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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Employment Discrimination Law: Cases and Materials on Equality in the Workplace
Robert Belton and Dianne Avery
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Labor and the Wartime State: The Continuing Impact of Labor Relations During World War II
James B. Atleson
The United States labor movement can credit—or blame—policies and regulations created during World War II for its current status. Focusing on the War Labor Board's treatment of arbitration, strikes, the scope of bargaining, and the contentious issue of union security, James Atleson shows how wartime necessities and language have carried over into a very different postwar world, affecting not only relations between unions and management but those between rank-and-file union members and their leaders.
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Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research
Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David M. Engel, Valerie Hans, and Susan Lawrence
Perhaps no idea is more emblematic of the field of law and society than crossing boundaries. From the founding of the Law and Society Association in the early 1960s, participating scholars aspired to create a field that crossed boundaries in at least two senses: by undertaking research that questioned and often bridged traditional methodological and disciplinary divisions, and by using nontraditional approaches to explore the interconnections between law and its social context. These essays reflect both aspirations.
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Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases
Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David M. Engel, Valerie Hans, and Susan Lawrence
Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases asks how law helps to constitute the worlds in which we live every day, and how law responds to disruptions and disputes that arise in various realms. Leading scholars explore the dichotomy between everyday practices and trouble cases, and the way various kinds of research have addressed that dichotomy, illuminating the pervasive role of law in social life as well as the capacity of law to respond to social conflict.
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Fatal Families: The Dynamics of Intrafamilial Homicide
Charles Patrick Ewing
For most Americans, regardless of where they live, the risk of being murdered is much greater in their own homes than on any main street on which they are ever likely to walk. Every year, nearly half of the more than 20,0000 homicide victims are related to or acquainted with their killers. Alcohol abuse, mental illness, and criminality figure largely in intrafamilial homicide. But, whatever the scenario behind the murder, murder within families is the most chilling and frightening of all crimes. Fatal Families examines the nature, causes, and consequences of family homicide in modern American society. Using a case study approach, author Charles Patrick Ewing explores the social, cultural, and psychological forces that lead people to kill members of their own families. Drawing on his professional background in both law and psychology, he points the way to measures that can be taken to halt the steady pace of murder within families. Examining a horrifying but necessary topic, Fatal Families will be vitally important to professionals and students in family studies, criminology, interpersonal violence, psychology, social work, and urban studies.
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Feminism, Media, and the Law
Martha A. Fineman and Martha T. McCluskey
The growing presence of women in the legal profession and the prominence of law as a site of feminist social change make the complex interrelationship between the media, feminism, and the law a critical concern across disciplines. Drawing on legal theory, cultural studies, journalism, political science, sociology, and communications, this book presents a collection of essays that explore how the media represents and constructs gender, law, and feminism. Arranged thematically, these twenty-three articles are the work of distinguished academics and activists.
The collection begins with a section on "Portrayals of Feminism in the Media", which provides historical background on the media's treatment of feminist issues. The anthology proceeds with sections entitled "Feminism, Law, and Popular Culture"; "Essentializing Gender"; and "Media Images of Violence". Giving fresh and provocative treatments to such complex and topical subjects as hate radio, Anita Hill, popular women's magazines, and the portrayal of women in film and television, Feminism, Media, and the Law is required reading for anyone interested in feminism and its relationship to the media.
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The Politics of Virtue: Is Abortion Debatable?
Elizabeth B. Mensch and Alan David Freeman
Fiercely committed to the separation of church and state, thoroughly pluralistic, largely secular: Where does a society like ours find common terms for conducting a moral debate? In view of the crises surrounding the issue of abortion, it is tempting to answer: nowhere. In this timely and provocative book, Elizabeth Mensch and Alan Freeman urge that we challenge the extremes of both the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" views of the abortion issue and affirm the moral integrity of compromise. Attempting to restore a level of complexity to the discussion and to enrich public debate so that we may move beyond our current impasse, the authors argue that it is essential to understand how issues of legal "rights" and theological concerns interact in American public debate.
Returning to the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, Mensch and Freeman detail the role of religion and its relationship to the emerging politics of abortion. Discussing primarily the natural law tradition associated with Catholicism and the Protestant ethical tradition, the authors focus most sharply on the 1960s in which the present terms of the abortion debate were set. In a skillful analysis, they identify a variety of factors that directed and shaped the debate--including, among others, the haunting legacy of Nazism, the moral challenge of the civil rights movement, the "God is dead" discourse, school prayer and Bible reading, Harvey Cox's The Secular City, the Berrigans and Vietnam, the animal rights movement, and the movement of the church-going population away from mainstream Protestant tradition toward evangelical fundamentalism. By criticizing the rhetoric employed by both the "pro-choice" and "pro-life" camps, Mensch and Freeman reveal the extent to which forces on either side of the issue have failed to respond to relevant concerns. Since Roe v. Wade, the authors charge, public debate has seemed to concede the moral high ground to the "pro-life" position, while the "pro-choice" rhetoric has appeared to defend an individual's legal right to do moral wrong. Originally published as a special issue of The Georgia Law Review (Spring 1991), this revised and expanded edition will be welcomed by all those frustrated by the impasse of debates so central to our nation's moral life.
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Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community
Judy Scales-Trent
While the "one-drop rule" in the United States dictates that people with any African ancestry are black, many black Americans have white skin. Notes of a White Black Woman is one woman's attempt to describe what it is like to be a "white" black woman and to live simultaneously inside and outside of both white and black communities.
Law professor Judy Scales-Trent begins by describing how our racial purity laws have operated over the past four hundred years. Then, in a series of autobiographical essays, she addresses how race and color interact in relationships between men and women, within families, and in the larger community. Scales-Trent ultimately explores the question of what we really mean by "race" in this country, once it is clear that race is not a tangible reality as reflected through color.
Scales-Trent uses autobiography both as a way to describe these issues and to develop a theory of the social construction of race. She explores how race and color intertwine through black and white families and across generations; how members of both black and white communities work to control group membership; and what happens to relations between black men and women when the layer of color is placed over the already difficult layer of race. She addresses how one can tell—and whether one can tell—who, indeed, is "black" or "white." Scales-Trent also celebrates the richness of her bicultural heritage and shows how she has revised her teaching methods to provide her law students with a multicultural education.
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American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science
John Henry Schlegel
John Henry Schlegel recovers a largely ignored aspect of American Legal Realism, a movement in legal thought in the 1920s and 1930s that sought to bring the modern notion of empirical science into the study and teaching of law. In this book, he explores individual Realist scholars' efforts to challenge the received notion that the study of law was primarily a matter of learning rules and how to manipulate them. He argues that empirical research was integral to Legal Realism, and he explores why this kind of research did not, finally, become a part of American law school curricula. Schlegel reviews the work of several prominent Realists but concentrates on the writings of Walter Wheeler Cook, Underhill Moore, and Charles E. Clark. He reveals how their interest in empirical research was a product of their personal and professional circumstances and demonstrates the influence of John Dewey's ideas on the expression of that interest. According to Schlegel, competing understandings of the role of empirical inquiry contributed to the slow decline of this kind of research by professors of law.
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Law and Community in Three American Towns
Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel
Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation's social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns—located in New England, the Midwest, and the South—view the law, courts, litigants, and social order.
Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," “Sander County,” and “Hopewell” interpret litigation as a sign of social decline, but they also value law as a symbol of their local way of life. The book focuses on this ambivalence and relates it to the deeply-felt tensions express between “community” and “rights” as rival bases of society.
The authors, two anthropologists and a lawyer, each with an understanding of a particular region, were surprised to discover that such different locales produced parallel findings. They undertook a comparative project to find out why ambivalence toward the law and law use should be such a common refrain. The answer, they believe, turns out to be less a matter of local traditions than of the ways that people perceive the patterns of their lives as being vulnerable to external forces of change.
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The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870
Robert J. Steinfeld
Examining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor--labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon--Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labor agreements punishable by imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, traditional legal restrictions no longer applied to many kinds of colonial workers, but it was not until the nineteenth century that indentured servitude came to be regarded as similar to slavery.
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Kids Who Kill
Charles Patrick Ewing
There is a new breed of killers loose in America today -- and its numbers are growing at an astounding rate. They are responsible for over ten percent of the nation's homicides. They are often victims themselves of neglect, violence and sexual abuse, of drugs and poverty. They murder alone or in groups -- in anger and frustration, for attention . . . or for thrills. And they have one thing in common: they are all children.
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Treaty Conflict and Political Contradiction: The Dialectic of Duplicity
Guyora Binder
One of the first books generated by the new and controversial movement in jurisprudence known as critical legal studies, this superbly written volume explores the problem of treaty conflict in international law: the legal consequences of inconsistent commitments by one nation to two or more others. The author uses this problem as a prism through which he focuses a number of major theoretical issues in international law and international relations. The result is a pathbreaking intellectual history of international law--one grounded in an account of the changing structure of international society and illustrated with a cogent analysis of recent events in the Middle East. Certain to stand as the definitive reference work on treaty conflict, Binder's work provides students and scholars of international relations with an illuminating survey of theories of the state and treaty in international jurisprudence.
