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.
Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel

Irus Braverman

Nature management is much more central to the settler colonial project than is commonly recognized. In Settling Nature, Irus Braverman draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. The book proceeds through two intersecting lines of inquiry: it first studies the protection of land through its designation by the settler state as a national park or nature reserve; then, it documents the settler state’s protection of animals and plants, which often exceeds the boundaries of the protected territories. Braverman argues that this dual protection scheme lies at the heart of the extensive yet overlooked conservation regime in Palestine-Israel, which she terms “settler ecologies.”

The territorial reach of nature protection in Palestine-Israel is remarkable. To date, nearly 25 percent of the country’s total land mass has already been designated as a nature reserve or a national park. Alongside this sovereign enclosure of land, Israel’s settler ecologies center on the biopolitical protection of fauna and flora, leading to widespread ecological warfare. Recruited to the front lines are fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows on the Israeli side against goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub on the Palestinian side. These nonhuman soldiers are all the more effective because nature camouflages their tactical deployment. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, Settling Nature plants the seeds for possible reimaginings of nature that transcend the grip of the state’s settler ecologies.
Election Law in the American Political System

Guy-Uriel R. Charles and James A. Gardner

The third edition of Election Law in the American Political System pivots to place front and center the profound challenges to American democracy posed by the emergence of a political environment in which repeated, partisan attempts to undermine longstanding democratic processes have become a new norm of political contestation. Like prior editions, it offers an easy to teach, student-friendly, intellectually rich casebook with comprehensive coverage of the legal rules and doctrines that shape democratic participation in the 21st century American political system.
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.
Legal Writing Handbook for Clinical Students

Nan Haynes

This handbook is for upper-level students enrolled in a clinic, who are expected to draft legal memorandums, briefs, client letters, and pleadings with minimal supervision. Each chapter focuses on a single writing skill. The exercises and examples consistently and cogently employ the techniques and devices advocated in the book.

Clinical students learn by doing. Still, their legal writing experience is limited, so guiding them through written assignments is challenging. They simultaneously need specific feedback on legal writing from their professors, and the opportunity to do as much as possible on their own. I wrote this handbook with that challenge in mind.

Students can use the book as a tool to help them complete writing assignments without relying too much on their professor. Clinical professors can use the handbook in three separate ways, depending on their students’ needs.

1. Require or ask students to use the handbook when they write assignments.

2. Assign students to read and complete the exercises in a single chapter or chapters based on weaknesses professors find in their students’ writing.

3. Assign chapters and exercises to prepare for in class review of basic writing skills. Students would read and complete some of the exercises in a chapter before attending class on a particular topic, where they would discuss the topic and practice that skill in class by completing as a group the remaining exercises. Such a class could also include peer editing of written clinic assignments.

The ebook includes numerous interactive questions, such as multiple choice, that allow students to assess their understanding and skills.
Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law

Paul Linden-Retek

At a time when the project of integrating Europe’s peoples through the rule of law is faltering, this book develops a critical theory of postnational constitutionalism. Today, widely held conceptions of European law continue to mislead citizens about the nature of political identity, sovereignty, and agency. They lose sight of a critical idea on which postnationalism depends: that constitutional self-authorship is a narrative affair and the polity is a subject whose identity, history, and legacy are still in formation. Absent this vision, European law reproduces crises of legitimacy: the depoliticization of public life; emergency rule by executive decree; a collapse of solidarity; and the rise of nativist movements. The book diagnoses this impasse as the product of a problem familiar to modernity: reification—a process in which social and historical relationships are misattributed as timeless relations among things. Reification’s shrinking of social dilemmas, moral principles, and political action to narrow perceptions of the present explains law’s role in perpetuating crisis. But this diagnosis also points to a remedy. It suggests that to sustain the emancipatory potential of European constitutionalism we must recover the time of law. The book offers a more temporally attuned constitutional theory with the principles of anti-reification, narrative interpretation, and non-sovereign agency at its centre. These principles reimagine essential domains of constitutional order: social integration, constitutional adjudication, and constituent power. Spanning various bodies of European jurisprudence, the book devotes particular attention to migration and asylum, struggles where questions of solidarity, law, and belonging are most acute and generative.
Verdad, Justicia y No Repetición en el Acuerdo colombiano

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

Este volumen proporciona una discusión interdisciplinaria del Acuerdo de Paz firmado entre el Gobierno de Colombia y las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) para finalizar medio siglo de conflicto armado, uno de los más largos y violentos en el hemisferio occidental. El volumen discute los logros, desafíos y fracasos de este acuerdo de paz. Los contribuyentes incluyen jueces de la jurisdicción especial de paz, representantes de la sociedad civil y expertos en derecho penal doméstico e internacional, derechos humanos, justicia transicional, derecho internacional, historia, filosofía, ciencia política y psicología.
The Palgrave Handbook of Democracy, Governance and Justice in Africa

