Socio-legal researchers increasingly recognise the need to employ a wide variety of methods in studying law and legal phenomena, and the need to be informed by an understanding of debates about theory and method in mainstream social science. The papers in this volume illustrate how a range of topics, including EU law, ombudsmen, judges, lawyers, Shariah Councils and the quality assurance industry can be researched from a socio-legal perspective. The objective of the collection is to show how different methods can be used in researching law and legal phenomena, how methodological issues and debates in sociology are relevant to the study of law, and the importance of the debate between "structural" and "action" traditions in researching law. It also approaches the methodological problem of how sociology of law can address the content of legal practice from a variety of perspectives and discusses the relationship between pure and applied research. The editors provide a critical introduction to each of the six sections, and a general introduction on law, sociology and method. The collection will provide an invaluable resource for socio-legal researchers, law school researchers and postgraduates.

A History of Child Protection in America is the first comprehensive history of American efforts to protect children from abuse and neglect. The book begins in colonial times and chronicles child protection into the twenty-first century. Among the important nineteenth century events detailed in these pages are the rise of orphanages for "dependent" children, the "orphan trains" operated by the New York Children's Aid Society, the birth of the juvenile court, the reforms of the Children's Progressive Era, and the dramatic rescue of Mary Ellen Wilson, which led to the creation of the world's first organization devoted entirely to child protection, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Twentieth century milestones include the gradual transition from private child protection societies to government operated child protection, the obscurity of child abuse from the 1920's to the 1960's, the "discovery" of child abuse in 1962, and the creation of the child protection system we know today.

This anthology features accessible, enjoyable, thought-provoking essays on timely legal issues by prominent journalists and scholars. Selected from well-known magazines like Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Business Review, The New Yorker, Slate, and Vanity Fair, each essay explores an important question currently being debated in our counts. Should government intervene in the business of a free market? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? Should religious icons be displayed in government buildings? Is a college student who mixes music on his laptop a thief? Any reader who would like to gain insight into the workings of the legal system while taking pleasure in excellent writing will enjoy this valuable collection. Including: Vikram Amar on What's Wrong with the Modern Jury Alex Beam on Big Tobacco and Greed Richard Thompson Ford on Gay Marriage Christopher Hitchens on Appalling Misdemeanors Ken I. Kersch on Multilateralism in the Courts Bryan Lonegan on Heartbreaking Deportations Nina Martin on Exoneration Hilary Rosen and Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Rod Smola on The Ten Commandments Eliot Spitzer on Business and Government Jeffrey Toobin on Gerrymandering

First published in hardback in April 2003, this is the first book that directly addresses the cultural history of the legal profession. An international team of scholars canvasses wide-ranging issues concerning the culture of the legal profession and the wider cultural significance of lawyers, including consideration of the relation to cultural processes of state formation and colonisation. The essays describe and analyse significant aspects of the cultural history of the legal profession in England, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Finland. The book seeks to understand the complex ways in which lawyers were imaginatively and institutionally constructed, and their larger cultural significance. It illustrates both the diversity and the potential of a cultural approach to lawyers in history. 'Wesley Pue and David Sugarman have produced a fascinating volume of essays written from various perspectives under the rubric of cultural histories. I...want to present a sense of the richness of the essays in this volume. Lawyers and Vampires is a very provocative volume, and it will appeal to many political scientists who are using multiple methods and multidisciplinary approaches in their own work.' Laura J. Hatcher, The Law and Politics Book Review, November 2003

