DigitalCommons@UM Carey Law

Civil Disobedience and the German Courts: the Pershing Missile Protests in Comparative Perspective

Peter E. Quint

In the 1980s the West German Peace Movement -- fearing that the stationing of NATO nuclear missiles in Germany threatened an imminent nuclear war in Europe -- engaged in massive protests, including sustained civil disobedience in the form of sit-down demonstrations. Civil Disobedience and the German Courts traces the historical and philosophical background of this movement and follows a group of demonstrators through their trials in the German criminal courts up to the German Constitutional Court -- in which their fate was determined in two important constitutional cases. In this context, the volume also analyzes the German Constitutional Court, as a crucial institution of government, in comparative perspective. The book is the first full-length English language treatment of these events and these constitutional decisions, and it also places the decisions at an important turning-point in German constitutional history.

Resolving Family Conflicts

Jana B. Singer and Jane Murphy

Over the past two decades, virtually all areas of family law have undergone major doctrinal and theoretical changes - from the definition of marriage, to the financial and parenting consequences of divorce, to the legal construction of parenthood. An equally important set of changes has transformed the resolution of family disputes. This 'paradigm shift' in family conflict resolution has reshaped the practice of family law and has fundamentally altered the way in which disputing families interact with the legal system. Moreover, the changes have important implications for the way that family law is understood and taught. This volume examines the contours of this paradigm shift in family conflict resolution and explores its implications for family law scholarship and practice. The interdisciplinary compilation includes contributions from lawyers, legal academics, social scientists and mental health professionals. As the articles in the volume demonstrate, the transformation in family conflict resolution holds considerable promise for disputing families, but it also raises a number of challenges. These challenges include concerns about the institutional competence of courts, the surrender of fact-finding and decision-making to individuals without legal training, the loss of autonomy and privacy for family members subject to continuing court oversight and the disjunction between problem-solving justice and authoritative legal norms. By exploring both the promise of the new paradigm and its potential pitfalls, this volume engages family law scholars and offers insights to judges, practitioners and policy makers responsible for serving families in conflict.

Tort Law: Cases, Perspectives, and Problems. 4th edition

Thomas C. Galligan, Phoebe A. Haddon, Frank L. Maraist, Frank M. McClellan, Michael Rustad, Nicolas P. Terry, and Stephanie M. Wildman

The Fourth Edition of this unique casebook has been dramatically revised. This new edition presents the important cases, statutes, empirical data, and competing tort theories in a problems-oriented format that is designed to help students acquire a sophisticated understanding of tort law through active learning. As before, the text includes a large number of problems Now, however, the Problems, updated and considerably expanded, are organized in Sets at the end of each substantive chapter. This extensively re-written and reorganized edition includes the classic common law torts cases, but is updated throughout with teachable, cutting-edge decisions that will demand student interest and hold their attention. Particular care has been to take account of the most recent commentaries on tort law, such as the growing importance of the Restatement (Third) of Torts.

Legal Negotiation: Theory and Practice, 2d edition

Donald G. Gifford

This edition of the classic negotiation text includes an extensive teacher's manual packed with simulation problems and other classroom exercises. It is specifically designed to teach students how to negotiate in the actual practice of law but derived from the ongoing research of social science, law, and business school scholars. Sample dialogue illustrates specific negotiation tactics. It includes discussion of both the influence of race, gender, and nationality on the bargaining process and alternative dispute resolution processes.

On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century

Sherrilyn A. Ifill

Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill's On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious.

On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today.

Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects of racial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue.

A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching's long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.
In the Media:

Mother Earth and Uncle Sam: How Pollution and Hollow Government Hurt our Kids

Rena I. Steinzor

In this compelling study, Rena Steinzor highlights the ways in which the government, over the past twenty years, has failed to protect children from harm caused by toxic chemicals. She believes these failures—under-funding, excessive and misguided use of cost/benefit analysis, distortion of science, and devolution of regulatory authority—have produced a situation in which harm that could be reduced or eliminated instead persists.