Aderomola Adeola and Makau wa Mutua

There is an emerging consensus that what is projected as democratic governance and justice in Africa requires a re-calibration, in particular, in relation to the constitutive demos, human rights, the realisation of commitments at various governance levels and the convergence between these ideations. The post-colonial narrative on democracy has unveiled some crevices in rule of law, political equality, political participation, political culture and freedom of the press. Aside from the fact that these notions are threatened by some existing institutional structures, these notions are increasingly being negotiated across political spaces. Evident in the prevalent narrative is an imperative for Africa to assert its place on the global scene of democratic governance and justice. However, if this will be accomplished, it is important to understand some of the issues that need to be worked through in this transition.
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.
Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents

Irus Braverman

Laws of the Sea assembles scholars from law, geography, anthropology, and environmental humanities to consider the possibilities of a critical ocean approach in legal studies.

Unlike the United Nations’ monumental Convention on the Law of the Sea, which imagines one comprehensive constitutional framework for governing the ocean, Laws of the Sea approaches oceanic law in plural and dynamic ways. Critically engaging contemporary concerns about the fate of the ocean, the collection’s twelve chapters range from hydrothermal vents through the continental shelf and marine genetic resources to coastal communities in France, Sweden, Florida, and Indonesia. Documenting the longstanding binary of land and sea, the chapters pose a fundamental challenge to European law’s “terracentrism” and its pervasive influence on juridical modes of knowing and making the world. Together, the chapters ask: is contemporary Eurocentric law—and international law in particular—capable of moving away from its capitalist and colonial legacies, established through myriad oceanic abstractions and classifications, toward more amphibious legalities?

Laws of the Sea will appeal to legal scholars, geographers, anthropologists, cultural and political theorists, as well as scholars in the environmental humanities, political ecology, ocean studies, and animal studies.
More-than-One Health: Humans, Animals, and the Environment Post-COVID

Irus Braverman

This edited volume examines the complex entanglements of human, animal, and environmental health. It assembles leading scholars from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and medicine to explore existing One Health approaches and to envision a mode of health that is both more-than-human and also more sensitive to, and explicit about, colonial and neocolonial legacies—urging the decolonization of One Health.

While acknowledging the importance of One Health, the volume at the same time critically examines its roots, highlighting the structural biases and power dynamics still at play in this global health regime. The volume is distinctive in its geographic breadth. It travels from Inuit sled dogs in the Arctic to rock hyraxes in Jerusalem, from black-faced spoonbills in Taiwan to street dogs in India, from spittle-bugs on Mallorca’s almond trees to jellyfish management at sea, and from rabies in sub-Saharan Africa to massive culling practices in South Korea. Together, the contributors call for One Health to move toward a more transparent, plural, and just perception of health that takes seriously the role of more-than-humans and of nonscientific knowledges, pointing to ways in which One Health can—and should—be decolonized.

This volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners in the medical humanities, posthumanities, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, animal studies, multispecies ethnography, anthrozoology, and critical public health.
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.
Sh*t No One Tells You About Law School

Tanya J. Monestier

Irreverent. Fun. Honest. Words never before used to describe a book intended for law students—until now. Sh*t No One Tells You About Law School offers law students a compilation of advice culled from the author's fifteen years of teaching experience. Think Jessica Pearson meets Carrie Bradshaw—shoe closet included! This book is a tell-it-like-it-is account of how students can successfully navigate the law school experience (minus the boring stuff). Written for today's law student, this book goes far beyond the run-of-the-mill "here's how you case brief" and "read cases carefully" advice. Expect to be both motivated and entertained by the author's practical, hands-on guidance.

Professor Tanya Monestier is a tenured law professor who teaches Contracts, Sales, and Conflict of Laws. She was a first-generation student who kicked a** in law school and who wants to help you do the same.
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.
"To Save the People from Themselves": The Emergence of American Judicial Review and the Transformation of Constitutions

Robert J. Steinfeld

In this expansive history, Robert J. Steinfeld offers a thorough re-interpretation of the origins of American judicial review and the central role it quickly came to play in the American constitutional system. Beginning with Privy Council review of American colonial legislation, the book goes on to provide detailed descriptions of the character of the first American constitutions, showing that they drew heavily on traditional Anglo/American constitutional assumptions, which treated legislatures as the primary interpreters of constitutions. Steinfeld then expertly analyses the central role lawyers and judges played in transforming these assumptions, creating the practice and doctrine of American judicial review in a half dozen state cases during the 1780s. The book concludes by showing that the ideas formulated during those years shaped critical decisions taken by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which turned the novel practice into a permanent, if still deeply controversial, feature of the American constitutional system.
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.
Children and The Law: Doctrine, Policy and Practice (American Casebook Series)

Douglas E. Abrams, Susan Vivian Mangold, and Sarah H. Ramsey