Books

The DC@UB Law Faculty Book collection includes information on books published by all current and emeritus University at Buffalo School of Law faculty members. Links to purchase books are included where the books are still in print.

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Organizational Structures of Academic Law Libraries: Past, Present, and Future

Elizabeth G. Adelman and Jessica de Perio Wittman

There are 3 academic law library model structures: autonomous, semi-autonomous, and the shared services model:
- An autonomous law school library is a library that is part of an independent law school or one that, despite being on a university campus, operates independently from the central campus library. The director of an autonomous law library reports to the dean of the law school. Typically, the law library’s budget is allocated from the law school budget at the discretion of the dean.
- A semi-autonomous law library is administratively connected to both the law school it serves and the university’s central library. The director of a semi-autonomous law library reports to the dean of the law school and to the university librarian. The semi-autonomous law library’s budget is typically derived from the central library’s funds.
- In the shared services model, an autonomous law library has consolidated select services with the central library, but the remaining reporting structure and budget resemble those of an autonomous law library.
During the last decade many institutions have considered the possibility of transitioning to a different law library structure because it appears to be a path for the institution to save money. This book will shed light on the different structures and the issues associated with each by hearing from law school deans, directors of the law library, and even university librarians.
Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan

Samantha Barbas

Actual Malice tells the full story of New York Times v. Sullivan, the dramatic case that grew out of segregationists' attempts to quash reporting on the civil rights movement. In its landmark 1964 decision, the Supreme Court held that a public official must prove "actual malice" or reckless disregard of the truth to win a libel lawsuit, providing critical protections for free speech and freedom of the press.

Drawing on previously unexplored sources, including the archives of the New York Times Company and civil rights leaders, Samantha Barbas tracks the saga behind one of the most important First Amendment rulings in history. She situates the case within the turbulent 1960s and the history of the press, alongside striking portraits of the lawyers, officials, judges, activists, editors, and journalists who brought and defended the case. As the Sullivan doctrine faces growing controversy, Actual Malice reminds us of the stakes of the case that shaped American reporting and public discourse as we know it.
The Asian Law and Society Reader

Lynette J. Chua, David M. Engel, and Sida Liu

The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries – East, South, Southeast and Central Asia – along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.
Puerto Rico’s Constitutional Paradox: Colonial Subordination, Democratic Tension, and Promise of Progressive Transformation

Jorge M. Farinacci Fernós

This book explains how the People of Puerto Rico managed to adopt a constitution whose content and process were both original and colonialist, participatory and undemocratic, as well as progressive and anticlimactic.

It looks in detail at the rich contradictions of the Puerto Rican constitutional experience, focusing on the history and content of the 1952 Constitution. This constitution is the only constitutional document written by the Puerto Rican People themselves after more than 500 years of Spanish and US colonialism.

By exploring Puerto Rico's unique history and constitutional experience the book shines a spotlight on key emerging themes of comparative constitutional studies in this area: state constitutionalism, the persistence of colonial relationships in the Caribbean, and the continued development of constitutionalism in Latin America.

The book delves deep into the particular experience of Puerto Rican constitutionalism which combines elements of colonialism, democratic tensions, and progressive policies. It explains how these features converge in a constitutional project that has endured for 70 years and continues its contradictory development. It considers issues such as the island's colonial history, including its conflicting relationship with democratic values and the constant presence of social movements and their struggles.

It also explores the content of the 1952 Constitution, focusing on its progressive substantive policy, particularly its rights provisions, its amendment procedures, and the governmental structure it set up.
Intellectual Property and the Brain: How Neuroscience Will Reshape Legal Protection for Creations of the Mind

Mark Bartholomew

Although legal scholars have begun to explore the implications of neuroscientific research for criminal law, the field has yet to assess the potential of such research for intellectual property law – a legal regime governing over one-third of the US economy. Intellectual Property and the Brain addresses this gap by showing how tools meant to improve our understanding of human behavior inevitably shape the balance of power between artists and copyists, businesses and consumers. This first of its kind book demonstrates how neuroscience can improve our flawed approach to regulating creative conduct and commercial communications when applied with careful attention to the reasons that our system of intellectual property law exists. With a host of real-life examples of art, design, and advertising, the book charts a path forward for legal actors seeking reforms that will unlock artistic innovation, elevate economic productivity, and promote consumer welfare.
Comparative Election Law

James A. Gardner

This timely research handbook offers a systematic and comprehensive examination of the election laws of democratic nations. Through a study of a range of different regimes of election law, it illuminates the disparate choices that societies have made concerning the benefits they wish their democratic institutions to provide, the means by which such benefits are to be delivered, and the underlying values, commitments, and conceptions of democratic self-rule that inform these choices.

