Wall Street Journal Law Blog
Posted by admin on Jan 25, 2006
The Wall Street Journal has launched a new law blog. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/ It “focuses on law and business, and the business of law.” You don’t need to be a subscriber to read the blog
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Black in Selma
Posted by admin on Jan 25, 2006
Author: J.L. Chestnut, Jr. and Julia Cass. Title: Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. KF373.C389 A3 1990
From the publisher: A civil rights classic returns to print.
On March 7, 1965, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, lined the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma with state troopers to prevent a civil rights march to Montgomery for the black vote. Among those present was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., the only black lawyer in Selma at that time, a man whose own struggle both parallels and exemplifies the growth of the civil rights movement since the early sixties. Journalist Julia Cass met Chestnut while covering the South for The Philadelphia Inquirer and was struck not only by the representative nature of his story but by his deeply perceptive reading of the realities of power and politics in the South. The result of their collaboration is Black in Selma, Chestnut’s extraordinary autobiography.
The Endangered Species Act at Thirty
Posted by admin on Jan 25, 2006
Title: The Endangered Species Act at Thirty. Washington: Island Press, 2005. KF5640 .E482 2005
From the publisher: The Endangered Species Act at Thirty is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of issues surrounding the Endangered Species Act, with a specific focus on the act’s actual implementation record over the past thirty years. The result of a unique, multi-year collaboration among stakeholder groups from across the political spectrum, the two volumes offer a dispassionate consideration of a highly polarized topic. Renewing the Conservation Promise, Volume 1, puts the reader in a better position to make informed decisions about future directions in biodiversity conservation by elevating the policy debate from its current state of divisive polemics to a more-constructive analysis. It helps the reader understand how the Endangered Species Act has been implemented, the consequences of that implementation, and how the act could be changed to better serve the needs of both the species it is designed to protect and the people who must live within its mandates. Volume 2, which examines philosophical, biological, and economic dimensions of the act in greater detail, will be published in 2006. As debate over reforming the Endangered Species Act heats up in the coming months, these two books will be essential references for policy analysts and lawmakers; professionals involved with environmental law, science, or management; and academic researchers and students concerned with environmental law, policy, management, or science.
Lowering the Bar
Posted by admin on Jan 25, 2006
Author: Marc Galanter. Title: Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. K184 .G35 2005
From the Publisher: What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the “legalization” of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans’ deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers.