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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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.
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New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law: Dual Enforcement of Norms
James A. Gardner and Jim Rossi
New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law: Dual Enforcement of Norms, edited by James A. Gardner and Jim Rossi, projects a new vision for state constitutional law through a collection of essays that reflect a shift in legal thinking about the relationship between national and subnational systems of constitutional law. This work charts a new course that gives voice to a recent, rising chorus of dissent among scholars and judges, namely that national and subnational systems of constitutional law cannot be adequately understood in isolation from one another. To the contrary, they are linked in a web of jurisprudential, social, and pragmatic connections structured by the American system of federalism. Here, multiple layers of constitutional law function together in a complex, interdependent process in which constitutional norms are developed, articulated, and enforced.
The essays illuminate the role that state constitutions must play in any theory of federalism, and exemplify a fresh approach to state constitutionalism by discussing a range of issues, including recent debates regarding state constitutional protections for same-sex marriage.
The entire work embraces the struggle between state and national power for dominance in American law and places both on equal ground. It contends that constitutional meaning in a federal system is never static and that it evolves over time. In addition to covering methods of judicial review, it discusses the handling of constitutional claims by courts at the state and national level and closely examines the way that courts and constitutions protect individual rights in a federal system.
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Intellectual Property: Private Rights, the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity
Shubha Ghosh, Richard Gruner, Jay P. Kesan, and Robert I. Reis
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International Economic Law and National Autonomy
Meredith Kolsky Lewis and Susy Frankel
International commitments may sit uneasily with national pressures in the best of times. This age of economic uncertainty brings these tensions into sharper relief. This volume draws together thirteen analyses of this tension in a wide array of contexts, including each of the three main pillars of the World Trade Organization, international investment law and arbitration, and the international financial institutions. The essays feature internationally recognised experts addressing topical examples of international economic law obligations clashing with domestic political interests. For example, Professor Robert Howse, of New York University Law School, addresses issues of globalization and whether international and national interests can in today's world be considered separate, while Ko-Yung Tung, the former Director-General of the World Bank, looks at trends in investment treaty arbitration and considers what the future may hold in light of the recent financial crisis, the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, and other factors.
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International Business Law
Bryan Mercurio, Leon Trakman, Meredith Kolsky Lewis, and Bruno Zeller
International Business Law provides thorough coverage of the major legal issues affecting Australian businesses involved in international trade, enabling students to understand both the law itself and its applications. The authors have combined a range of case extracts and other materials with incisive commentary to create a student-friendly textbook that is Australia-specific, but with international applications.
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Deploying Ourselves: Islamist Violence, Globalization, and the Responsible Projection of U.S. Force
David A. Westbrook
In Deploying Ourselves, David A. Westbrook puts the case for major reform of US national security. He argues that today's national security establishment is outdated and entrenched in a model of defence more befitting the post-World War II Cold War era than today's realities. In a world without military peers, Westbrook argues, the US must re-create its institutions in order to wield influence globally, based on co-operation with other states and groups. Deploying Ourselves includes specific proposals to make US national security institutions more democratically accountable.
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Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets
David A. Westbrook
Former Federal Reserve chair Greenspan recently said that the risk management paradigm is broken; thus our understanding of financial regulation no longer makes sense. More generally, the current financial crisis obliges us to rethink the relationships among "financial markets" and "governments." In Out of Crisis financial analyst David Westbrook illuminates the intellectual, business, and policy errors that have led us into the present morass. Through a vivid legal and political analysis he shows how the ideologies of the right and left have distorted financial thinking and policy. Learning from these errors, the book sketches the emergence of a new understanding of risk management and bureaucratic regulation. Out of Crisis begins the tasks of rethinking the structures that constitute financial markets and exploring how such structures may be strengthened. Taking responsibility for the markets we build to do so much of our society's work, we may yet become mature capitalists.
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Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine
Irus Braverman
Planted Flags tells an extraordinary story about the mundane uses of law and landscape in the war between Israelis and Palestinians. The book is structured around the two dominant tree landscapes in Israel/Palestine: pine forests and olive groves. The pine tree, which is usually associated with the Zionist project of afforesting the Promised Land, is contrasted with the olive tree, which Palestinians identify as a symbol of their steadfast connection to the land. What is it that makes these seemingly innocuous, even natural, acts of planting, cultivating, and uprooting trees into acts of war? How is this war reflected, mediated, and, above all, reinforced through the polarization of the natural landscape into two juxtaposed landscapes? And what is the role of law in this story? Planted Flags explores these questions through an ethnographic study. By telling the story of trees through the narratives of military and government officials, architects, lawyers, Palestinian and Israeli farmers, and Jewish settlers, the seemingly static and mute landscape assumes life, expressing the cultural, economic, and legal dynamics that constantly shape and reshape it.
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Supplement to Wetlands: Law and Policy: Understanding Section 404
Kim Diana Connolly and Stephen M. Johnson
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Fault Lines: Tort Law as Cultural Practice
David M. Engel and Michael McCann
Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation.
Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.
