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.
-
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.
-
Intellectual Property: Private Rights, the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity
Shubha Ghosh, Richard Gruner, Jay P. Kesan, and Robert I. Reis
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Supplement to Wetlands: Law and Policy: Understanding Section 404
Kim Diana Connolly and Stephen M. Johnson
-
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.
-
What are Campaigns For? The Role of Persuasion In Electoral Law and Politics
James A. Gardner
Election campaigns ought to be serious occasions in the life of a democratic polity. For citizens of a democracy, an election is a time to take stock-to reexamine our beliefs; to review our understanding of our own interests; to ponder the place of those interests in the larger social order; and to contemplate, and if necessary to revise, our understanding of how our commitments are best translated into governmental policy-or so we profess to believe.
Americans, however, are haunted by the fear that our election campaigns fall far short of the ideal to which we aspire. The typical modern American election campaign seems crass, shallow, and unengaging. The arena of our democratic politics seems to lie in an uncomfortable chasm between our political ideals and everyday reality.
What Are Campaigns For? is a multidisciplinary work of legal scholarship that examines the role of legal institutions in constituting the disjunction between political ideal and reality. The book explores the contemporary American ideal of democratic citizenship in election campaigns by tracing it to its historical sources, documenting its thorough infiltration of legal norms, evaluating its feasibility in light of the findings of empirical social science, and testing it against the requirements of democratic theory.
-
Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession
Robert Granfield and Lynn M. Mather
This collection of original essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field examines the history, conditions, organization, and strategies of pro bono lawyering. Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession traces the rise and impact of the American Bar Association's campaign to hold lawyers accountable for a commitment to public service and to encourage public service within law schools. Combining empirical legal research with reflections by practitioners and theorists about the meaning and practice of pro bono legal work, this collection of essays interrogates the public service ideals that are inscribed within the legal profession and places these ideals within a broader social, economic, ideological, and normative context. Particular attention is paid to the factors that explain why lawyers engage in pro bono work and the ways in which their views of pro bono are mediated by the institutional context of their legal practice. The book also explores the concept of "public" in public service and compares pro bono as a means of delivering legal services with other mechanisms such as state funding. Collectively, these essays investigate the evolving role of pro bono in the legal profession and in law schools, the relationship between pro bono ideals and pro bono in practice, the way that pro bono is shaped by external forces beyond the individual practitioner, and the multi-faceted nature of legal professionalism as expressed through pro bono practice.
-
North Carolina Appellate Law: A Guide to the North Carolina Appellate Rule
Pamela Newell
This Guide is not only easy to navigate, but also simple to understand. It will be welcomed by law professors and novice appellate attorneys all over North Carolina as a thorough, practical instruction manual on how to file or respond to an appeal in accordance with the Rules of Appellate Procedure. Existing texts are designed primarily to be a universal guide on persuasive writing and advocacy but lack specific references to the local requirements and corresponding North Carolina court decisions on this topic.
Professor Williams has drawn on her extensive experience and anticipated questions that may be asked by a student or advocate of appellate law. Corresponding case references provide the reader with context. An extra tool is a thorough appendix with superb examples of appellate documents. This book is a must-have for any practicing, studying and/or interested in appellate law!
-
International Labor Law: Cases and Materials on Workers' Rights in the Global Economy
James B. Atleson, Lance Compa, Kerry Rittich, Calvin William Sharpe, and Marley S. Weiss
-
Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law
Charles Patrick Ewing
The insanity defense is one of the oldest fixtures of the Anglo-American legal tradition. Though it is available to people charged with virtually any crime, and is often employed without controversy, homicide defendants who raise the insanity defense are often viewed by the public and even the legal system as trying to get away with murder. Often it seems that legal result of an insanity defense is unpredictable, and is determined not by the defendants mental state, but by their lawyers and psychologists influence.
From the thousands of murder cases in which defendants have claimed insanity, Doctor Ewing has chosen ten of the most influential and widely varied. Some were successful in their insanity plea, while others were rejected. Some of the defendants remain household names years after the fact, like Jack Ruby, while others were never nationally publicized. Regardless of the circumstances, each case considered here was extremely controversial, hotly contested, and relied heavily on lengthy testimony by expert psychologists and psychiatrists. Several of them played a major role in shaping the criminal justice system as we know it today.
