Post Types
Book Review
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Certain Change: How the Roberts Court is revising constitutional law
November 24, 2014
Laurence Tribe discusses some of the implications of the decisions of nine men and women with regard to gay marriage, gun rights, N.S.A. surveillance, health care, emerging threats to privacy, immigration and more.
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Recent Faculty Books – Summer 2014
May 15, 2014
In two new books, Professor Cass Sunstein, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, addresses human behavior and how government should best respond to it.
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Recent Faculty Books – Winter 2014
January 1, 2014
“The New Black: What Has Changed—and What Has Not—with Race in America,” edited by Professor Kenneth W. Mack ’91 and Guy-Uriel Charles (New Press). The volume presents essays that consider questions that look beyond the main focus of the civil rights era: to lessen inequality between black people and white people. The contributors, including HLS Professor Lani Guinier, write on topics ranging from group identity to anti-discrimination law to implicit racial biases, revealing often overlooked issues of race and justice in a supposed post-racial society.
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Salving the Wounds
January 1, 2014
Randall Kennedy has tackled plenty of controversial issues in his five previous books, ranging from interracial marriage to the intersection of race, crime and the law. The Harvard Law professor comes to the defense of affirmative action in his latest book, “For Discrimination.” In an interview with the Bulletin, Kennedy described his own evolution on the issue and the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which was announced after his book went to print.
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Fixing Price Fixing
January 1, 2014
Louis Kaplow ’81 seeks to upend the academic debate and to suggest important reforms to legal practice in his latest book, which addresses the law and economics of price fixing. The Harvard Law School professor describes the law prohibiting this practice as “incoherent, its practical reach uncertain, and its fit with fundamental economic principles obscure.” And that’s just in the first paragraph.
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The Long Game
January 1, 2014
However much presidents want to influence the future through their judicial appointments, the problem, Professor Mark Tushnet writes in his new book, “In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court” (Norton, 2013), “is that things change.”
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Strange New Rules of a Cool War
July 1, 2013
After the global meltdown of 2008, while the United States was distracted by economic recovery and disengaging its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, a new war quietly began. Many Americans have yet to realize the world-changing implications of the conflict between the United States and China that is the focus of Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman’s new book, “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition” (Random House).
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Recent Faculty Books – Summer 2013
July 1, 2013
“Designing Systems and Processes for Managing Disputes” (Wolters Kluwer, 2013), co-written by Clinical Professor Robert C. Bordone ’97, Professor Emeritus Frank E.A. Sander ’52, Nancy H. Rogers, and Craig A. McEwen, is the first course book of its kind offering a multidisciplinary and skill-based guide to designing and implementing alternative dispute resolution systems.
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An Enduring Conversation
December 6, 2012
HLS Professor Bill Stuntz completed “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” just a few month before his death from cancer at age 52. The book has been hailed as a masterwork and Stuntz called the leading thinker on criminal justice. His longtime friend HLS Professor Carol Steiker helped to shepherd the completed manuscript through its final stages of production. “It felt like a continued conversation with Bill.” says Steiker.
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An Advocate Before the Bench
December 6, 2012
Nancy Gertner's two decades as a defense attorney in Boston as a self-described “revolutionary” and “radical lawyer” redoubled her belief in the inherent unfairness of many aspects of the criminal justice system, including its disparate impact on racial minorities. As she relates in her new book, it also laid the groundwork for her federal judgeship.
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A Milestone But …
December 6, 2012
On the night Barack Obama ’91 was elected president of the United States, many people cried tears of joy. For many black people the tears held a special significance: They couldn’t believe they had lived to see this milestone. Yet their happiness also signified something sad about the moment, about the history of the country and about the problem of race in America that did not end with the election of the nation’s first black president, says Randall Kennedy.
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Fear and Loathing
December 6, 2012
At a time when Americans are expressing record dissatisfaction with Washington, the publication this fall of Professor Lawrence Lessig’s latest book couldn’t be more opportune. “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It” (Twelve) is an exhaustively researched and passionately argued indictment of Capitol Hill and the money-centered daily dance between lawmakers and lobbyists.
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The Courts and Public Opinion
October 1, 2012
Michael Klarman’s scholarship has focused on the effect that court rulings have on social reform movements. He argues that when courts get ahead of public opinion, political backlash often follows. That’s what he found in an earlier book he wrote on race and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a phenomenon he has also observed in cases involving the death penalty and abortion.mIn his new book, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage” (Oxford), the HLS professor explores whether the same effect has taken place when it comes to same-sex marriage litigation.
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Recent Faculty Books – Fall 2012
October 1, 2012
Professor Einer Elhauge ’86 is author of the e-book “Obamacare On Trial” (Edward Elgar), focused on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act case decided by the Supreme Court in June. Elhauge raises points that were not aired in the courtroom, including the fact that the constitutional framers themselves had approved mandates to buy health insurance.
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A Theory of Connectivity
October 1, 2012
The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”
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Recent Faculty Books – Summer 2012
July 1, 2012
“After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory” (Duke), edited by Professor Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Contributors to the development of queer studies offer personal reflections on the potential and limitations of the field, asking to what extent it is defined by a focus on sex and sexuality.
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Elected vs. Appointed?
July 1, 2012
Today, about 90 percent of state judges must run for office, and the elections have become increasingly expensive and nasty. Assistant Professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman provides historical perspective on judicial elections and other methods of judicial selection in his new book, “The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America” (Harvard, 2012).
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‘A Harmonious System of Mutual Frustration’
July 1, 2012
As Barack Obama ’91 was making criticism of Bush administration policies on terrorism a centerpiece of his campaign for the presidency in 2008, Jack Goldsmith offered a prediction: The next president, even if it were Obama, would not undo those policies. One of the key and underappreciated reasons, he wrote in a spring 2008 magazine article, was that “many controversial Bush administration policies have already been revised to satisfy congressional and judicial critics.”
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The Balancing Act
May 10, 2012
In 1932, in a Philadelphia courtroom, a defense attorney representing a man accused of murder cross-examined a police officer. There was nothing unusual about this scene, except that the defense attorney, Raymond Pace Alexander ’23, was black, and the officer he was aggressively questioning was white. This scene is one of many dramatic moments in the new book by HLS Professor Kenneth Mack ’91, “Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer.”
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Recent Faculty Books – Winter 2011
December 6, 2011
“Prospects for the Professions in China” (Routledge, 2010) edited by William P. Alford ’77, William Kirby and Kenneth Winston. Through its meditations on Chinese professional…
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A Life’s Project and a Project’s Life
December 6, 2011
Dean Martha Minow answers seven questions about her new book, “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark” (Oxford University Press, 2010).