interpretation of human rights.

The Age of Foolishness is a doubter's guide to current lawyerly thinking about all things related to constitutionalism in a democracy. This book offers a thorough-going skeptical critique of the views that dominate our legal caste, including in law schools and among judges, and place too much weight on judges to resolve important social policy disputes and too little on democratic politics. The author argues that politics matters in a way that our legal orthodoxy often downplays.

Throughout the twentieth century, administrations have wrestled with allaying public concern over national disasters and social scandals. This book seeks to describe historically the use of public inquiries, and demonstrates why their methods continued to deploy until 1998 the ingrained habits of lawyers, particularly by issuing warning letters in order to safeguard witnesses who might be to blame. Under the influence of Lord Justice Salmon, the vital concern about systems and services allotted to social problems was relegated to the identification of individual blameworthiness. The book explains why the last inquiry under that system, into the events of 'Bloody Sunday' under Lord Saville's chairmanship, cost GBP200 million and took twelve and a half years (instead of two years). 'Never again', was the Government's muted cry as the method of investigating the public concern was eventually replaced by the Inquiries Act 2005, by common consent a good piece of legislation. The overriding principle of fairness to witnesses was confirmed by Parliament to those who are 'core participants' to the event, but with limited rights to participate. The public inquiry, the author asserts, is now publicly administered as a Commission of Inquiry, and is correctly regarded as a branch of public administration that focuses on the systemic question of what went wrong, as opposed to which individuals were to blame.

This book provides unique insights into the practice of democratic constitutionalism in one of the world's most legally and politically significant regions. It combines contributions from leading Latin American and global scholars to provide 'bottom up' and 'top down' insights about the lessons to be drawn from the distinctive constitutional experiences of countries in Latin America. In doing so, it also draws on a rich array of legal and interdisciplinary perspectives. Ultimately, it shows both the promise of democratic constitutions as a vehicle for social, economic and political change, and the variation in the actual constitutional experiences of different countries on the ground - or the limits to constitutions as a locus for broader social change. This book presents new perspectives on recurrent topics and debates that enrich comparative constitutional law in other regions of the world, both in the Global South and the Global North. The fine-tuned, in-depth approach of the contributors brings rigorous scholarship to this institutionally diverse and significant region, illuminating the under-explored relationship between constitutionalism, politics, ideology and leadership. This unique and challenging study will prove to be an indispensable tool, not only for academics interested in Latin America but for comparative constitutional law scholars across the globe. Contributors include: C. Bernal, J.l. Colon-Rios, J. Couso, R. Dixon, Z. Elkins, H.A. Garcia, R. Gargarella, T. Ginsburg, A. Huneeus, D. Landau, J. Lemaitre, L. Lixinski, G.L. Negretto, R.A. Sanchez-Urribarri, M. Tushnet, O. Vilhena Vieira

The West's cherished dream of social harmony by numbers is today disrupting all our familiar legal frameworks - the state, democracy and law itself. Its scientistic vision shaped both Taylorism and Soviet Planning, and today, with 'globalisation', it is flourishing in the form of governance by numbers. Shunning the goal of governing by just laws, and empowered by the information and communication technologies, governance champions a new normative ideal of attaining measurable objectives. Programmes supplant legislation, and governance displaces government. However, management by objectives revives forms of law typical of economic vassalage. When a person is no longer protected by a law applying equally to all, the only solution is to pledge allegiance to someone stronger than oneself. Rule by law had already secured the principle of impersonal power, but in taking this principle to extremes, governance by numbers has paradoxically spawned a world ruled by ties of allegiance.

A systematic and scholarly description of the principles of the Roman law regarding slavery. "So great is the care, skill, and accuracy with which his object has been carried out, we think it will be long before any other writer, either at home or abroad attempts to produce a rival work on this branch of law" (Marke 126). With appendices and a through index.

The Continuity of Legal Systems in Theory and Practice examines a persistent and fascinating question about the continuity of legal systems: when is a legal system existing at one time the same legal system that exists at another time? The book's distinctive approach to this question is to combine abstract critical analysis of two of the most developed theories of legal systems, those of Hans Kelsen and Joseph Raz, with an evaluation of their capacity, in practice, to explain the facts, attitudes and normative standards for which they purport to account. That evaluation is undertaken by reference to Australian constitutional law and history, whose diverse and complex phenomena make it particularly apt for evaluating the theories' explanatory power. In testing whether the depiction of Australian law presented by each theory achieves an adequate 'fit' with historical facts, the book also contributes to the understanding of Australian law and legal systems between 1788 and 2001. By collating the relevant Australian materials systematically for the first time, it presents the case for reconceptualising the role of Imperial laws and institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and clarifies the interrelationship between Colonial, State, Commonwealth and Imperial legal systems, both before and after Federation.

Federica Giovanella examines the on-going conflict between copyright and informational privacy rights within the judicial system in this timely and intriguing book. Adopting a comparative approach focusing on the United States, Canada and Italy, Dr Giovanella skilfully explores the strategies through which judges solve conflicts between Internet users' data protection and copyright holders' enforceable rights. Using research centred on a selection of lawsuits in which copyright holders attempted to enforce their rights against Internet users suspected of illegal file-sharing, this book analyses the cases and regulatory frameworks concerning both privacy and copyright. Copyright and Information Privacy demonstrates that these decisions were ultimately the by-products of different policy conceptions of the two conflicting rights. Whilst providing a comprehensive analysis of the conflict between copyright and data protection, this book also stimulates the debate surrounding the role that judges have in balancing conflicting rights, and examines their reasoning in resolving such conflict, taking into consideration the process of conceptual balancing. Perceptive and contemporary in topic, this book will be beneficial to both scholars and students of intellectual property, privacy, and comparative law.

"In short, we have a first-rate study of an important constitutional symbol of disunion." --Donald Roper, American Journal of Legal History 26 (1982) 255. Finkelman describes the judicial turmoil that ensued when slaves were taken into free states and the resultant issues of comity, conflict of laws, interstate cooperation, Constitutional obligations, and the nationalization of slavery. "Other scholars have defined the antebellum constitutional crisis largely in terms of the extension of slavery to the territories and the return of fugitive slaves. Finkelman's study demonstrates that the comity problem was also an important dimension of intersectional tension. It is a worthy addition to the growing literature of slavery." -- James W. Ely, Jr., California Law Review 69 (1981) 1755. Paul Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow, Government Law Center, Albany Law School. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and more than 35 books including A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States, with Melvin I. Urofsky (2011), Slavery, Race and the American Legal System, 1700-1872 (editor) (1988) and Slavery in the Courtroom (1985).