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Banking on the Body: The Market In Blood, Milk, And Sperm In Modern America
by Kara W. SwansonEach year Americans supply blood, sperm, and breast milk to "banks" that store these products for use by strangers in medical procedures. Who gives, who receives, who profits? Kara Swanson traces body banks from the first experiments that discovered therapeutic uses for body products to current websites that facilitate a thriving global exchange.
The Force of Law
by Frederick SchauerMany legal theorists maintain that laws are effective because we internalize them, obeying even when not compelled to do so. In a comprehensive reassessment of the role of force in law, Frederick Schauer disagrees, demonstrating that coercion, more than internalized thinking and behaving, distinguishes law from society’s other rules.
The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise
by Laura WeinribLaura Weinrib shows how a coalition of lawyers and activists made judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights a defining feature of American democracy. Protection of civil liberties was a calculated bargain between liberals and conservatives to save the courts from New Deal attack and secure free speech for both labor radicals and businesses.
Torpedo: Inventing The Military-industrial Complex In The United States And Great Britain
by Katherine C. EpsteinWhen President Eisenhower referred to the "military-industrial complex" in his 1961 Farewell Address, he summed up in a phrase the merger of government and industry that dominated the Cold War United States. In this bold reappraisal, Katherine Epstein uncovers the origins of the military-industrial complex in the decades preceding World War I, as the United States and Great Britain struggled to perfect a crucial new weapon: the self-propelled torpedo. Torpedoes threatened to upend the delicate balance among the world's naval powers, they were bought and sold in a global marketplace, and they were cutting-edge industrial technologies. But building them required substantial capital investments and close collaboration among scientists, engineers, businessmen, and naval officers. To address these formidable challenges, the U.S. and British navies created a new procurement paradigm: instead of buying finished armaments from the private sector or developing them from scratch at public expense, they began to invest in private-sector research and development. The inventions emerging from torpedo R&D sparked legal battles over intellectual property rights that reshaped national security law. Torpedo blends military, legal, and business history with the history of science and technology to recast our understanding of defense contracting and the demands of modern warfare.
Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice
by Barak KushnerThe Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. Focusing on the trials of Japanese war criminals, Barak Kushner analyzes the political maneuvering and propagandizing in both China and Japan that would roil East Asian relations throughout the Cold War, with repercussions still felt today.
Virtues of Thought: Essays On Plato And Aristotle
by Aryeh KosmanExploring what two foundational figures, Plato and Aristotle, have to say about the nature of human awareness and understanding, Aryeh Kosman concludes that ultimately the virtues of thought are to be found in the joys and satisfactions that come from thinking philosophically, whether we engage in it ourselves or witness others' participation.
Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers And The One Percent
by Brooke HarringtonHow do the one percent keep getting richer despite financial crises and the myriad of taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance? Brooke Harrington interviewed professionals who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world’s richest people: wealth managers. To gain access to their tactics and mentality, she trained to become one of them.
On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century
by Daniel R. CoquilletteHarvard Law School pioneered educational ideas, including professional legal education within a university, Socratic questioning and case analysis, and the admission and training of students based on academic merit. On the Battlefield of Merit offers a candid account of a unique legal institution during its first century of influence.
The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon
by David WebberWhen Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies. In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism has been used to divest from anti-labor companies, gun makers, and tobacco; diversify corporate boards; support Occupy Wall Street; force global warming onto the corporate agenda; create jobs; and challenge outlandish CEO pay. Webber argues that workers have found in labor’s capital a potent strategy against their exploiters. He explains the tactic’s surmountable difficulties even as he cautions that corporate interests are already working to deny labor’s access to this powerful and underused tool. The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder is a rare good-news story for American workers, an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Combining legal rigor with inspiring narratives of labor victory, Webber shows how workers can wield their own capital to reclaim their strength.
Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange
by Barak D. RichmanHow does Manhattan’s 47th Street diamond district thrive as an ethnic marketplace without lawyers, courts, and state coercion? Barak Richman draws on insider interviews to show why relational exchange based on familiarity, trust, and community enforcement succeeds and what it reveals about the modern state’s limitations in governing the economy.
To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Tommie ShelbyMartin Luther King, Jr., may be America’s most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King’s writings and political thought remains underappreciated. In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write that the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative—an effort not at radical reform but at “living up to” enduring ideals laid down by the nation’s founders. On this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King’s writings allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of “color blindness” that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome. Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King’s exciting and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.