Steinzor states that, as a society, we are neglecting our children's health to an extent that we would find unthinkable as individual parents, primarily due to the erosion of the government's role in protecting public health and the environment. At this pace, she asserts, our children will inherit a planet under grave threat. We can arrest these developments if a critical mass of Americans become convinced that these problems are urgent and the solutions are near at hand.

By focusing on three specific case studies—mercury contamination through the human food chain, perchlorate (rocket fuel) in drinking water, and the effects of ozone (smog) on children playing outdoors—Steinzor creates an analysis grounded in law, economics, and science to prove her assertions about the existing dysfunctional system.

Steinzor then recommends a concise and realistic series of reforms that could reverse these detrimental trends and serve as a blueprint for restoring effective governmental intervention. She argues that these recommendations offer enough material to guide government officials and advocacy groups toward prompt implementation, for the sake of America's—and the world's—future generations.

Constitutional Law: Cases, History, and Dialogues, 3rd edition

William D. Araiza, Phoebe A. Haddon, and Dorothy E. Roberts

One of this book's distinguishing features is its series of Dialogues in which the authors debate issues relevant to the cases. In the Dialogues the authors engage both each other and the cases, and in doing so reveal their own and the Justices' methodological, ideological, and policy assumptions. Students benefit from having this information as they form their own opinions about the doctrine. The Dialogues also provide a starting point for more insightful class discussions, by presenting the material in the context of the authors' viewpoints.

Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil

Mark A. Graber

Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil concerns what is entailed by pledging allegiance to a constitutional text and tradition saturated with concessions to evil. The Constitution of the United States was originally understood as an effort to mediate controversies between persons who disputed fundamental values, and did not offer a vision of the good society. In order to form a "more perfect union" with slaveholders, late-eighteenth-century citizens fashioned a constitution that plainly compelled some injustices and was silent or ambiguous on other questions of fundamental right. This constitutional relationship could survive only as long as a bisectional consensus was required to resolve all constitutional questions not settled in 1787. Dred Scott challenges persons committed to human freedom to determine whether antislavery northerners should have provided more accommodations for slavery than were constitutionally strictly necessary or risked the enormous destruction of life and property that preceded Lincoln's new birth of freedom.

Screening Justice - The Cinema of Law: Significant Films of Law, Order and Social Justice

Rennard Strickland, Teree Foster, and Taunya L. Banks

Screening Justice is designed to tell the complex story of law through an exploration of forty films focusing upon courtroom dramas, social issues and questions of justice. These motion pictures are evaluated by distinguished scholars who, using a range of narrative styles, compare the law on the screen and the law in action. The work serves as a guide to understanding law, the rhetoric of law and images of justice. The book will introduce readers to new films as well as help create new perspectives on familiar classic movies.

Rescuing Science from Politics: Regulation and the Distortion of Scientific Research

Wendy E. Wagner and Rena I. Steinzor

Rescuing Science from Politics debuts chapters by the nation's leading academics in law, science, and philosophy who explore ways that the law can be abused by special interests to intrude on the way scientists conduct research. The high stakes and adversarial features of regulation create the worst possible climate for the honest production and use of science especially by those who will ultimately bear the cost of the resulting regulatory standards. Yet an in-depth exploration of the ways in which dominant interest groups distort the available science to support their positions has received little attention in the academic or popular literature. The book begins by establishing non-controversial principles of good scientific practice. These principles then serve as the benchmark against which each chapter author compares how science is misused in a specific regulatory setting and assist in isolating problems in the integration of science by the regulatory process.

Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture

Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams

What is the price of a limb? A child? Ethnicity? Love? In a world that is often ruled by buyers and sellers, those things that are often considered priceless become objects to be marketed and from which to earn a profit. Ranging from black market babies to exploitative sex trade operations to the marketing of race and culture, Rethinking Commodification presents an interdisciplinary collection of writings, including legal theory, case law, and original essays to reexamine the traditional legal question: ̶To commodify or not to commodify?”

