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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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.
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Collective Bargaining in Private Employment: Unit One of Labor Relations & Social Problems: A Course Book
James B. Atleson, Robert J. Rabin, George Schatzke, and Eileen Silverstein
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Empirical Theories About Courts
Keith O. Boyum and Lynn M. Mather
The classic and groundbreaking study of trial courts and other dispute processes — and foundational ways to think about researching them — is now available in a modern digital edition. It is edited by Professors Keith O. Boyum and Lynn Mather, and contains chapters from the leading theorists about courts and their research.
Much cited and relevant today in how it frames the analysis of courts, this book’s new republication features an additional Introduction and Afterword by the editors, with updates, and anew Foreword by Christina L. Boyd. As Boyd writes, “For nearly all civil and criminal cases the traditional model of court as a judge-dominated, formal adversary process of adjudication does not hold. What exists instead … is so variable, complex, and dynamic that a proper study of courts must return to first principles. And that is precisely what an all-star list of interdisciplinary court scholars, many of whom have established storied careers as trial court experts, does so well within the chapters of this book.” She adds: “I find the text to be very contemporary. Empirical Theories About Courts’ design to focus on theory building rather than simply examining discrete datasets or engaging in data mining of a single set of observations is a key factor in the book’s longevity.”
For the new digital edition, quality ebook features includes linked Contents and notes, fully linked and paginated Index, proper formatting, and all of the tables and figures of the original properly presented. The paperback edition includes the updating new material and modern presentation. Part of the Classics of Law & Society Series from Quid Pro Books.
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The Papers of Daniel Webster: Legal Papers, Volume 2: The Boston Practice
Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King
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The Papers of Daniel Webster: Legal Papers, Volume 1: The New Hampshire Practice
Alfred S. Konefsky and Andrew J. King
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Labor Relations and Social Problems: A Course Book: Unit 1: Collective Bargaining in Private Employment
James B. Atleson, Robert J. Rabin, George Schatzke, and Eileen Silverstein
