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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Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge
Jessica Owley and Keith H. Hirokawa
Has the concept of sustainability as we know it reached the end of its useful life? It is a term that means many things to many people, but it has been a positive driving force across all levels of society in a broad-based effort—either through laws and treaties or voluntary action—to keep our planet and our people healthy. But none of those efforts have managed to prevent climate change. It’s a reality that’s here to stay, and it’s bigger than we would have imagined even 20 years ago.
This volume presents a collection of papers from experts in the field articulating a wide range of thoughtful ways in which various conceptions of sustainability need to be re-examined, refined, or articulated in greater detail to address these challenges. The chapters reflect the kind of thoughtful and sophisticated thinking that is needed to accelerate the transition to sustainability in the face of a changing climate. As editors Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa note, one of the main challenges is the need for a better understanding of the issues and developing the proper means of communicating them.
The chapter authors demonstrate that sustainability provides a creative space within which to develop ideas and proposals to further social, economic, and environmental goals at the same time. Many propose new or modified laws and policies. All of them contribute to a constructive and helpful discussion about how to address what is easily one of the most difficult and important questions facing the planet.
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Enciclopedia de filosofía y teoría del derecho Volúmen 2 [Encyclopedia of Legal Philosophy and Legal Theory, Volume 2]
Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco and Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora
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Children and The Law: Doctrine, Policy and Practice (American Casebook Series)
Douglas E. Abrams, Sarah H. Ramsey, and Susan Vivian Mangold
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The Expanding Spaces of Law: a Timely Legal Geography
Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar
The Expanding Spaces of Law presents readers with cutting-edge scholarship in legal geography. An invaluable resource for those new to this line of scholarship, the book also pushes the boundaries of legal geography, reinvigorating previous modes of inquiry and investigating new directions. It guides scholars interested in the law–space–power nexus to underexplored empirical sites and to novel theoretical and disciplinary resources. Finally, The Expanding Spaces of Law asks readers to think about the temporality and dynamism of legal spaces.
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Substantive Criminal Law: Cases, Comments And Comparative Materials
Luis E. Chiesa
The strength of this casebook is the uniformity of each chapter’s structure, which makes it easier to approach the chapter’s topic systematically. Each chapter begins with several sections that discuss the applicable law, followed by a separate section that discusses the Model Penal Code’s approach to the topic. This is then followed by a “Comparative Perspectives” section that encourages students to think about alternative ways of approaching the topic. The richness of the comparative materials used in the casebook is unmatched by its competitors, as many of the materials have been translated by the author. Finally, each chapter ends with a section titled “Scholarly Debates” that introduces the student to some of the philosophical discussions related to the topic.
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Preventing the Sexual Victimization of Children: Psychological, Legal, and Public Policy Perspectives
Charles Patrick Ewing
Sexual exploitation of children is a major social problem in the United States and around the world. Depending upon how such exploitation is defined and measured, divergent estimates indicate that in the U.S. between 3 and 37 percent of males, and between 8 and 71 percent of females are sexually abused in some manner during childhood or adolescence. In response, governments have passed strict laws, entered into international treaties, and established large bureaucracies aimed at curbing child sexual abuse.
Preventing the Sexual Victimization of Children is the first book to critically evaluate national and international efforts to reduce child sexual abuse (CSA) and ameliorate its effects. Until now, input from social science and mental health experts has been accepted for the most part uncritically, as have the programs and laws that have been developed in reliance upon that advice. Here Dr. Ewing utilizes empirical data, policy considerations, cost-benefit analyses, psychological theory, legal reasoning, and common sense to undertake the often difficult and sometimes controversial task of distinguishing prevention strategies that are likely to prevent CSA from those that are not. He concludes that the most expensive preventive strategies-such as sex offender registration, enhancing criminal penalties for such offenders, and civilly confining them-are not effective in preventing CSA and may actually increase its likelihood. However, he also concludes that many other strategies are or could be effective in preventing CSA, such as minimizing opportunities for such abuse, risk education, teaching children to protect themselves, encouraging bystander intervention, limiting the cultural sexualization of children, improving the investigation and prosecution of CSA allegations, using technology to stop child pornography and to rescue its victims, changing the culture in child-serving organizations, and more. This volume will be a unique and critical resource for lawyers, researchers, psychologists, social workers, public policy officials, students, and child advocates interested in preventing child sexual abuse.
