Delaware Campus Library Blogs

“Times Select” is a fee based subscription service for access to select
articles appearing in the New York Times online edtion at nytimes.com.

Current university faculty and students can now get FREE access to this
content by signing up with a valid university email address ending in
.edu.
Sign up for this valuable service and learn more here.

The U. S. Government Accountabilty Office (GAO) has issued a report on Law School Accreditation. The report was drafted in response to concerns about the reauthorization of the American Bar Association (ABA) as the accrediting body for law schools in the United States. The U.S. Department of Education
typically reauthorizes the ABA every 5 years. However, in 2006 the
Department of Education extended authorization to the ABA for only 18
months, so that specific concerns outlined in the report could be studied.

Brad Snyder. A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports. New York, Viking, 2006. GV865.F45 S69 2006

From the publisher: Upon being traded to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969, Curt Flood, an All-Star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, wanted nothing more than to stay with St. Louis. But his only options were to report to Philadelphia or retire. Instead, Flood sued Major League Baseball for his freedom, hoping to invalidate the reserve clause in his contract, which bound a player to his team for life. Flood took his lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, and though he ultimately lost, his decision to sue cost him his career and a chance at the Hall of Fame. But Floodís place in baseball history, like that of Jackie Robinsonís, extends far beyond his accomplishments on the ballfield. Just three years later, the era of free agency that all professional athletes enjoy today became a reality.

In A Well-Paid Slave, the first extended treatment of Flood and his lawsuit, Brad Snyder examines this long-misunderstood case and its impact on professional sports. He reveals the twisted logic and behind-the-scenes vote switching behind the courtís decision and explains Floodís decision to sue in the context of his experiences during the civil rights movement. Astutely and dramatically told, A Well-Paid Slave will appeal broadly to fans of sports history, legal affairs, and American culture.

This month the library received several new books on immigration law and policy.

Aristide R. Zolberg. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2006. JV6483 .Z65 2006

From the publisher: According to the national mythology, the United States has long opened its doors to people from across the globe, providing a port in a storm and opportunity for any who seek it. Yet the history of immigration to the United States is far different. Even before the xenophobic reaction against European and Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth century, social and economic interest groups worked to manipulate immigration policy to serve their needs. In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building.

A Nation by Design argues that the engineering of immigration policy has been prevalent since early American history. However, it has gone largely unnoticed since it took place primarily on the local and state levels, owing to constitutional limits on federal power during the slavery era. Zolberg profiles the vacillating currents of opinion on immigration throughout American history, examining separately the roles played by business interests, labor unions, ethnic lobbies, and nativist ideologues in shaping policy. He then examines how three different types of migration–legal migration, illegal migration to fill low-wage jobs, and asylum-seeking–are shaping contemporary arguments over immigration to the United States.

A Nation by Design is a thorough, authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. With rich detail and impeccable scholarship, Zolberg’s book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.

Hiroshi Motomura. Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. JV6483 .M67 2006

From the publisher:  In Americans in Waiting, Motomura discovers in our national past a simple yet powerful approach to immigration and citizenship. Rewriting the conventional story, Motomura uncovers how for over 150 years, many immigrants were immediately put on track to U.S. citizenship. They were entitled to overseas diplomatic protection and eligible to homestead land on the western frontier. Citizens-to-be were even allowed to vote. In sum, immigration was assumed to be a transition to citizenship, and immigrants were future citizens–Americans in waiting. Once central to law and policy, this view has all but vanished. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the United States began to treat its immigrants in one of two ways: as signatories to a contract that sets the terms of their stay in this country, or as affiliates who can earn rights only as they become, over time, enmeshed in the nations life. Immigration is now seen too often as a problem to be solved, rather than a pillar of our nations strength. A panoramic history of the past 200 years of immigration and citizenship in the United States, Americans in Waiting offers a clear lesson: only by recovering this lost of history of immigration can we ensure that both current and future citizens share in the sense of belonging that is crucial to full participation in American life.

The next meeting of the Brown Bag Book Club will be on Tuesday,
March 20th, noon to 1 p.m. in the Library Special Collections Room.

We will be discussing “The Coffee Trader” by David Liss.  This book
is available in print and on audio CD for those of you who like to
listen as you commute.

It should be an interesting discussion!