In this pathbreaking course reader, Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams present the legal cases and theories that laid the groundwork for traditional critiques of commodification, which tend to view the process as dehumanizing because it reduces all human interactions to economic transactions. This “canonical” section is followed by a selection of original essays that present alternative views of commodification based on the concept that commodification can have diverse meanings in a variety of social contexts. When viewed in this way, the commodification debate moves beyond whether or not commodification is good or bad, and is assessed instead on the quality of the social relationships and wider context that is involved in the transaction. Rethinking Commodification contains an excellent array of contemporary issues, including intellectual property, reparations for slavery, organ transplants, and sex work; and an equally stellar array of contributors, including Richard Posner, Margaret Jane Radin, Regina Austin, and many others.

The Full Faith and Credit Clause: a Reference Guide to the United States Constitution

William L. Reynolds and William M. Richman

This work examines all the aspects of the Full Faith and Credit Clause and its importance in the development of United States law. It begins with the birth of the clause and the history underlying its adoption. This includes discussions held at the Constitutional Convention and the early judicial interpretations of the clause. The book looks separately at the individual components that embody the clause--those that deal with records, public acts, and judicial proceedings. The book also zeroes in on the relationship between the clause and the issues of family law. It covers marriage, divorce, support, and child custody, all issues that have demanded serious attention in recent years.

The New Progressive Agenda for Protecting Public Health and the Environment

Christopher Schroeder and Rena I. Steinzor

This book re-imagines federal policy in the areas of health, safety, and the environment with particular focus on the regulatory process. It identifies the failings of the current approach to regulation and proposes innovative, straightforward, and practical solutions for the 21st Century. The book is a collaboration among the Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Regulation.

Patent Infringement Remedies

Lawrence M. Sung

An accurate determination of patent infringement liability, whether during litigation or as part of pre-litigation risk management and business decision making, depends on not only the probability of infringement, but also the potential damages exposure. Accordingly, a keen understanding of the applicable patent infringement remedies and their quantitative measure is critical to both patent owners and competitors alike to establish an informed calculus of prudent business options in the litigation settlement and litigation avoidance contexts.

Privileges and Immunities: a Reference Guide to the United States Constitution

David S. Bogen

The privileges and immunities clauses in the U.S. Constitution forbids one state from discriminating against citizens of another state with respect to privileges and immunities that state affords its own citizens. Of course, the history, interpretation, and rulings on Article IV and the Fourteenth Amendment are much more nuanced and controversial. Bogen details the origins and development of the concept of privileges and immunities, and provides an in-depth analysis of the symbiotic relationship between Article IV and the Fourteenth Amendment, detailing the current understanding of the clauses as reflected in the decisions of the Supreme Court. The author concludes by arguing that the tension between the Framers' intent to protect fundamental human rights and the Court's current confused and inappropriate use of rights language may be resolved by applying customary international human rights to the states. An extensive bibliographic essay and a table of cases are provided to guide further reading on the topic.

First Amendment Law: Cases, Comparative Perspectives, and Dialogues

Donald E. Lively, William D. Araiza, Phoebe A. Haddon, John Knechtle, and Dorothy E. Roberts

American Probate: Protecting the Public, Improving the Process

Paula A. Monopoli

New Hampshire judge and probate attorney John Fairbanks, a court-appointed executor and trustee, stole thousands of dollars from the estates of his trusting elderly clients. Successful Virginia lawyer David Murray misappropriated nearly four million dollars from estates entrusted to him in one of the largest financial swindles by a lawyer in U.S. history. Enterprising attorney James Gunderson drafted wills and living trusts for many residents of Leisure World in Orange County, California, who named him the sole trustee and major beneficiary.