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Trade Agreements at the Crossroads
Susy Frankel and Meredith Kolsky Lewis
The book examines trade agreements in the context of the current world economic crisis and the uncompleted World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round of trade negotiations. With economies shrinking and protectionism on the rise, many fear a protracted global recession. This raises important questions as to what role trade agreements – multilateral, plurilateral, and bilateral – should be playing in the current climate of uncertainty, and how best to plan for a more stable economic future. Previous assumptions are now being questioned, making this an opportune time to critically examine the WTO, free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties, and other international economic law instruments. Furthermore, participants in international agreements are concerned with emerging issues that have the potential to strengthen or weaken the global trading system, including matters of treaty interpretation; terms of new agreements; and effects of existing provisions.
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Buddhism and Law: An Introduction
Rebecca Redwood French
As the first comprehensive study of Buddhism and law in Asia, this interdisciplinary volume challenges the concept of Buddhism as an apolitical religion without implications for law. Buddhism and Law draws on the expertise of the foremost scholars in Buddhist studies and in law to trace the legal aspects of the religion from the time of the Buddha to the present. In some cases, Buddhism provided the crucial architecture for legal ideologies and secular law codes, while in other cases it had to contend with a pre-existing legal system, to which it added a new layer of complexity. The wide-ranging studies in this book reveal a diversity of relationships between Buddhist monastic codes and secular legal systems in terms of substantive rules, factoring, and ritual practices. This volume will be an essential resource for all students and teachers in Buddhist studies, law and religion, and comparative law.
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Filosofía de la Responsabilidad Extracontractual [Philosophy of Tort Law]
Carlos L. Bernal Pulido and Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora
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Mastering Partnership Taxation
Stuart G. Lazar
Mastering Partnership Taxation guides students through the complex tax rules affecting partnerships and their partners. The discussion of each topic is designed to provide a basic understanding of the rules of Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code. It is specifically designed for students taking a class in partnership tax. Each chapter begins with a roadmap to introduce the material to be presented and ends with checkpoints that summarize the information covered.
Mastering Partnership Taxation takes students through the entire life cycle of a partnership, beginning with partnership formations and ending with partnership liquidations and partnership mergers. The topics covered include: the entity v. aggregate theories of taxation; the “check the box” regulations; a comparison of partnerships to corporations and S corporations; the consequences of partner contributions to a partnership; transfers of compensatory partnership interests; an introduction to partnership accounting; an introduction to partnership debt; allocations of partnership income; partnership distributions; transactions between partnerships and their partners; and dispositions of partnership interests.
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Felony Murder
Guyora Binder
The felony murder doctrine is one of the most widely criticized features of American criminal law. Legal scholars almost unanimously condemn it as irrational, concluding that it imposes punishment without fault and presumes guilt without proof. Despite this, the law persists in almost every U.S. jurisdiction.
Felony Murder is the first book on this controversial legal doctrine. It shows that felony murder liability rests on a simple and powerful idea: that the guilt incurred in attacking or endangering others depends on one's reasons for doing so. Inflicting harm is wrong, and doing so for a bad motive—such as robbery, rape, or arson—aggravates that wrong. In presenting this idea, Guyora Binder criticizes prevailing academic theories of criminal intent for trying to purge criminal law of moral judgment. Ultimately, Binder shows that felony murder law has been and should remain limited by its justifying aims.