Here’s a brief synopsis:

Amsterdam, 1659: On the world’s first commodities exchange,
fortunes are won and lost in an instant. Miguel Lienzo, a sharp-witted
trader in the city’s close-knit community of Portuguese Jews, knows
this only too well. Once among the city’s most envied merchants, Miguel
has suddenly lost everything. Now, impoverished and humiliated, living
in his younger brother’s canal-flooded basement, Miguel must find a way
to restore his wealth and reputation.

Miguel enters into a partnership with a seductive Dutchwoman who
offers him one last chance at successóa daring plot to corner the
market of an astonishing new commodity called “coffee.” To succeed,
Miguel must risk everything he values and face a powerful enemy who
will stop at nothing to see him ruined. Miguel will learn that among
Amsterdam’s ruthless businessmen, betrayal lurks everywhere, and even
friends hide secret agendas.

Although classes have been canceled for this evening, the Delaware campus library will remain open for regular hours this evening 2/13/2007

Two new books in the library this month have very different views on the powers of the president and the war on terror. First a book by civil rights attorney Joseph Margulies.

Joseph Margulies. Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006. KF5060 .M373 2006

From the publisher: After september 11, the Bush administration developed a detention policy unique in our nation’s history. Prisoners have been taken from every corner of the globe, some of them arrested thousands of miles from any battlefield, and shipped to offshore prisons run by the CIA or Department of Defense. Nearly five hundred prisoners are currently held at the Guant·namo Bay Naval Station, in Cuba, some of whom have been in prison for more than four years. Another five hundred are held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Perhaps as many as two hundred others have been sent to countries with richly deserved reputations for torture, a process known as “extraordinary rendition.” Still more are held at so-called black sites-CIA-run facilities so secret the Administration does not even acknowledge their existence. At these “prisons beyond the law,” the Administration claims the right to hold people indefinitely, incommunicado and in solitary confinement, without charges or access to counsel, and without the benefit of the Geneva Conventions. Worse, the Administration has subjected them to interrogation techniques that Margulies argues are abusive, illegal, and immoral. Weaving together firsthand accounts of military personnel who witnessed the interrogations with the words of the prisoners themselves, Margulies exposes the chilling reality of Guant·namo Bay. He examines the genesis of the detention policy and exposes its consequences, not only for the prisoners who endure the torment of their captors but for the larger “war on terror” that is the centerpiece of the nation’s foreign policy.

Joseph Margulies is a nationally recognized civil rights lawyer and law professor in Chicago.He was the lead attorney in Rasul v. Bush, one of two cases in the Supreme Court that exposed the plight of the Guant·namo prisoners and led to judicial oversight of the prison at Guant·namo Bay. He argues that in creating this detention policy, the president has claimed all the power of a wartime executive but rejected all restraints on the use of that power, including those imposed by other branches of government. The result is an unprecedented, and dangerous, expansion of presidential authority. Guant·namo and the Abuse of Presidential Power examines the arguments on both sides of the issue, but it makes clear that the present policy is a legal and ethical disaster that offers only a false promise of security against terrorism, even as it inflames sentiments against us in the rest of the world, inspiring far more terror than it could ever prevent.

And this book by John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice and law professor at Berkeley.

John Yoo. War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror. New York, Atlantic Monthly, 2006. HV6432 .Y66 2006

From the publisher: On September 11, 2001, while America reeled from the day’s cataclysmic events, and the majority of Official Washington, D.C. – including most of the Justice Department – evacuated, John Yoo and a skeletal staff of the Office of Legal Counsel stayed behind. They quickly found themselves on the phone with the White House. The attacks called for a response, but the president’s legal authority to act was unclear. Were we at war?

In answering that question and others in the following months, Yoo had an almost unmatched impact on the fight against al Qaeda. His analysis led to many of the Bush administration’s most controversial policies: detention at Guantanamo Bay, coercive interrogation, military trials, the NSA’s wiretapping program, the Patriot Act, and the decision that the Geneva Conventions are irrelevant for “illegal enemy combatants.”

In War by Other Means, you offers an insider accounts of the personalities, on-the-ground facts, and legal basis behind these decisions Through specific cases, from John Walker Lindh and Zacarias Moussaoui, to an American al Qaeda leader killed by a CIA pilotless drone in the deserts of Yemen, Yoo sweeps aside partisan bickering, answers his and the Bush administration’s critics, and clarifies how and why we fight. War by Other Means is a captivating, brilliant, and accessible book, a must read for anyone concerned about the War on Terror.