Comparative Election Law features a wide scope of coverage, from distribution of the franchise, to candidate qualifications, to campaign speech and finance, to election administration, and more. Contributions from a range of expert scholars in the field are brought together to tackle difficult problems surrounding the definition of the democratic demos, as well as to lay bare important disjunctions between democratic ideals and feasible democratic regimes in practice. Furthermore, a comparative approach is also taken to examine democratic regimes at a theoretical as well as a descriptive level.

Featuring key research in a vitally important area, this research handbook will be crucial reading for academics and students in a range of fields including comparative law, legal theory, political science, political theory, and democracy. It will also be useful to politicians and government officials engaged in election regulation, due to its excellent perspective on the range of regulatory options and how to evaluate them.
Understanding Criminal Procedure

Pamela Newell
While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy, and Law in a Time of Change

John Henry Schlegel

What might a sensible community choose to do if its economy has fallen apart and becoming a ghost town is not an acceptable option? Unfortunately, answers to this question have long been measured against an implicit standard: the postwar economy of the 1950s. After showing why that economy provides an implausible standard—made possible by the lack of economic competition from the European and Asian countries, winners or losers, touched by the war—John Henry Schlegel attempts to answer the question of what to do.

While Waiting for Rain first examines the economic history of the United States as well as that of Buffalo, New York: an appropriate stand-in for any city that may have seen its economy start to fall apart in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It makes clear that neither Buffalo nor the United States as a whole has had an economy in the sense of “a persistent market structure that is the fusion of an understanding of economic life with the patterns of behavior within the economic, political, and social institutions that enact that understanding” since both economies collapsed. Next, this book builds a plausible theory of how economic growth might take place by examining the work of the famous urbanist, Jane Jacobs, especially her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Her work, like that of many others, emphasizes the importance of innovation for economic growth, but is singular in its insistence that such innovation has to come from local resources. It can neither be bought nor given, even by well-intentioned political actors. As a result Americans generally, as well as locally, are like farmers in the midst of a drought, left to review their resources and wait. Finally, it returns to both the local Buffalo and the national economies to consider what these political units might plausibly do while waiting for an economy to emerge.
Objectivity in Jurisprudence, Legal Interpretation and Practical Reasoning

Gonzalo Villa-Rosas and Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

This thought-provoking book explores the multifaceted phenomenon of objectivity and its relations to various aspects of the law and practical reasoning. Featuring contributions from an international group of researchers from differing legal contexts, it addresses topics relevant not only from a theoretical point of view but also themes directly connected with legal and judicial practice.

Beginning with an introduction from the editors proposing a new account of the meaning of objectivity, the book is then divided into three broad themes illuminated by this account. Chapters first address a range of problems linked to the relationship between objectivity and jurisprudence, before turning in the second part to an analysis of the functions of objectivity in legal interpretation. The final part then deals with the function of objectivity in practical reasoning.

Offering a spectrum of scholarly insights within a coherent intellectual framework, this book will be a crucial read for scholars and graduate students of legal philosophy and legal theory. Its discussion of objectivity as it relates to legal practice and practical reasoning will also be of interest to practitioners such as judges, arbitrators and lawyers.
The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade

Samantha Barbas

In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of the best-known liberal lawyers in the United States. An eminent attorney and general counsel of the ACLU for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against literary and artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread broadening of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet this “human dynamo,” as friends called him, was also a man of stark contradictions, who also waged a personal battle against Communism, defended a foreign autocrat, and aligned himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades.

Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and later-life turn toward zealous anticommunism. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever.
The Colombian Peace Agreement: A Multidisciplinary Analysis

Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora, Andrés Molina-Ochoa, and Nancy C. Doubleday

This book is the first systematic, interdisciplinary examination of the peace agreement signed between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to end one of the largest and most violent conflicts in the Western Hemisphere. It discusses the achievements, failures, and challenges of this innovative peace agreement and its implications for Colombia’s future. Contributors include negotiators of the Agreement, judges of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, representatives of the civil society, and leading academic experts in peace studies, human rights, international law, criminal law, transitional justice, political science, and philosophy. Based on the premise that peace is a form of transferable social knowledge, and therefore necessitates transformative social learning, the volume also discusses what other countries can learn from the Colombian experience.
Conceptual Jurisprudence: Methodological Issues, Classical Questions, and New Approaches

Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora and Gonzalo Villa Rosas

This book brings together leading legal theorists to present original philosophical work on the concept of law - the central question of jurisprudence. It covers five broad topics: firstly it addresses debates concerning the methodology of jurisprudence. In Part II it focuses on the notion of a legal system and its coercive nature, while Part III explores the relationships between law and morality, the traditional point of contention between positivist and non-positivist theories of law. Part IV then examines questions regarding law’s normative character and relationships with practical reason. Lastly, the final part introduces two novel theoretical approaches to conceptual jurisprudence.
Criminal Law: Cases and Materials

John Kaplan, Robert Weisberg, and Guyora Binder

Criminal Law: Cases and Materials has long been respected for its distinguished authorship. The late John Kaplan’s extraordinary work continues with the scholarship of Robert Weisberg and Guyora Binder in the Ninth Edition. This casebook’s renowned interdisciplinary approach fuels class discussion as it enriches study. Logically organized, the text addresses the purposes and limits of punishment and considers the meaning and types of crime. Well-edited cases, interesting materials, and clear notes combine with cutting-edge issues and important social questions, such as whom and why we punish. Especially strong are the sections addressing the phenomenon of mass incarceration (including the movement towards prison abolition), the theme of and challenges to racial justice in our criminal law system, and the evolution of our laws on sexual assault.
Criminal Evidence: Critical Readings

Pamela Newell

Criminal Evidence: Critical Readings provides students with carefully curated selections within the discipline that foster their philosophical and practical understanding of criminal evidence. Pragmatic in nature, the text focuses on the evidence that is presented within criminal investigations and trials.

The book is organized in a logical way by first offering an introduction to criminal evidence, then sources of law, and finally the issues that may arise in an investigation and trial. Each chapter features an introduction, featured readings, key terms, study questions, and real-world examples of the topics and theories discussed to help students better understand practical applications of the material within their future careers. Specific topics include the federal rules of evidence; the discovery, preservation, collection, and transmission of evidence; interrogations and confessions; the exclusionary rule; expert witnesses; hearsay; and more.

Featuring highly accessible and focused material, Criminal Evidence is an ideal resource for undergraduate courses in criminal evidence and criminal procedure.
Criminal Law: Teacher's Manual

Robert Weisberg and Guyora Binder

Criminal Law: Cases and Materials has long been respected for its distinguished authorship. The late John Kaplan’s extraordinary work continues with the scholarship of Robert Weisberg and Guyora Binder in the Ninth Edition. This casebook’s renowned interdisciplinary approach fuels class discussion as it enriches study. Logically organized, the text addresses the purposes and limits of punishment and considers the meaning and types of crime. Well-edited cases, interesting materials, and clear notes combine with cutting-edge issues and important social questions, such as whom and why we punish. Especially strong are the sections addressing the phenomenon of mass incarceration (including the movement towards prison abolition), the theme of and challenges to racial justice in our criminal law system, and the evolution of our laws on sexual assault.
New York Legal Research

Elizabeth G. Adelman, Courtney L. Selby, Brian T. Detweiler, and Kathleen Darvil

New York Legal Research provides an alternative to the excellent, but often lengthy, legal research books that take a bibliographic approach to this dynamic lawyering skill. The goal of the fourth edition is to explore concisely both the sources of New York state law and the process of conducting research using those sources.