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Zooland: The Institution of Captivity
Irus Braverman
This book takes a unique stance on a controversial topic: zoos. Zoos have their ardent supporters and their vocal detractors. And while we all have opinions on what zoos do, few people consider how they do it. Irus Braverman draws on more than seventy interviews conducted with zoo managers and administrators, as well as animal activists, to offer a glimpse into the otherwise unknown complexities of zooland.
Zooland begins and ends with the story of Timmy, the oldest male gorilla in North America, to illustrate the dramatic transformations of zoos since the 1970s. Over these decades, modern zoos have transformed themselves from places created largely for entertainment to globally connected institutions that emphasize care through conservation and education.
Zoos naturalize their spaces, classify their animals, and produce spectacular experiences for their human visitors. Zoos name, register, track, and allocate their animals in global databases. Zoos both abide by and create laws and industry standards that govern their captive animals. Finally, zoos intensely govern the reproduction of captive animals, carefully calculating the life and death of these animals, deciding which of them will be sustained and which will expire. Zooland takes readers behind the exhibits into the world of zoo animals and their caretakers. And in so doing, it turns its gaze back on us to make surprising interconnections between our understandings of the human and the nonhuman.
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Election Law in the American Political System
James A. Gardner and Guy-Uriel R. Charles
This new Election Law casebook, published by Aspen, and suitable for use in law schools and political science departments, offers a distinct alternative to casebooks currently on the market. Although election law, like any body of law, is a collection of constitutional provisions, statutes, and judicial rulings, it is also something more: election law establishes the ground rules by which politics itself is conducted. It is thus impossible, in our view, or at the very least inadvisable, to contemplate existing American election law without considering the kind of politics we have, and without asking whether it is the kind of politics we want, or deserve, or can justify. This book results, quite simply, from our wish for a set of course materials that places election law, as thoroughly as possible within the constraints of a typical classroom setting, in this broader context. It is designed to provide robust support for instructors who wish to ask questions about the efficacy, justifiability, and merits of contemporary politics and politico-legal institutions.
The book provides this support primarily in two ways. First, it organizes the material and offers an account of the field in a way that stresses the conceptual connections between legal regimes structuring different phases of the democratic process. Second, it draws frequently on democratic theory and empirical political science to provide tools to help answer, or at the very least to help frame and to ask, the really significant and challenging questions about the design and justifications of contemporary American election law. At the same time, the book’s judicious selection of cases and its use of more comprehensive case excerpts than are sometimes found in law school casebooks allow it to support equally teaching approaches that stress the intensive legal analysis of doctrine.
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Lawyers in Practice: Ethical Decision Making in Context
Leslie C. Levin and Lynn M. Mather
How do lawyers resolve ethical dilemmas in the everyday context of their practice? What are the issues that commonly arise, and how do lawyers determine the best ways to resolve them? Until recently, efforts to answer these questions have focused primarily on rules and legal doctrine rather than the real-life situations lawyers face in legal practice.
The first book to present empirical research on ethical decision making in a variety of practice contexts, including corporate litigation, securities, immigration, and divorce law, Lawyers in Practice fills a substantial gap in the existing literature. Following an introduction emphasizing the increasing importance of understanding context in the legal profession, contributions focus on ethical dilemmas ranging from relatively narrow ethical issues to broader problems of professionalism, including the prosecutor’s obligation to disclose evidence, the management of conflicts of interest, and loyalty to clients and the court. Each chapter details the resolution of a dilemma from the practitioner’s point of view that is, in turn, set within a particular community of practice. Timely and practical, this book should be required reading for law students as well as students and scholars of law and society.
