"A stimulating debate of a great case."
--Library Journal

"Balkan offers his own assessment in a critical introduction and the iconic impact of "Brown,""
--"Black Issues Book Review"

"Balkin persuasively argues that the courts play a vital role in tempering the nation's political and legal mechanisms."
--"Journal of the West"

"Passionate, intelligent, accessible, and eloquent. If only the real court would follow suit."
--Kirkus, Starred Review

"A remarkable collection of writings. The eminent scholars it features articulate with insight and passion a wide range of views. No other book better relates the Supreme Court's landmark decision of 1954 to the debates and anxieties of our own time."
--Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School

"A critical introduction to the original ruling."
-- "Reference & Research Book News"

"Brown v. Board of Education," the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision ordering the desegregation of America's public schools, is perhaps the most famous case in American constitutional law. Criticized and even openly defied when first handed down, in half a century Brown has become a venerated symbol of equality and civil rights.

Its meaning, however, remains as contested as the case is celebrated. In the decades since the original decision, constitutional interpreters of all stripes have found within it different meanings. Both supporters and opponents of affirmative action have claimed the mantle of Brown, criticizing the other side for betraying its spirit. Meanwhile, the opinion itself has often been criticized as bland and uninspiring, carefully written to avoid controversy and maintain unanimity among the Justices.

As the50th anniversary of Brown approaches, America's schools are increasingly divided by race and class. Liberals and conservatives alike harbor profound regrets about the development of race relations since Brown, while disagreeing heatedly about the proper role of the courts in promoting civil equality and civil rights.

In this volume, nine of America's top constitutional and civil rights experts have been challenged to rewrite the Brown decision as they would like it to have been written, incorporating what they now know about the subsequent history of the United States but making use of only those sources available at the time of the original decision. In addition, Jack Balkin gives a detailed introduction to the case, chronicling the history of the litigation in Brown, and explaining the current debates over its legacy.

Contributors include: Bruce Ackerman, Jack M Balkin, Derrick A. Bell, Drew S. Days, John Hart Ely, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Michael W. McConnell, Frank I Michelman, and Cass R. Sunstein.

This book examines a long-standing dispute regarding the prerequisite for the exercise of the right to self-defence and aims to offer a possible better alternatives for interpreting the significance of the precondition provided for in the Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, by taking a historical perspective on the development of that concept from the mid-19th century to 1945. The book defines the right of self-defence as understood in and before 1945, suggesting the typology which represents the strata of the concept. It will contribute to the current debate regarding the right of self-defence in contemporary international law, including that against terrorism, by providing a framework to analyse the state practice since 1945.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"A very valuable work. In a highly accessible way, Harold Krent surveys a wide array of topics involving the authority of the modern presidency, drawing on examples from the earliest days of our Republic to the present. He takes often difficult and complex issues and makes them easily comprehensible so that his book should be of great use to both scholars and newcomers to this field. Having been personally involved in several of the litigation matters Krent uses as examples to illustrate his points, I can attest to the breadth of his knowledge and the quality of his analysis. Put simply, this book is thoughtful, lucid, and well written."
--Douglas Letter, United States Department of Justice

"Krent has written an outstanding book that is sure to become the foundation work for understanding the scope of presidential power, and its ambiguous and important cognate 'executive' power. He is careful to nest his discussion in a broad context that includes other important actors - public and private - that, through their own interaction and with the president and executive branch, affect and indeed on occasion dictate what the president may or may not do. A must read for anyone interested in how our repudiation of a monarchy was and remains balanced against the need for a strong executive."
--Nicholas Zeppos, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

"Krent's mastery of both the history and the law surrounding presidential power assures that the book will be a significant and unique contribution to its field."
--William Marshall, University of North Carolina School ofLaw

"Informative and helpful for clarifying (one's) thinking about executive power issues. It is well structured and well documented."
--"Law and Politics Book Review"

Framed in Article II of the Constitution, presidential powers are dictated today by judicial as well as historical precedent. To understand the ways the president wields power as well as how this power is kept in check by other branches of government, Harold J. Krent presents three overlapping determinants of the president's role under the Constitution-the need for presidential initiative in administering the law and providing foreign policy leadership, the importance of maintaining congressional control over policymaking, and the imperative to ensure that the president be accountable to the public.

