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Foreign Rights: Available Now: LawCommunities and Law by Gad Barzilai Courting Failure by Lynn M. LoPucki Eat What You Kill by Milton C. Regan, Jr. It's Legal but It Ain't Right edited by Nikos Passas Transformation and Trouble by Diana Gordon Transformative Justice by Leora Y. Bilsky With All Deliberate Speed by Norman I. Silber Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal IdentitiesGad Barzilai Rights: World Communities and Law looks at minorities, or nonruling communities, and their identity practices under state domination in the midst of globalization. It examines six sociopolitical dimensions of community—nationality, social stratification, gender, religion, ethnicity, and legal consciousness—within the communitarian context and through their respective legal cultures. Gad Barzilai addresses such questions as: What is a communal legal culture, and what is its relevance for relations between state and society in the midst of globalization? How do nonliberal communal legal cultures interact with transnational American-led liberalism? Is current liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, litigation, and adjudication, sufficient to protect pluralism and multiculturalism? Why should democracies encourage the collective rights of nonruling communities and protect nonliberal communal cultures in principle and in practice? He looks at Arab-Palestinians, feminists, and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel as examples of the types of communities discussed. Communities and Law contributes to our understanding of the severe tensions between democracies, on the one hand, and the challenge of their minority communities, on the other, and suggests a path toward resolving the resulting critical issues. Gad Barzilai is Professor of Political Science and Law and Co-Director of the Law, Politics and Society Program, Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University. August 2003 Courting Failure: How Competition for Big Cases Is Corrupting the Bankruptcy CourtsLynn M. LoPucki Rights: World Courting Failure is potentially a blockbuster. Lynn LoPucki, Security Pacific Bank Professor of Law at UCLA, has collected evidence that the American bankruptcy system is profoundly corrupt, and that this corruption has directly led to the major corporate failures of the last decade, including Enron, MCI, WorldCom, and Global Crossing. LoPucki and his colleagues have collected data on almost every major American corporate bankruptcy case of the last 100 years. The author has now boiled this data down into a very concise and surprisingly readable analysis of the impact of "forum shopping," a practice in which corporations carefully select the venue for their bankruptcy proceedings based on their estimation of which court will offer the most favorable outcome. The courts, in turn, have been lured by the enormous court fees, prestige, and local revenue that flow from these cases into "streamlining" their requirements, effectively lowering their standards in order to compete for the most lucrative cases. The result has been a series of increasingly shoddy plans for the reorganization of major American corporations, proposed by greedy corporate executives and authorized by case-hungry judges. In theory, reorganizations are supposed to help cash-poor businesses stay in operation by postponing payments on debt. But LoPucki presents compelling data showing that the pressures of court competition have encouraged specific courts, and even individual judges, to authorize plans that are really designed to postpone debt in order to enrich corporate (and personal) coffers. Worse yet, because these plans were never intended to keep their companies afloat, they have a very high failure rate. The result is corporate insolvency, layoffs, the devaluation of employee and retiree stock options, huge losses to creditors and small investors alike—the story of Enron, and Polaroid, and Continental Airlines, and a host of other big-name American companies. Courting Failure ruthlessly uncovers this story, showing how competition has corrupted the courts and made further Enron-like scandals inevitable. Lynn M. LoPucki is Security Bank Professor of Law at UCLA Law School. Spring 2005 Eat What You Kill: The Fall of a Wall Street LawyerMilton C. Regan, Jr. Rights: World Eat What You Kill is the story of the rise and fall of John Gellene, a bankruptcy partner at one of Wall Street's most venerable law firms. Gellene was disbarred after becoming embroiled in a complex web of conflicting interests. Author Milton Regan Jr. uses Gellene's case to prove that such conflicts now pervade the world of American corporate finance. Through careful journalistic work and sharp psychological insight, Regan spins Gellene's case into a gripping dramatization of fundamental tensions in modern-day corporate practice. Regan uses this story to describe in perfect miniature the inexorable confluence of the interests of American corporations and their legal counselors. This confluence may seem natural enough, but because these prestigious law firms serve multiple clients—corporations, venture capitalists, shareholder groups—it has paradoxically led to deep, systematic conflicts of interest. Eat What You Kill gives us the story of a man trapped in this labyrinth, and excavates the individual and systemic factors that contributed to Gellene's demise. Milton C. Regan, Jr., is Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. October 2004 It's Legal but It Ain't Right: Harmful Social Consequences of Legal IndustriesNikos Passas, Editor Rights: World In It's Legal but It Ain't Right, a wide range of scholars, journalists, and policy analysts examine the "lawful but awful" practices that populate the gray area between legality and morality. Many U.S. corporations and the goods they produce negatively impact our society without breaking any laws. We are all too familiar with the tobacco industry's effect on public health and health care costs for smokers and nonsmokers, as well as the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry's research priorities. It's Legal but It Ain't Right tackles these issues, plus the ethical ambiguities of legalized gambling, the firearms trade, the fast food industry, the pesticide industry, private security companies, and more. Aiming to identify industries and goods that undermine our societal values and hold them accountable for their actions, this collection makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of ethics in our time. This accessible exploration of corporate legitimacy and crime will be important reading for advocates, journalists, students, and anyone interested in the dichotomy between law and legitimacy. Niko Passas is Assistant Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northwestern University. Neva Goodwin is Co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. October 2004 Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and SovereigntyPaul Kahn Rights: World In the midst of agonizing debates over sanctioned and unsanctioned U.S. use of terror in Iraq and Guantanamo, Paul W. Kahn weighs in with the theory that as long as there are states founded on sovereignty, and in particular as long as there is terror, there will be torture. According to Kahn, the dominant liberal theory of the state premised on a consensual social contract (and which treats the use of force either domestically or against foreign adversaries as a deviation) cannot appreciate the intrinsic relation of torture to sovereignty, and cannot comprehend that torture and terror are inextricably linked both behaviorally and symbolically. Assuming a respect for the moral dignity of each individual and repelled by the idea of coercion or force, the liberal theory of the state believes that consent can and should replace sacrifice, but then the state is unable either to act consistently on its premises while defending against terror. While touching on themes that he has raised elsewhere—the central religious, sacred component of the state and sovereignty and the role of force and sacrifice in community and state-formation—Kahn here provides his first extended analysis of the terror/torture duo that he situates at the core of post-Cold War conflicts, and that has emerged prominently in the debated over Iraq and government policy. For Kahn, terrorism and torture together call into question the belief that globally we are moving, or even can move, into a period or respect for cultural diversity, or that a rule of law has been, or can be, established free of force and coercion. Though modern states have moved beyond torture domestically as citizens replaces subjects, Kahn stresses that the return to the more primitive forms of violence against persons, is an inevitable—if unwelcome—consequence of war and, especially, terrorism. Paul W. Kahn is the Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. He is the author of Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional Theory (1993); The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America (1997); The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (1999); Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear (2000); Putting Liberalism in its Place (Princeton University Press, 2004); and Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton University Press, 2007). August 2009 Transformation and Trouble: Democratic South Africa Fights CrimeDiana Gordon Rights: World Transformation and Trouble looks at the complexities of democratizing a criminal justice system. How can South Africa—a country which was governed for many years through a strict regime of racial inequality—transform its police, its criminal codes and its courts from a system of brutal social control to one based on democracy, equal protection and free participation? Author Diana Gordon asks whether the South African political transformation that appears so miraculous has really been accompanied by the kinds of reforms that matter on the ground. She finds that in fact South Africa is part of a world-wide intensification of the culture of punishment. It is a trend which shows very little effect on crime, but which contributes greatly to the widening gap between rich and poor. South Africa's criminal justice policies primarily serve to express the anxieties of middle-class citizens yearning for order in an insecure world. In short, South Africa is gradually becoming a "carceral" society: one in which pervasive surveillance and punishment reinforces centralized power, inhibits creativity, represses political expression, deters the exercise of rights, and maintains race and class divisions. Such a society falls short of a transformed South Africa. Diana Gordon is Professor of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. October 2006 Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on TrialLeora Y. Bilsky Rights: World Leora Bilsky's Transformative Justice examines four important Israeli political trials, in order to show how such trials can expose "the practical, even existential," implications of abstract terms such as "democracy" for political reality. Bilsky looks at the political role of trials in a modern liberal democracy, and asks how legal proceedings can serve as a focal point for questions about the legitimacy of authority and the nature of identity and community. The trials that she analyzes in making her case raise political issues—identity, the nature of pluralism, human rights and the rule of law—whose importance extends well beyond Israel's borders. The result is a study of importance not only to students of Israeli politics and history, but to anyone interested in the inner workings of democracy and the law. Leora Y. Bilsky is Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University. Fall 2004 With All Deliberate Speed: The Life of Philip ElmanNorman I. Silber Rights: World From a modest childhood in Patterson, N. J., Philip Elman rose to become clerk for the great Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and then to a position in the U.S. Solicitor General's Office. As a member of that office, Philip Elman had an exceptional vantage point on one of the most momentous cases in U.S. Supreme Court history: Brown v. Board of Education. In this oral history memoir of Elman's life, With All Deliberate Speed, author Norman I. Silber reveals the maneuvering that led to the Court's overturning the doctrine of "separate but equal." Working behind the scenes, it was Justice Department attorney Elman who came up with the concept of gradual integration—an idea that worked its way into the final decision as the famous phrase "with all deliberate speed." Though this expression angered those pressing for immediate desegregation, Elman claims that it unified a divided Court, thus enabling them to stand together against the evil of segregation. With All Deliberate Speed records a decisive moment in Supreme Court history, but it is also Philip Elman's unforgettable oral memoir—the story of his entire career in government service, including his work with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as commissioner of the FTC, and his role in founding the modern consumer protection movement, which includes the antismoking campaign that put the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packs. At once rich historical testimony and a gripping read, With All Deliberate Speed offers a rarely glimpsed insider's understanding of the politics of the American legal system. Norman Silber is Professor of Law, Hofstra University School of Law. Philip Elman was responsible, in the Solicitor General's Office of the Department of Justice, for reviewing hundreds of cases involving civil rights, civil liberties and economic justice—including the epic case of Brown v. Board of Education. He later served as Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, where he played a major role in the rebirth of the consumer movement and in the antismoking movement. May 2004 |
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