"Diversity" has become a mantra within discussions of university admissions policies and many other arenas of American society. In the essays collected here, Sanford Levinson, a leading scholar of constitutional law and American government, wrestles with various notions of diversity. He begins by explaining why he finds the concept to be almost useless as a genuine guide to public policy. Discussing affirmative action in university admissions, including the now famous University of Michigan Law School case, he argues both that there may be good reasons to use preferences-including race and ethnicity-and that these reasons have relatively little to do with any cogently developed theory of diversity. Distinguished by Levinson's characteristic open-mindedness and willingness to tease out the full implications of various claims, each of these nine essays, written over the past decade, develops a case study focusing on a particular aspect of public life in a richly diverse, and sometimes bitterly divided, society.Although most discussions of diversity have focused on race and ethnicity, Levinson is particularly interested in religious diversity and its implications. Why, he asks, do arguments for racial and ethnic diversity not also counsel a concern to achieve religious diversity within a student body? He considers the propriety of judges drawing on their religious views in making legal decisions and the kinds of questions Senators should feel free to ask nominees to the federal judiciary who have proclaimed the importance of their religion in structuring their own lives. In exploring the sense in which Sandy Koufax can be said to be a "Jewish baseball player," he engages in broad reflections on professional identity. He asks whether it is desirable, or even possible, to subordinate merely "personal" aspects of one's identity-religion, political viewpoints, gender-to the impersonal demands of the professional role. Wrestling with Diversity is a powerful interrogation of the assumptions and contradictions underlying public life in a multicultural world.

Effective Writing: A Handbook with Stories for Lawyers offers specific advice on how to write effectively the many kinds of writing lawyers do in actual practice.. It considers what makes writing effective in letters of various kinds, forms, bills, the many kinds of writing done through the trial, writing for an appeal, contracts, and writing for wills and trusts. The last chapter addresses how to rewrite to promote more effective thinking and how to rewrite for the reader, going beyond the usual considerations of correct or "plain" style to address what constitutes effective word choice, sentence structure, organization, citation and quotation in real contexts. The book is seasoned with "sidebars"-brief stories about legal writing from many judges, lawyers, and other writers-- that help to bring the world of legal writing alive. This book is the product of a collaboration between a distinguished lawyer, a professor of English (Rhetoric and Writing).

IIn 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system’s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America’s child-welfare system.

The Lost Children of Wilder gives us the galvanizing history of this landmark case and the personal story at its core. Nina Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, but she also traces the life of Shirley Wilder and her son, Lamont, born when Shirley was only fourteen and relinquished to the very system being challenged in her name. Bernstein’s account of Shirley and Lamont’s struggles captures the heartbreaking consequences of the child welfare system’s best intentions and deepest flaws. In the tradition of There Are No Children Here, this is a major achievement of investigative journalism and a tour de force of social observation, a gripping book that will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.

This new edition of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s classic book offers a lively and accessible history of the Supreme Court. His engaging writing illuminates both the high and low points in the Court's history, from Chief Justice Marshall’s dominance of the Court during the early nineteenth century through the landmark decisions of the Warren Court. Citing cases such as the Dred Scott decision and Roosevelt's Court-packing plan, Rehnquist makes clear that the Court does not operate in a vacuum, that the justices are unavoidably influenced by their surroundings, and that their decisions have real and lasting impacts on our society.

The public often hears little about the Supreme Court until decisions are handed down. Here, Rehnquist reveals its inner workings--the process by which cases are chosen, the nature of the conferences where decisions are made, and the type of debates that take place. With grace and wit, this incisive history gives a dynamic and informative account of the most powerful court in the nation and how it has shaped the direction America has taken.

After more than a decade of renewal of South African administrative law in its constitutional and statutory form, the time has come to ensure implementation of the ideals enshrined in the legislation through the public administration. The papers contained in this title focus on the issue and represent the views of some of the key participants in that reform process. They provide an overview of the context in which this reform has taken place, as well as of the interaction between common law, statutory law and the constitution in this field. In addition, various perspectives on administrative justice are expounded, and implementation and training strategies are examined.

Every day the economic importance of national boundaries diminishes. The globalisation of world markets is proceeding with ever-increasing speed, stimulated by developments like the introduction of the single European currency, and even the smallest transactions frequently now include a cross-border element. Business executives and their advisers participating in a transaction need a clear and concise framework of understanding, which will enable them to identify the critical issues likely to affect the course of the deal and to formulate the questions on which detailed advice will be needed. This text provides a one-stop guide to the practical issues involved for this jurisdiction. The following key topics are addressed: cultural aspects; regulatory framework; common financing methods; antitrust/competition aspects; taxation aspects; employment considerations; procedural formalities; accounting treatment of acquisitions and mergers; future developments. Professional advisers involved in merger and acquisition activity in Switzerland, including bankers, independent lawyers or in-house counsel, tax consultants, accountants, public relations advisers, and actuaries, will find this book a useful and reliable source of practical reference and information. This volume originally appeared as a country report in the loose-leaf work "Corporate Acquisitions and Mergers" edited by Peter Begg.

