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The Law Book: From Hammurabi to the International Criminal Court, 250 Milestones in the History of Law (Sterling Milestones)
Michael H. Roffer
The Law Book explores 250 of the most significant legal issues, cases, trials, and events that have profoundly changed our world. Although the heaviest emphasis is on American law it also touches on more than a dozen countries and the European Union, laws relating to Antarctica and Outer Space, and principles of international law. Among the topics it explores are the earliest legal codes, the role of juries, slavery and emancipation, civil rights, Native Americans, copyright, the press and free speech, immigration, censorship and obscenity, the environment, war and international relations, war crimes and trials, the insanity defense, taxation, prohibition, voting rights, women’s rights, labor unions and workers’ rights, Social Security, workers’ compensation laws, the securities laws, the origins of Legal Aid, surrogacy, the right of privacy, cameras in the courts, food and drug regulation, antitrust law, South Africa’s Constitution, assisted suicide, gun control, the death penalty, civil commitment, juvenile sentencing, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage, tort law, the Affordable Care Act, and many others.
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Drafting New York Wills and Related Documents 4th ed.
William P. LaPiana, Mark Ira Bloom, and Harold D. Klipstein
A complete drafting system for New York wills, trusts, and advance directives. This 4th edition includes not only wills, but also revocable trusts, powers of attorney for property, directives on disposition of remains, health care proxies, living wills and directives against resuscitation (DNRs). Relevant tax considerations are included throughout the text.
Wills are still the primary subject of the work as the the first 17 chapters are devoted to the planning and drafting of wills. The non-wills area of practice is handled in Chapters 18-21.
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Jumpstart Constitutional Law: Reading and Understanding Constitutional Law Cases
Jethro K. Lieberman
Jumpstart Constitutional Law: Reading and Understanding Constitutional Law Cases, sheds light on the threshold issues and substantive questions common to all constitutional law cases thus bringing everything into focus for the student. Key to constructing cogent answers on a Constitutional Law exam, Jethro K. Lieberman's straightforward approach teaches students how to spot the issues and respond to the relevant questions in any constitutional law case.
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The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice among the Worst of the Worst
Robert I. Blecker
For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor at New York Law School, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder.The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, Professor Blecker exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives.
The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.
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Liberalism Undressed
Jethro K. Lieberman
In Liberalism Undressed, Jethro K. Lieberman returns to liberalism's roots to explain, in accessible and readable prose, why liberalism retains its power and appeal. He begins with the memorable thesis of John Stuart Mill, who drew from earlier liberal writers, which states "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Building on Mill's well-known, but rarely analyzed, Harm Principle, Liberalism Undressed undertakes to show that this widely-accepted precept-"it's a free country; I should be able to do what I want as long as I don't hurt anybody"-can justify a government robust enough to deal with pressing modern problems of human harm and suffering while restrained enough to provide people freedom to live life on their own terms. A powerful reinterpretation of liberalism's foundations, it forces us to rethink our understanding of the meaning of harm and the proper role of government in our individual and communal lives.
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Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements
Richard K. Sherwin
Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice and theory of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning making. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also shares broader cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. When fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law’s claim to power. Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers a jurisprudential paradigm that is equal to the challenge that current cultural conditions present.
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Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry
Edward A. Purcell Jr.
In this historical examination of American federalism, Edward A. Purcell Jr. refutes the widely accepted notion that the founding fathers carefully crafted a constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government. His argument is based on close analysis of the Constitution’s original structure and the ways that structure both induced and accommodated changes over the centuries.
There was no clear agreement among the founding fathers regarding the “true” nature of American federalism, Purcell contends, nor was there a consensus on “correct” lines dividing state and national authority. Furthermore, even had there been some true “original” understanding, the elastic and dynamic nature of the constitutional structure would have made it impossible for subsequent generations to maintain any “original” or permanent balance. Purcell traces the evolution of federalism through the centuries, focusing particularly on shifting interpretations founded on political interests. He concludes with insights into current issues of federal power and a discussion of the grounds on which legitimate decisions about federal and state power should rest.
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Transitional Justice
Ruiti G. Teitel
Ruti Teitel explores the ways in which a society should respond to evil rule. This is an insightful analysis of one of the most fundamental political science issues of our times - how the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere should deal with the legal systems inherited from their authoritarian pasts.
Should the past system be repudiated altogether? Should the leaders from the authoritarian period be punished? If so, how? Under what principles of law would punishment be justified, given that the leaders were, in general, acting legally according to the legal systems in effect at the time? This book is the first systematic treatment of these issues.
Teitel brings an exceptional breadth of knowledge to bear on the problem, a must read for anyone interested in the role of law in contemporary world politics.
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New York Evidentiary Foundations
Randolph N. Jonakait, H. Baer, E. S. Jones, and E. Imwinkelried
This textbook illustrates how to apply New York Evidence law teaching the reader how to lay out the foundations for the introduction of items of evidence. This book adds to the abstract evidentiary doctrines that many law students study. It is designed to teach the reader both the doctrines of evidence as well as how to present the evidentiary foundations necessary for trying a case.
This edition is the first edition where Professor Randolph N. Jonakait was asked to revise the text to make it more useful to New Yorkers. New York attorneys especially need tailored evidence materials because New York evidence law is not based on the Federal Rules of Evidence. Lawyers with educations from outside New York are often unaware of the differences.
This book proved to be greatly successful and Jonakait has gone on to write further editions.