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Justice Perverted: Sex Offender Law, Psychology, and Public Policy
Charles Patrick Ewing
Over the past quarter century Congress, state legislatures and the courts have radically reshaped America's laws dealing with sex offenders in an effort to reduce the prevalence of sex offenses. Most convicted sex offenders must now register with the authorities, who then make information about them available to the public. Possession of child pornography has been made an extremely serious crime often punishable by prison sentences that dwarf those meted out to child molesters, rapists, robbers, and even killers. Federal law now imposes a minimum sentence of ten years in prison for those convicted of using the internet to attempt to lure minors for sex. And the federal government and 20 states have "sexually violent predator" laws that allow the indefinite civil commitment of convicted sex offenders to secure institutions for treatment after they have served their full criminal sentences.
All of these changes in sex offender law, as well as numerous others, have been based at least in part on input from psychology, psychiatry and the social sciences. Moreover, enforcement and administration of many of these laws relies to a large extent on the efforts of mental health professionals. However, many questions about this involvement remain largely unanswered. Are these laws supported by empirical evidence, or even by well-reasoned psychological theories? Do these laws actually work? Are mental health professionals capable of reliably determining an offender's future behavior, and how best to manage it? Finally, are experts capable of providing effective treatment for sex offenders -- i.e., treatment that actually reduces the likelihood that an identified sex offender will re-offend?
In Justice Perverted, Charles Patrick Ewing poses these difficult questions and others that few in either law or psychology have asked, much less tried to answer. Drawing on research from across the social and behavioral sciences, he weighs the evidence for the spectrum of sex offense laws, to occasionally surprising results. A rational look at an intensely emotional subject, Justice Perverted is an essential book for anyone interested in the science behind public practice.
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The Journey to Excellence in Legal Writing
Pamela Newell and Timothy J. Peterkin
Professors Newell and Peterkin deal thoroughly with fundamental grammar skills often overlooked in legal writing textbooks. The chapters in this text cover everything that students should learn in legal writing from spotting issues, to finding and interpreting the law, to writing either an objective or persuasive document for their client or the court. Each chapter provides exhaustive treatment of the topic. The text also provides useful examples and exercises for the reader to test his or her understanding of the topic. The Journey to Excellence in Legal Writing not only contains a thorough explication of legal writing for first-year law students. Upper-level students, practitioners, and judges will also benefit from the instruction contained in these pages. Therefore, this book is the perfect tool for all who wish to learn and improve their legal writing skills.
Through The Journey to Excellence in Legal Writing students and other readers will:
- Learn the differences between primary and secondary law, the doctrine of stare decisis, and the distinction between statutory law and case law.
- Become skilled at outlining rules in order to identify issues and craft issue statements properly.
- Gather knowledge to interpret statutes and apply case law to different factual scenarios.
- Use synthesis to compare court holdings and reasoning in fashioning a general legal principle.
- Be taught how to develop organizational skills and use grammatical rules appropriately.
- Be able to apply effective techniques in writing memoranda.
- Study the importance of ethics in correspondence to clients.
- Comprehend the power behind mediation and negotiations.
- Study the best ways to answer examination questions.
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Employment Discrimination Law: Cases and Materials on Equality in the Workplace
Dianne Avery, Maria L. Ontiveros, Roberto L. Corrada, Michael Selmi, and Melissa Hart
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Tort, Custom, and Karma: Globalization and Legal Consciousness in Thailand
David M. Engel and Jaruwan S. Engel
Diverse societies are now connected by globalization, but how do ordinary people feel about law as they cope day-to-day with a transformed world? Tort, Custom, and Karma examines how rapid societal changes, economic development, and integration into global markets have affected ordinary people's perceptions of law, with a special focus on the narratives of men and women who have suffered serious injuries in the province of Chiangmai, Thailand.
This work embraces neither the conventional view that increasing global connections spread the spirit of liberal legalism, nor its antithesis that backlash to interconnection leads to ideologies such as religious fundamentalism. Instead, it looks specifically at how a person's changing ideas of community, legal justice, and religious belief in turn transform the role of law particularly as a viable form of redress for injury. This revealing look at fundamental shifts in the interconnections between globalization, state law, and customary practices uncovers a pattern of increasing remoteness from law that deserves immediate attention.