In this book, Ewing skillfully conveys the psychological and legal drama of each case, while providing important and fresh professional insights. For the legal or psychological professional, as well as the interested reader, Insanity will take you into the minds of some of the most incomprehensible murderers of our age.
-
Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook
Charles Patrick Ewing
A fascinating collection of ten high-profile cases illustrating the controversial, often contentious-yet essential-role of forensic psychology in the American justice system.
Written by psychologist and lawyer Charles Patrick Ewing, one of the country's leading experts on forensic psychology, Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook is a scholarly, thought-provoking collection of cases from the author's three decades of professional experience. Bringing to life the psychological and legal details of each case as well as the personal stories involved, this volume insightfully covers those issues facing forensic psychologists, including:
- Ability to Waive Miranda Rights
- Coerced Confessions
- The Insanity Defense
- Malingering
- Battered Woman Syndrome
- Evaluating Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse
- The Implications of Extreme Emotional Disturbance
Informative, compelling, and educational, each of the ten cases presented in Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook offers a rare glimpse at the work of forensic psychologists, how forensic psychologists are examined in court, the ways in which their expertise is used by the legal system, and the contributions they make to the system's ultimate goal of doing justice.
-
Human Rights NGOS in East Africa: Political and Normative Tensions
Makau wa Mutua
Human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are by definition not part of the state. Rather, they are an element of civil society, the strands of the fabric of organized life in countries, and crucial to the prospect of political democracy. Civil society is a very recent phenomenon in East African nations, where authoritarian regimes have prevailed and human rights watchdogs have had a critical role to play. While the state remains one of the major challenges to human rights efforts in the countries of the region, other problems that are internal to the human rights movement are also of a serious nature, and they are many: What are the social bases of the human rights enterprise in transitional societies? What mandate can human rights NGOs claim, and in whose name do they operate?
Human Rights NGOs in East Africa critically explores the anatomy of the human rights movement in the East African region, examining its origins, challenges, and emergent themes in the context of political transitions. In particular, the book seeks to understand the political and normative challenges that face this young but vibrant civil society in the vortex of globalization. The book brings together the most celebrated human rights thinkers in East Africa, enriched by contributions from their colleagues in South Africa and the United States.
To date, very little has been written about the struggles and accomplishments of civil society in the nations of East Africa. This book will fill that gap and prove to be an invaluable tool for understanding and teaching about human rights in this complex and vital part of the world.
-
Kenya's Quest for Democracy: Taming Leviathan
Makau wa Mutua
Tracing the trajectory of postcolonial politics, Makau Mutua maps the political forces that have shaped contemporary Kenya. He also critically explores efforts on the part of both civil society and the political opposition to reform the state. Analyzing the tortuous efforts since independence to create a sustainable, democratic state, he uses the struggle over constitutional reform as a window for understanding the larger struggles confronting Kenyan society.
-
Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters
David A. Westbrook
As the image of anthropologists exploring exotic locales and filling in blanks on the map has faded, the idea that cultural anthropology has much to say about the contemporary world has likewise diminished. In an increasingly smaller world, how can anthropology help us to tackle the concerns of a global society? David A. Westbrook argues that the traditional tool of the cultural anthropologist—ethnography—can still function as an intellectually exciting way to understand our interconnected, yet mysterious worlds.
Navigators of the Contemporary describes the changing nature of ethnography as anthropologists use it to analyze places closer to home. Westbrook maintains that a conversational style of ethnography can help us look beyond our assumptions and gain new insight into arenas of contemporary life such as corporations, financial institutions, science, the military, and religion. Westbrook’s witty, absorbing book is a friendly challenge to anthropologists to shed light on the present and join broader streams of intellectual life. And for those outside the discipline, his inspiring vision of ethnography opens up the prospect of understanding our own world in much greater depth.
-
Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy
James A. Gardner
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.
-
Intellectual Property: Private Rights, the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity
Shubha Ghosh, Richard Gruner, Jay P. Kesan, and Robert I. Reis