Krent's examination is sweeping, ranging from the president's ability to appoint and remove executive branch officials, to the president's role in proposing and implementing treaties and the power to conduct war, to the extent the president can refuse to turn over information in response to congressional and judicial requests. Finally, Krent addresses the history and purposes of presidential pardons.

By drawing on historic and contemporary presidential actions to illustrate his points, Krent reminds us that the president is both an exalted leader with the regalia of power and an American who is and should be accountable to fellow citizens-important considerations as we elect and assess our presidents.

The traditional theory of urban finance argues against local redistribution of wealth on the assumption that such action is likely to chase away the relatively wealthy, leaving only the impoverished behind. Nevertheless, Clayton P. Gillette observes, local governments engage in substantial redistribution, both to the wealthy and to the poor.

In this thoughtful book, Gillette examines whether recent campaigns to enact "living wage" ordinances and other local redistributive programs represent gaps in the traditional theory or political opportunism. He then investigates the role of the courts in distinguishing between these explanations. The author argues that courts have greater capacity to review local programs than is typically assumed. He concludes that when a single interest group dominates the political process, judicial intervention to determine a program's legal validity may be appropriate. But if the political contest involves competing groups, courts should defer to local political judgments.

For all the attention paid to the Founder Fathers in contemporary American debates, it has almost been wholly forgotten how deeply they embraced an ambitious and intellectually profound valuation of foreign legal experience. Jedidiah Kroncke uses the Founders' serious engagement with, and often admiration for, Chinese law in the Revolutionary era to begin his history of how America lost this Founding commitment to legal cosmopolitanism and developed a contemporary legal culture both parochial in its resistance to engaging foreign legal experience and universalist in its messianic desire to export American law abroad. Kroncke reveals how the under-appreciated, but central role of Sino-American relations in this decline over two centuries, significantly reshaped in the early 20th century as American lawyer-missionaries helped inspire the first modern projects of American humanitarian internationalism through legal development. Often forgotten today after the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the Sino-American relationship in the early 20th century was a key crucible for articulating this vision as Americans first imagined waves of Americanization abroad in the wake of China's 1911 Republican revolution. Drawing in historical threads from religious, legal and foreign policy work, the book demonstrates how American comparative law ultimately became a marginalized practice in this process. The marginalization belies its central place in earlier eras of American political and legal reform. In doing so, the book reveals how the cosmopolitan dynamism so prevalent at the Founding is a lost virtue that today comprises a serious challenge to American legal culture and its capacity for legal innovation in the face of an increasingly competitive and multi-polar 21st century. Once again, America's relationship with China presents a critical opportunity to recapture this lost virtue and stimulate the searching cosmopolitanism that helped forge the original foundations of American democracy.

aIt is worth noting that one of the many positive things that this book has to recommend for itself is a very clear writing style that makes complex legal and social science concepts accessible to a wide array of audiences.a
--The Law and Politics Book Review

"It's law-focused and part of an academic series, but its style and subject matter make it relevant to a broad audience."
--"Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"

"A must read for students of bias, racism, discrimination, and privilege. Lu-in Wang employs readable prose and compelling examples to elucidate these complex issues. Her cutting-edge exposition, especially in the context of health care, offers the reader a deeper understanding of the unseen forces that govern daily life."
--Stephanie M. Wildman, professor of law and director, Santa Clara University School of Law Center for Social Justice

"Does a powerful job of explaining why and how discrimination still plays such a strong role in our society. Like all of the best legal scholarship, this insightful book uses an unexpected, fresh conception to explore an age-old, stubborn problem. The result is a new understanding of both our legal structure and the society in which we live. A strong, helpful contribution to the debate on discrimination, its causes, and the damage it does."--David A. Harris, E.N. Balk Professor of Law and Values, University of Toledo College of Law

"(The book is) law-focused and part of an academic series, but its style and subject matter make it relevant to a broad audience."
--"Emporia Gazette"

a It very effectively manages to put the somtimes-abstract principles of social psychology into real world contexts.a
--PsycCRITQUES

Much as we "select" computer settings by default--reflexively, without thinking, and sometimes without realizing there are other options--we often discriminate by default as well. And just as default computer settings tend to become locked in or entrenched as the standard, discrimination by default creates a situation in which disparate outcomes are expected, accepted, and taken for granted. The killing of Amadou Diallo, racial disparities in medical care, the dominance of Whites and men in certain professions, and even the uneven media attention paid to crimes depending on their victims' race and class, all might be cases of discrimination by, or as, default.