Roger W. Shuy. Linguistics in the Courtroom: A Practical Guide. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. KF8968.54 .S483 2006

From the publisher: This is a practical guide for both beginning and established linguists who have been asked by lawyers to address the language issues in their civil and criminal cases. Author Roger W. Shuy deals with issues of how to become an expert, how to start and manage a practice of consulting on law cases, how to address the issue of professional ethics, how to work with lawyers, write reports, affidavits, and participate successfully in depositions, direct examination, and cross examination at trial. The book also suggests ways that linguists can use their forensic linguistic experiences in their publications and classroom teaching, along with suggestions of recent books that forensic linguists may need for their personal libraries.

Richard A. Posner. Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.  KF4749 .P67 2006

From the publisher: Eavesdropping on the phone calls of U.S. citizens; demands by the FBI for records of library borrowings; establishment of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens – many of the measures taken by the Bush administration since 9/11 have sparked heated protests. In Not a Suicide Pact, Judge Richard A. Posner offers a cogent response to these protests, arguing that personal liberty must be balanced with public safety in the face of grave national danger.

Thursday, January 4, 2006 marks the first day of the 110th United
States Congress. We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to
an online resources that can help you stay up to date on happenings in
the U.S. Congress. CQ Weekly is available to current Widener Law
students, faculty and staff. Follow the link from the library’s database page
to gain access to this resources (if you are off campus you will be
prompted for your name and Widener barcode number.) Once on the CQ.com page
choose the link for CQ Weekly from the middle of the page.

CQ Weekly Online allows you to search for pending legislation by
keyword or bill number but it also provides in depth analysis of issues
before Congress. You’ll  find background information on many
topics that should be of interest to every citizen as well as profiles
of members of Congress and other important policy makers. Please see a
Reference Librarian if you’d like help using this or any of the
databases available at
http://www.law.widener.edu/Law-Library/new/research/legal_databases.shtml

Please take a moment before the winter break to make sure you have
returned any library materials, ESPECIALLY Interlibrary loan books.
Books that have been borrowed through ILL have been requested on your
behalf from other libraries. It is very important that we return these
books in the time frame set by the lending library. Failure to do so
could result in late fees or, in the worse case, cause the lending
library to stop loaning materials to us.

Now that exams are starting, don’t forget that the library has a collection of old exams for your studying pleasure.  Many of the exams are available on the library website here: http://www.law.widener.edu/Law-Library/new/services/exams/index.shtml.

You’ll need a password to access the exams.  Just contact the reference desk by phone (302-477-2114), email (Law.LibRef@law.widener.edu) IM (WidenerLawLib) or in person to get the password.

Not all of the exams are online yet, so if you don’t see the exam you are looking for stop by the library circulation desk to look at the paper copies.

Robert V. Remini. The House: The History of the House of Representatives. New York, Smithsonian Books in association with HarperCollins, 2006. JK1319 .R46 2006

From the publisher:  The United States House of Representatives is regarded by many as the finest deliberative body in existence. Throughout America’s history, the House has played a central role in shaping the nation’s destiny. In our own time the impeachment hearings of President Clinton and the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich revealed, quite starkly, just how vital the House’s constitutional powers remain. In this incomparable single-volume history, distinguished historian Robert V. Remini traces the development of this quintessential American institution from a struggling, nascent body to the venerable powerhouse it has become since America’s rise on the world stage. Violence, acrimony, triumph, and compromise litter the House’s varied and illustrious past. Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, “Czar” Thomas Reed, “Uncle Joe” Cannon, and, more recently, Sam Rayburn, Tip O’Neill, Gerald Ford, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Jim Wright, Patricia Schroeder, Dick Cheney, Tom Foley, Peter Rodino, and John Murtha are just a few of the figures who have played significant political roles. These leaders mastered the rules and folkways of the House and bent them to their own or the people’s wills and needs. Through their exploits, Dr. Remini shows the true brilliance of constitutional elasticity and the dangers inherent in it. The founders of our country created the House to reflect the will of the people. Out of chaos could emerge a national consensus that could bind the country together after first revealing the deep fissures between North and South and, in our day, among the Midwest, the South, and the coastal regions. For two centuries the powerful hold the Founding Fathers gave the House over the purse strings of the nation has forced its members to be conciliators and statesmen in times of crisis. The essential drama of democracy — the struggle between principle and pragmatism — is showcased throughout the book and through it the history of America’s successful experiment with democracy unfurls.