This study on cross cultural perspectives in child advocacy deals with various topics, including support for children's issues, the factors that influence reporting of suspected child abuse and child advocacy's application to education professionals. The study looks at issues from around the world.

LexisNexis CaseMap is a computer program that makes analyzing cases easier and allows lawyers to do a better job for their clients in less time. Daniel Siegel's practical guide is filled with numerous tips designed to help you get the most from LexisNexis CaseMap. He includes step-by-step instructions and illustrations. Designed for beginners as well as longtime users.

"I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were." For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government's practice of jailing children and families for months, or even years, until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown University's asylum law clinic, takes readers through thirty years of conflict over which refugee advocates resisted the detention of migrant children. The saga began during the Reagan administration when 15-year-old Jenny Lisette Flores languished in a Los Angeles motel that the government had turned into a makeshift jail by draining the swimming pool, barring the windows, and surrounding the building with barbed wire. What became known as the Flores Settlement Agreement was still at issue years later, when the Trump administration resorted to the forced separation of families after the courts would not allow long-term jailing of the children. Schrag provides recommendations for the reform of a system that has brought anguish and trauma to thousands of parents and children. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the ongoing struggle between the U.S. government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who seek safety in America.

The United States introduced the earned income tax credit (EITC) in 1975, where it remains the most significant earnings-based refundable credit in the Internal Revenue Code. While the United States was the first country to use its domestic revenue system to deliver and administer social welfare benefits to lower-income individuals or families, a number of other countries, including New Zealand and Canada, have experimented with or incorporated similar credits into their tax systems. In this work, Michelle Lyon Drumbl, drawing on her extensive advocacy experience representing low-income taxpayers in EITC audits, analyzes the effectiveness of the EITC in the United States and offers suggestions for how it can be improved. This timely book should be read by anyone interested in how the EITC can be reimagined to better serve the working poor and, more generally, whether the tax system can promote social justice.

The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the litigation following the Bhopal disaster provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground.
Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the gas victims' stories, Fortun's innovative narrative sheds light on the complex intertwined way advocacy works within a global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."

Winner of The Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, Simon Fraser University Originally approved as a master of laws thesis by a respected Canadian university, this book tackles one of the most compelling issues of our time--the crime of genocide--and whether in fact it can be said to have occurred in relation to the many Original Nations on Great Turtle Island now claimed by a state called Canada. It has been hailed as groundbreaking by many Indigenous and other scholars engaged with this issue, impacting not just Canada but states worldwide where entrapped Indigenous nations face absorption by a dominating colonial state.Starblanket unpacks Canada's role in the removal of cultural genocide from the Genocide Convention, though the disappearance of an Original Nation by forced assimilation was regarded by many states as equally genocidal as destruction by slaughter. Did Canada seek to tailor the definition of genocide to escape its own crimes which were then even ongoing? The crime of genocide, to be held as such under current international law, must address the complicated issue of mens rea (not just the commission of a crime, but the specific intent to do so). This book permits readers to make a judgment on whether or not this was the case.Starblanket examines how genocide was operationalized in Canada, focused primarily on breaking the intergenerational transmission of culture from parents to children. Seeking to absorb the new generations into a different cultural identity--English-speaking, Christian, Anglo-Saxon, termed Canadian--Canada seized children from their parents, and oversaw and enforced the stripping of their cultural beliefs, languages and traditions, replacing them by those still in process of being established by the emerging Canadian state. She outlines the array and extent of the destruction which inevitably took place as part of the effort to bring about such a wrenching change--forcible indoctrination by means of massive and widespread death by disease and dilapidated living conditions, torture, forced starvation, labor, and sexual predation--collateral damage to Canada's effort to absorb diverse original nations into one larger, alien and dominating body politic. The cumulative effects of genocide continue to be exhibited by the survivors and their descendants who suffer from the trauma and dysfunction, primarily in healthy proper parenting, which results in ongoing forcible removals via the child welfare systems to this day.