Wang contends that, today, most discrimination occurs by default and not design, making legal prohibitions that focus on those who discriminate out of ill will inadequate to redress the largest share of modern discrimination. She draws on social psychology to detail three ways in which unconscious assumptions can lead to discrimination, showing how they play out in a range of everyday settings. Wang then demonstrates how these dynamics interact in medical care to produce an invisible, self-fulfilling, and self-perpetuating prophecy of racial disparity. She goes on to suggest ways in which institutions and individuals might recognize, interrupt, and override the discriminatory default.

In order to be effective, federal ethics law must address sources of systematic corruption rather than simply address motives that individual government employees might have to betray the public trust (such as personal financial holdings or family relationships). Getting the GovernmentAmerica Deserves articulates a general approach to combating systemic corruption as well as some specific proposals for doing so. Federal ethics law is relatively unknown in legal academia and elsewhere outside of Washington, D.C., but it is binding on over one million federal employees. Lobbyists, federal contractors, lawyers and others who interact with the federal government are also deeply interested in federal ethics law and represent a surprisingly large market for a little-studied area of the law.
Getting the Government America Deserves analyzes government ethics law from the perspective of an academic critic and that of a lawyer who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for two and a half years. Richard Painter argues that the existing ethics regime is in need of substantial reform since federal ethics laws fail to curtail conduct that undermines the integrity of government, such as political activity by federal employees and their interaction with lobbyists and interest groups. He also contends that in some other areas, such as personal financial conflicts of interest, there is too much complexity in regulatory and reporting requirements, and rules need to be simplified. Painter's solution includes strengthening the enforcement of ethics rules, reforming the lobbying industry, and changing a system of campaign finance that impedes meaningful government ethics reform.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in South Africa after the collapse of apartheid, was the bold creation of a people committed to the task of rebuilding of a nation and establishing a society founded upon justice, equality and respect for the rule of law. As part of its historic, cathartic mission, the TRC held a special hearing, calling to account the lawyers -- judges, academics and members of the bar -- who had been crucial participants in the apartheid legal order. This book is an account of those hearings, and an attempt to evaluate, in the light of theories of adjudication, the historical role of the judiciary and bar in the apartheid years.

Written by a well-known commentator on the South African legal system who became, by chance, the first witness to give testimony at these hearings, this book reveals, often in the words of those who testified, how the judges failed in their duty to uphold the rule of law. For the most part, the lawyers of apartheid deserted its victims. The few notable exceptions both illustrate the potential for lawyers to have done more and laid the basis for the respect the rule of law still enjoys in South Africa despite apartheid.

Yet, as the author shows, many continue to commit a more serious 'crime'. Failing to confront the past, and in many cases refusing even to attend TRC hearings, the lawyers who could have helped to resist the worst excesses of apartheid remain accomplices to its evil deeds.

This book offers us the spectacle of an entire legal system on trial. The echoes from this process are captured here in a way which will appeal to all readers -- lawyers and non-lawyers alike -- interested in the relationshipbetween law and justice, as it is exposed during a period of transition to democracy.

This book is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of constitutional politics and constitution-making in the Middle East. The historical background and setting are fully explored in two substantial essays by Linda Darling and Said Amir Arjomand, placing the contemporary experience in the contexts, respectively, of the ancient Middle Eastern legal and political tradition and of the nineteenth and twentieth century legal codification and political modernization. These are followed by Ann Mayer's general analysis of the treatment of human rights in relation to Islam in Middle Eastern constitutions, and Nathan Brown's comparative scrutiny of the process of constitution-making in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq with reference to the available constitutional theories which are shown to throw little or no light on it. The remaining essays are country by country case studies of Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq, the case of Iran having been covered by Arjomand as the special point of reference. Mehmet Fevzi Bilgin examines the making and subsequent transformation of the Turkish Constitution of 1982 against current theories of constitutional and deliberative democracy, while Hootan Shambayati examines the institutional mechanism for protecting the ideological foundations of the Turkish Republic, most notably the Turkish Constitutional Court which offers a surprising parallel to the Iranian Council of Guardians. Arjomand's introduction brings together the bumpy experience of the Middle East along the long road to political reconstruction through constitution-making and constitutional reform, drawing some general analytical lessons from it and showing the consequences of the origins of the constitutions of Turkey and Iran in revolutions, and of Afghanistan and Iraq in war and foreign invasion.