The Ethics of Cryonics: Is it Immoral to be Immortal?
by Francesca MinervaCryonics—also known as cryopreservation or cryosuspension—is the preservation of legally dead individuals at ultra-low temperatures. Those who undergo this procedure hope that future technology will not only succeed in reviving them, but also cure them of the condition that led to their demise. In this sense, some hope that cryopreservation will allow people to continue living indefinitely. This book discusses the moral concerns of cryonics, both as a medical procedure and as an intermediate step toward life extension. In particular, Minerva analyses the moral issues surrounding cryonics-related techniques (including the hypothetical cryosuspension of fetuses as an alternative to abortion) by focusing on how they might impact the individuals who undergo cryosuspension, as well as society at large.
The Ethics of Cryonics: Is it Immoral to be Immortal?
by Francesca MinervaCryonics—also known as cryopreservation or cryosuspension—is the preservation of legally dead individuals at ultra-low temperatures. Those who undergo this procedure hope that future technology will not only succeed in reviving them, but also cure them of the condition that led to their demise. In this sense, some hope that cryopreservation will allow people to continue living indefinitely. This book discusses the moral concerns of cryonics, both as a medical procedure and as an intermediate step toward life extension. In particular, Minerva analyses the moral issues surrounding cryonics-related techniques (including the hypothetical cryosuspension of fetuses as an alternative to abortion) by focusing on how they might impact the individuals who undergo cryosuspension, as well as society at large.
Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped The Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sexual Abuse
by Timothy D. LyttonThe prevalence of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and its shocking cover-up by church officials have obscured the largely untold story of the tort system's remarkable success in bringing the scandal to light. The lessons of clergy sexual abuse litigation give us reason to reconsider the case for tort reform and to look more closely at how tort litigation can enhance the performance of public and private policymaking institutions.
Long Wars and the Constitution
by Stephen M. GriffinExtension of presidential leadership in foreign affairs to war powers has destabilized our constitutional order and deranged our foreign policy. Stephen M. Griffin shows unexpected connections between the imperial presidency and constitutional crises, and argues for accountability by restoring Congress to a meaningful role in decisions for war.
Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era
by David M. DorsenHenry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.
Laws of Creation: Property Rights In The World Of Ideas
by Ronald A. Cass Keith N HyltonCass and Hylton explain how technological advances strengthen the case for intellectual property laws, and argue convincingly that IP laws help create a wealthier, more successful, more innovative society than alternative legal systems. Ignoring the social value of IP rights and making what others create “free” would be a costly mistake indeed.
The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View
by Tim CraneCurrent debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but they make no impact on believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. Noting that religion is not what atheists think it is, Tim Crane offers a way out of this stalemate.
After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene
by Jedediah PurdyNature no longer exists apart from humanity. The world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists call this epoch the Anthropocene, Age of Humans. The facts of the Anthropocene are scientific—emissions, pollens, extinctions—but its shape and meaning are questions for politics. Jedediah Purdy develops a politics for this post-natural world.
Natural Law in Court: A History Of Legal Theory In Practice
by R. H. HelmholzNatural-law theory grounds human laws in universal truths of God’s creation. The task of the judicial system was to build an edifice of positive law on natural law’s foundations. R. H. Helmholz shows how lawyers and judges made and interpreted natural law arguments in the West, and concludes that historically it has advanced the cause of justice.
One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality
by Jeremy WaldronAn enduring theme of Western philosophy is that we are all one another’s equals. Yet the principle of basic equality is woefully under-explored in modern moral and political philosophy. What does it mean to say we are all one another’s equals? Jeremy Waldron confronts this question fully and unflinchingly in a major new multifaceted account.
Seven Modes of Uncertainty
by C. Namwali SerpellLiterature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.
Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas
by Tamar HerzogTamar Herzog asks how territorial borders were established in the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are settled by military conflicts and treaties. Claims and control on both sides of the Atlantic were subject to negotiation, as neighbors and outsiders carved out and defended new frontiers of possession.
Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
by Samuel MoynThe age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring wealth, resolved to fulfill their citizens’ most basic needs without forgetting to contain how much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse of empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scale. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead. Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.
Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic
by Jon D. MichaelsAmericans hate bureaucracy—though they love the services it provides—and demand that government run like a business. Hence today’s privatization revolution. Jon Michaels shows how the fusion of politics and profits commercializes government and consolidates state power in ways the Constitution’s framers endeavored to disaggregate.