These are just some of the cases examined by Paula A. Monopoli to illustrate the unsettling prevalence of fraud and abuse inherent in American probate law. Probate courts are intended to provide a vehicle for the orderly disposition of property after death, to balance the interests of creditors, the government, and heirs, and to protect the rights of the elderly and others with special needs. In this insightful work, Monopoli shows how an array of flaws in the system allows corrupt and unethical lawyers to take advantage of the nation's most vulnerable citizens. She delves into such subjects as the history and purpose of probate, procedural complexities, lack of regulatory oversight, inadequate judicial resources, and the growth of non-probate alternatives, concluding with a blueprint for reform that emphasizes deterrence, detection, and compensation for the victims.

This informative account casts new light on the intricacies and failures of a legal process that affects millions of Americans every year.

Judicial Process in a Nutshell

William L. Reynolds

Explores the process by which American judges decide cases and analyzes questions involving common-law adjudication and statutory interpretation. Additional subjects are touched upon, such as constitutional decision making and problems concerning the trial of issues.

Cases and Materials on the Law of Torts, 4th edition

Harry Shulman, Fleming James, Oscar S. Gray, and Donald G. Gifford

The opinions included in this law school casebook are designed for teaching case analysis and the social and economics consequences of legal decisions. Enough of the majority, and often the dissent opinion is presented to illustrate how the case fits with precedents and allows students to evaluate the arguments on either side of the case. It emphasizes accidents and the role of fault in society's management of their costs, and the historical basis for modern torts doctrines. It details intentional torts and a wide range of other non-accident wrongs.

Conflict of Laws: Cases, Materials and Problems

David H. Vernon, Louise Weinberg, William L. Reynolds, and William M. Richman

Conflicts courses have become increasingly important to preparation for a sophisticated practice of law, whether in counseling or litigation. Because modern Conflicts law is undergoing significant and complex changes in many states, the authors include new discussions of emerging areas, notably international aspects of conflicts of laws and Internet jurisdiction. Further reflecting the fact that the Second Restatement has become the dominant choice-of-law methodology in over half the states, this new edition contains an extensively revised and supplemented treatment of those provisions.

Protecting the Human Rights of Religious Minorities in Eastern Europe

Peter G. Danchin and Elizabeth A. Cole

The ousting of the communist regimes has not guaranteed the protection of human rights. The historical reality is that discrimination against minority religious and ethnic groups is often part of a broader monolithic nationalism. As official atheism is replaced by varying models of church-state arrangements, how much will the rule of law prevail against resurgent nationalism and intolerance toward minorities? These nineteen essays consider this question. The authors represent eleven countries (four essays discuss Western Europe ) and include theologians, political and social scientists, legal scholars, and human rights professionals. Whether considering Bulgaria's policy toward Muslims or Christian-Jewish dialogue in Poland, these provocative essays shed new light on human rights in a globalizing world.

Marbury versus Madison: Documents and Commentary

Mark A. Graber and Michael Perhac

Marbury versus Madison combines documents and analytical essays timed for the bicentennial year (2003) of one of the most important Supreme Court cases. This timely collection will explain:

• the constitutional, political, philosophical background to judicial review
• the historical record leading to this landmark case
• the impact of the decision since 1803
• its impact on the world stage, especially for new and emerging democratic nations.

Also includes a listing of all the Supreme Court cases citing Marbury an an annotated Marbury v. Madison.

Understanding Conflict of Laws

William M. Richman and William L. Reynolds

This Understanding treatise provides authoritative and comprehensive explanations of major theories and leading cases covered in Conflict of Laws courses. A family law chapter includes substantial new material on federal legislative responses to the serious problem of child support enforcement. Understanding Conflict of Laws also includes a new section on cyberspace jurisdiction.

Der Vereinigungsschock: Vergleichende Betrachtungen zehn Jahre danach

Wolfgang Schluchter and Peter E. Quint

Constitutional process: a social choice analysis of Supreme Court decision making

Maxwell L. Stearns