The Declaration of Independence stated that all men are created equal, yet the long and continuing struggle for civil rights in the United States seems to indicate otherwise. This reference guide details the most critical civil rights laws in U.S. history, moving from the period of slavery, to the Civil War, to the Reconstruction, to the civil rights era of the mid- to late-20th century. An overview essay introduces each period, and 36 individual laws are examined in essays placing the bills in their historical contexts. Each law is then presented in an edited and, when appropriate, annotated form, so students can read and understand the actual words of the law.

Many of the notable and notorious laws in U.S. legislative history have come in the area of civil rights. Among these are the Fugitive Slave Act, the Missouri Compromise, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. This uncommonly helpful guide to U.S. civil rights legislation also includes timelines, a bibliography, and an index.

The First English-Language Treatise on Consular Law. Warden's was the first English-language treatise on consular law and one of the earliest workson the subject. Both a descriptive and prescriptive work, it outlines the ideal qualities of a consul, his role in diplomatic relations and legal status and a review of consular treaties in force at the time. Highly regarded in its day, it was translated into French, the language of nineteenth-century diplomacy, and circulated widely among diplomatic circles. A scarce work today, our edition is enhanced by Professor Butler's extensive introduction, which examines the historical context of this book and the life of its author. David Bailie Warden 1772-1845], an Irish-born American diplomat, was distinguished for his scientific attainments and varied learning. A member of the French Academy and other prestigious learned societies, he was secretary of the United States Legation to France, agent of prize causes, and for many years the United States consul in Paris. "Consular law, it is widely believed, is among the most venerable of the institutes of the law of nations and an early example, in State practice and doctrinal form, of the comparative investigation and analysis of State practice in the form of treaties, national legislation, and judicial application."--William E. Butler, iv

Reflexive governance offers a theoretical framework for understanding modern patterns of governance in the European Union (EU) institutions and elsewhere. It offers a learning-based approach to governance, but one which can better respond to concerns about the democratic deficit and to the fulfillment of the public interest than the currently dominant neo-institutionalist approaches. The book is composed of one general introduction and eight chapters. Chapter one introduces the concept of reflexive governance and describes the overall framework. The following chapters of the book then summarise the implications of reflexive governance in major areas of domestic, EU and global policy-making. They address in turn: Services of General Interest, Corporate Governance, Institutional Frames for Markets, Regulatory Governance, Fundamental Social Rights, Healthcare Services, Global Public Services and Common Goods. While the themes are diverse, the chapters are unified by their attempt to get to the heart of which concepts of governance are dominant in each field, and what their successes and failures have been: reflexive governance then emerges as one possible response to the failures of other governance models currently being relied upon by policy-makers.

Privacy is a fundamental concern of all individuals in the modern information-driven society, but information security goes beyond digital and data-oriented approaches to include the basic components of what makes us human. Protecting the Genetic Self from Biometric Threats: Autonomy, Identity, and Genetic Privacy considers all aspects of privacy and security relating to an individual's DNA. With a concentration on fundamental human rights as well as specific cases and examples, this essential reference brings pertinent, real-world information to researchers, scientists, and advocates for greater security and privacy in the modern world.

The reform of the European Constitution continues to dominate news headlines and has provoked a massive debate, unprecedented in the history of EU law. Against this backdrop Monica Claes' book offers a "bottom up" view of how the Constitution might work, taking the viewpoint of the national courts as her starting point, and at the same time returning to fundamental principles in order to interrogate the myths of Community law. Adopting a broad, comparative approach, she analyses the basic doctrines of Community law from both national constitutional perspectives as well as the more usual European perspective. It is only by combining the perspectives of the EU and national constitutions, she argues, that a complete picture can be obtained, and a solid theoretical base (constitutional pluralism) developed. Her comparative analysis encompasses the law in France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom and in the course of her inquiry discusses a wide variety of prominent problems. The book is structured around three main themes, coinciding with three periods in the development of the judicial dialogue between the ECJ and the national courts. The first focuses on the ordinary non-constitutional national courts and how they have successfully adapted to the mandates developed by the ECJ in Simmenthal and Francovich. The second examines the constitutional and other review courts and discusses the gradual transformation of the ECJ into a constitutional court, and its relationship to the national constitutional courts. The contrast is marked; these courts are not specifically empowered by the case law of the ECJ and have reacted quite differently to the message from Luxembourg, leaving them apparently on collision course with the ECJ in the areas of judicial Kompetenz Kompetenz and fundamental rights. The third theme reprises the first two and places them in the context of the current debate on the Constitution for Europe and the Convention, taking the perspective of the national courts as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of EU's constitutional fundamentals. In so doing it argues that the new Constitution must accommodate the national perspective if it is to prove effective.