Large-scale change in the legal profession is happening now. The effects of COVID-19 have accelerated the pace of change and will continue to do so, meaning lawyers must contend with new technologies, new competition and new ways of working. All of us have a vital part to play in a profession where the focus is on people and tech, not people or tech. This book is your go-to companion for the change that lies ahead. Legal Practice in the Digital Age contains the hard-won insights lawyers and firms need to survive and thrive in the complex, post-pandemic age. It demonstrates how firms can embrace technological change, from taking a people-centric approach, to technology and innovation, to entrenching forward-thinking new mindsets into your firm's DNA. This guide is filled with insightful case studies and practical tips to give your firm the edge it needs and make the changes necessary for future success. It covers a variety of subjects highly relevant to the future of legal practice, including: How lawyers can be better at what they do day-to-day through the use of smart legal tech; The new infrastructure, software and resources required for a hybrid world; The growing importance of data and how to mine it; and How to attract and retain talent in the increasingly dynamic legal industry. Amid exclamations of the profession's demise, this unique book shows why there is an exciting future ahead for the legal profession, and why lawyers and firms need to act now to get ahead of the pack. It is written for senior lawyers and decision makers within law firms and legal businesses, and in-house lawyers will also find the content useful. For lawyers and firms hoping to thrive in the digital age, this title is essential reading.

In this book a group of lawyers and legal historians has tried to identify the new Nordic legal map which is under construction. This volume is a collection of papers addressing legal staging, and most of the articles combine theoretical approaches to the visuality of law with practical experiences and effects. The texts show that law is so much more than law in action and law in books; law is also part of a visual culture. It contributes to that culture and is, in turn, analysed, maintained and criticised by that culture. At the same time, the cultural manifestations of law change the way we understand law and, thus, changes law itself.

Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, "Urban Lawyers" presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every aspect of the work and careers of urban lawyers-their relationships with clients, job tenure and satisfaction, income, social and political values, networks of professional connections, and patterns of participation in the broader community. Yet despite the dramatic changes, much remains the same. Stratification of income and power based on gender, race, and religious background, for instance, still maintains inequality within the bar.
The authors of "Urban Lawyers" conclude that organizational priorities will likely determine the future direction of the legal profession. And with this landmark study as their guide, readers will be able to make their own informed predictions.

The removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families gained national attention in Australia following the Bringing Them Home Report in 1997. However, the voices of Indigenous parents were largely missing from the Report. The Inquiry attributed their lack of testimony to the impact of trauma and the silencing impact of parents' overwhelming sense of guilt and despair; a submission by Link-Up NSW commented on Aboriginal mothers being "unwilling and unable to speak about the immense pain, grief and anguish that losing their children had caused them." This book explores what happened to Aboriginal mothers who had children removed and why they have overwhelmingly remained silent about their experiences. Identifying the structural barriers to Aboriginal mothering in the Stolen Generations era, the author examines how contemporary laws, policies and practices increased the likelihood of Aboriginal child removal and argues that negative perceptions of Aboriginal mothering underpinned removal processes, with tragic consequences. This book makes an important contribution to understanding the history of the Stolen Generations and highlights the importance of designing inclusive truth-telling processes that enable a diversity of perspectives to be shared.

One of the major challenges facing the legal profession today is how to adapt and apply the concept of attorney-client privilege (or professional secrecy) in an increasingly globalised world. Rules on attorney-client privilege differ significantly from country to country. This book explores such differences within 32 jurisdictions in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Together with its complementary volume Professional Secrecy of Lawyers in Europe (Cambridge, 2013), this book explores the creation of a common definition for attorney-client privilege which can be accepted by a wide variety of countries and international institutions. Practice and interpretation within each jurisdiction is mapped and explored, including reference to local laws, ethical rules and case law. This book is a useful resource for those working on transactions or litigations which involve several countries.