The book begins with an overview of the legal research process and an introduction to research techniques using online media. Then the book turns to secondary sources, recognizing these sources as the entry point for most new research projects. Next, New York Legal Research addresses primary authority, with chapters dedicated to case law, enacted law (statutes, constitutions, local law, and court rules), and administrative law. Additional chapters cover legislative history, free and commercial updating tools, legal ethics research, New York City law, and research strategies and organization. An appendix explains legal citation by New York courts following the New York Law Reports Style Manual.

Most chapters contain outlines with step-by-step guidance for research in various types of legal resources. The book also includes short excerpts and screen shots from important sources. Discussions of legal analysis are brief but are included as necessary to show the crucial connection between research and analysis. While the concentration of New York Legal Research is state research, concise descriptions of federal resources are included throughout.

New to the fourth edition is a much greater emphasis on online sources and online research process. Print sources are discussed as an opportunity to enhance the research process or when no online equivalent is available.

This book is part of the Legal Research Series, edited by Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff, Director of the Legal Research and Writing Program, Concordia University School of Law.
Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet

Irus Braverman

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet.

Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild—in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques—is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans.

At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.
Blue Legalities: The Law and Life of the Sea

Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson

The ocean and its inhabitants sketch and stretch our understandings of law in unexpected ways. Inspired by the blue turn in the social sciences and humanities, Blue Legalities explores how regulatory frameworks and governmental infrastructures are made, reworked, and contested in the oceans. Its interdisciplinary contributors analyze topics that range from militarization and Maori cosmologies to island building in the South China Sea and underwater robotics. Throughout, Blue Legalities illuminates the vast and unusual challenges associated with regulating the turbulent materialities and lives of the sea. Offering much more than an analysis of legal frameworks, the chapters in this volume show how the more-than-human ocean is central to the construction of terrestrial institutions and modes of governance. By thinking with the more-than-human ocean, Blue Legalities questions what we think we know—and what we don’t know—about oceans, our earthly planet, and ourselves.
Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions

Martha Chamallas and Lucinda M. Finley

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from pre-natal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience.
- Provides examples of rewritten torts opinions from feminist perspectives to allow readers to envision transformation of tort law from feminist perspectives
- Critiques judicial opinions that undervalue gender-related interests and injuries, demonstrating gender bias in major areas of tort law
- Offers examples of strategies and techniques to reform tort law to suggest potential concrete changes in tort law to make it more equitable
Jurisprudence in a Globalized World

Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

In this unique book, leading legal scholars and philosophers provide a breadth of perspectives and inspire stimulating debate around the transformations of jurisprudence in a globalized world. Traditionally the central debates surrounding jurisprudence and legal theory are concerned with the elucidation of the particularities of state-law. This innovative book considers that this orthodox picture may no longer be tenable, given the increasing standardization of technologies, systems and information worldwide.

Split across four thematic parts, this timely book provides a broad overview of the topic, followed by in depth analyses investigating the modifications to jurisprudence’s methodological approaches driven by globalization, the concepts and theoretical tools required to account for putative new forms of legal phenomena, and normative issues relating to the legitimacy and democratic character of these legal orders. Chapters cover legal encounters with alterity in a post-monist mode, normative legal pluralism, relating law and power in a historical global context, cosmopolitan legitimacy and human rights and dignity in a corporate world.

Jurisprudence in a Globalized World will be a key resource for students and scholars working in global transnational law, public international law and legal theory and philosophy.
Las transformaciones del derecho en la globalización [Law’s Transformation in Globalization]

Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora
Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy

James A. Gardner and Christine P. Bartholomew

Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy is a full-featured guide designed primarily for law students in research, writing, analysis, and trial advocacy classes and moot court programs. Inside you'll find detailed explanations of how lawyers construct legal arguments and practical guidelines to the process of molding the raw materials of litigation—cases, statutes, testimony, documents, common sense—into instruments of persuasive advocacy. You'll also find writing guidelines that show you how to present a well-constructed legal argument in writing in a way that legal decision makers will find persuasive. The centerpiece of this indispensable work is its syllogism-based step-by-step method, designed to walk the advocate through the process of crafting a winning argument. Intuitive organization presents the material in five parts:
- Part I sets out a general methodology for constructing legal arguments.
- Part II focuses more closely on the construction of persuasive, well-grounded legal premises, and covers the effective integration of legal doctrine and evidence into the argument's structure.
- Part III shows how to put the method to work by giving two detailed examples of the construction of complete legal arguments from scratch.
- Part IV provides a detailed protocol for reducing well-constructed legal arguments to written form, along with a concrete illustration of that process. It also provides concrete advice on how to recognize and avoid a host of common mistakes in the written presentation of legal arguments.
- Part V moves from the basics into more advanced techniques of persuasive legal argument, including rhetorical tactics like framing and emphasis, how to respond to arguments, maintaining professionalism in advocacy, and the ethical limits of argument.
A Post-WTO International Legal Order: Utopian, Dystopian and Other Scenarios