In this comparative study of the contemporary politics of deportation in Germany and the United States, Antje Ellermann analyzes the capacity of the liberal democratic state to control individuals within its borders. The book grapples with the question of why, in the 1990s, Germany responded to vociferous public demands for stricter immigration control by passing and implementing far-reaching policy reforms, while the United States failed to effectively respond to a comparable public mandate. Drawing on extensive field interviews, Ellermann finds that these crossnational differences reflect institutionally determined variations in socially coercive state capacity. By tracing the politics of deportation across the evolution of the policy cycle, beginning with anti-immigrant populist backlash and ending in the expulsion of migrants by deportation bureaucrats, Ellermann is also able to show that the conditions underlying state capacity systematically vary across policy stages. Whereas the ability to make socially coercive law is contingent on strong institutional linkages between the public and legislators, the capacity for implementation depends on the political insulation of bureaucrats.

A Jurisprudence of Power concerns the brutal suppression under martial law of the Jamaica uprising of 1865, and the explosive debate and litigation these events spawned in England. The book explores the centrality of legal ideas and institutions in English politics, and of political ideas that give rise to great questions of English law. It documents how the world's most powerful and articulate political elite struggled with fundamental questions about law, morality, and power. Can a constitutional state rule a sprawling empire without breaking faith with the rule of law? Can it contend with the violent resistance of subjugated peoples without corrupting the integrity of its legal and political ideals? The book addresses these questions as it reconstructs the most prolonged and important conflict over martial law and the rule of law in the history of England in the nineteenth century.

This two-volume set is a collection of articles that elucidate the theory, practice, legal innovations, and codification experience of the Law of Personality Rights in China. The Law of Personality Rights was enacted in China in May 2020, the first time that a Law has been legislated as an independent part of the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China and an unprecedented step in protecting the personality rights of citizens. The first volume examines the legal and theoretical basis for the Law as a standalone part of the Civil Code as well as practical issues including institutional arrangements, the relationship between human rights and personality rights and the relationship with laws on tort liability, as well as those pertaining to marriage and the family. The second volume explains the design and innovations of the Law and proposes suggestions to refine it through evaluation of the attributes of personality rights and the draft laws. The volumes will be an essential reference for scholars and students studying civil law, continental law, Chinese law, and the legal protection of personality rights.

The rule of law paradigm has long operated on the premise that independent judges disregard extralegal influences and impartially uphold the law. A political transformation several generations in the making, however, has imperiled this premise. Social science learning, the lessons of which have been widely internalized by court critics and the general public, has shown that judicial decision-making is subject to ideological and other extralegal influences. In recent decades, challenges to the assumptions underlying the rule of law paradigm have proliferated across a growing array of venues, as critics agitate for greater political control of judges and courts. With the future of the rule of law paradigm in jeopardy, this book proposes a new way of looking at how the role of the American judiciary should be conceptualized and regulated. This new, "legal culture paradigm" defends the need for an independent judiciary that is acculturated to take law seriously but is subject to political and other extralegal influences. The book argues that these extralegal influences cannot be eliminated but can be managed, by balancing the needs for judicial independence and accountability across competing perspectives, to the end of enabling judges to follow the "law" (less rigidly conceived), respect established legal process, and administer justice.

This volume, an updated collection of essays presented by leading scholars at a Hofstra University conference on group defamation, provides a cross-disciplinary examination of hate speech. Beginning with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, the volume analyzes the problem from historical, anthropological, comparative-legal, and American constitutional law perspectives. Among the topics examined are the role of hate speech in the persecutions of Jews and Asians during World War II, in the subordination of Blacks, Native Americans, and women, and the pros and cons of the legal controls on hate speech adopted in such countries as Australia, Canada, and Israel. The section on American constitutional law features several proposed statutes outlawing hate speech, along with model court opinions supporting and attacking their constitutionality. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of intergroup relations and constitutional law as well as policy makers.