Meredith Kolsky Lewis and Rostam J. Neuwirth

This book provides readers with a unique opportunity to explore how the international economic legal order (IELO) may look in a post-WTO world. The substance of this book presupposes (whether correct or not) that the WTO either: (a) Stagnates into the foreseeable future (Doha withers, no new Rounds, at best minor amendments, little new jurisprudence, effective collapse of the DSB); or (b) Falls apart completely. While neither is desirable, the book underlines that it must be conceded that neither is inconceivable. The collapse of the Soviet Union tells us that anything is possible (in 1986 no one foresaw the end of the Cold War - clearly it was a much more significant event than would be the case for the demise of the WTO and the current international economic legal order (IELO)). Similarly, just a year or two before Brexit or the election of US President Donald Trump, no one foresaw those two eventualities. Consequently, a worst-case scenario for the future of the WTO cannot be ignored – rather, it must be explored, as has been done in this book. Indeed, despite most IEL academics’ commitment to multilateralism and specifically to a vibrant and dynamic WTO, academics in the field are now beginning to seriously discuss what a post-WTO world could look like (and it was the project behind this book that first launched those discussions). Accordingly, this examination of the post-WTO world will be of great value to practitioners, governmental and international officials and scholars in the IELO. This is particularly so in an era of increasingly rapid change, during which legal scholarship must also address the future if it wants to contribute creative solutions to the resolution and management of the many serious contemporary problems facing our field.
Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern

Mark Maguire and David A. Westbrook

Getting Through Security offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of global security structures. The authors unveil the “secret colleges” of counterterrorism, a world haunted by the knowledge that intelligence will fail, and Leviathan will not arrive quickly enough to save everyone. Based on extensive interviews with both special forces and other security operators who seek to protect the public, and survivors of terrorist attacks, Getting Through Security ranges from targeted European airports to African malls and hotels to explore counterterrorism today. Maguire and Westbrook reflect on what these practices mean for the bureaucratic state and its violence, and offer suggestions for the perennial challenge to secure not just modern life, but humane politics.

Mark Maguire has long had extraordinary access to a series of counterterrorism programs. He trained with covert behavior detection units and attended secret meetings of international special forces. He found that security professionals, for all the force at their command, are haunted by ultimately intractable problems. Intelligence is inadequate, killers unexpectedly announce themselves, combat teams don’t arrive quickly enough, and for a time an amorphous public is on its own. Such problems both challenge and occasion the institutions of contemporary order. David Westbrook accompanied Maguire, pushing for reflection on what the dangerous enterprise of securing modern life means for key concepts such as bureaucracy, violence, and the state. Introducing us to the “secret colleges” of soldiers and police, where security is produced as an infinite horizon of possibility, and where tactics shape politics covertly, the authors relate moments of experimentation by police trying to secure critical infrastructure and conversations with special forces operators in Nairobi bars, a world of shifting architecture, technical responses, and the ever-present threat of violence. Secrecy is poison. Government agencies compete in the dark. The uninformed public is infantilized. Getting Through Security exposes deep flaws in the foundations of bureaucratic modernity, and suggests possibilities that may yet ameliorate our situation.
人权标准：霸权法律和政治 (translation of Human Rights Standards: Hegemony, Law, and Politics)

Makau wa Mutua

《人权标准：霸权法律和政治》追溯了人权标准制定之历史，并批判性地探讨了人权运动标准的确立。作者考察了第二次世界大战结束、人权运动诞生以来关键性的人权文本，以发展中国家的眼光批判性地审视了此类重要文献。本书着力阐述国际秩序的缺陷、以及为何这种国际秩序定义下的人权标准会充满文化偏见。