Pauline Maier. Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2010. KF4541 .M278 2010
From the publisher: When the delegates left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, the new Constitution they had written was no more than a proposal. Elected conventions in at least nine of the thirteen states would have to ratify it before it could take effect. There was reason to doubt whether that would happen. The document we revere today as the foundation of our country’s laws, the cornerstone of our legal system, was hotly disputed at the time. Some Americans denounced the Constitution for threatening the liberty that Americans had won at great cost in the Revolutionary War. One group of fiercely patriotic opponents even burned the document in a raucous public demonstration on the Fourth of July.
In this splendid new history, Pauline Maier tells the dramatic story of the yearlong battle over ratification that brought such famous founders as Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and Henry together with less well-known Americans who sometimes eloquently and always passionately expressed their hopes and fears for their new country. Men argued in taverns and coffeehouses; women joined the debate in their parlors; broadsides and newspaper stories advocated various points of view and excoriated others. In small towns and counties across the country people read the document carefully and knew it well. Americans seized the opportunity to play a role in shaping the new nation. Then the ratifying conventions chosen by “We the People” scrutinized and debated the Constitution clause by clause.
Although many books have been written about the Constitutional Convention, this is the first major history of ratification. It draws on a vast new collection of documents and tells the story with masterful attention to detail in a dynamic narrative. Each state’s experience was different, and Maier gives each its due even as she focuses on the four critical states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, whose approval of the Constitution was crucial to its success.
Sarah Barringer Gordon. The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. KF358 .G67 2010
From the publisher:
A new constitutional world burst into American life in the mid-twentieth century. For the first time, the national constitution’s religion clauses were extended by the United States Supreme Court to all state and local governments. As energized religious individuals and groups probed the new boundaries between religion and government and claimed their sacred rights in court, a complex and evolving landscape of religion and law emerged.
Sarah Gordon tells the stories of passionate believers who turned to the law and the courts to facilitate a dazzling diversity of spiritual practice. Legal decisions revealed the exquisite difficulty of gauging where religion ends and government begins. Controversies over school prayer, public funding, religion in prison, same-sex marriage, and secular rituals roiled long-standing assumptions about religion in public life. The range and depth of such conflicts were remarkable—and ubiquitous.
Telling the story from the ground up, Gordon recovers religious practices and traditions that have generated compelling claims while transforming the law of religion. From isolated schoolchildren to outraged housewives and defiant prisoners, believers invoked legal protection while courts struggled to produce stable constitutional standards. In a field dominated by controversy, the vital connection between popular and legal constitutional understandings has sometimes been obscured. The Spirit of the Law explores this tumultuous constitutional world, demonstrating how religion and law have often seemed irreconcilable, even as they became deeply entwined in modern America.
Michael Perino. The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance. New York : Penguin Press, 2010. HB3717 1929 .P47 2010
From the publisher: A gripping account of the underdog Senate lawyer who unmasked the financial wrongdoing that led to the Crash of 1929 and forever changed the relationship between Washington and Wall Street.
Mark Tushnet. Why the Constitution Matters. New Haven, Conn. Yale University Press, 2010. KF4550 .T873 2010
From the publisher:
In this surprising and highly unconventional work, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet poses a seemingly simple question that yields a thoroughly unexpected answer. The Constitution matters, he argues, not because it structures our government but because it structures our politics. He maintains that politicians and political parties—not Supreme Court decisions—are the true engines of constitutional change in our system. This message will empower all citizens who use direct political action to define and protect our rights and liberties as Americans.
Unlike legal scholars who consider the Constitution only as a blueprint for American democracy, Tushnet focuses on the ways it serves as a framework for political debate. Each branch of government draws substantive inspiration and procedural structure from the Constitution but can effect change only when there is the political will to carry it out. Tushnet’s political understanding of the Constitution therefore does not demand that citizens pore over the specifics of each Supreme Court decision in order to improve our nation. Instead, by providing key facts about Congress, the president, and the nature of the current constitutional regime, his book reveals not only why the Constitution matters to each of us but also, and perhaps more important, how it matters.
Freedom of Assembly and Petition: the First Amendment: Its Constitutional History and the Contemporary Debate. Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus Books, 2010. KF4778 .F743 2010
Jeannie Suk. At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. KF9322 .S85 2009
From the publisher: In the past forty years, the idea of home, which is central to how the law conceives of crime, punishment, and privacy, has changed radically. Legal scholar Jeannie Suk shows how the legitimate goal of legal feminists to protect women from domestic abuse has led to a new and unexpected set of legal practices.
Suk examines case studies of major legal developments in contemporary American law pertaining to domestic violence, self-defense, privacy, sexual autonomy, and property in order to illuminate the changing relation between home and the law. She argues that the growing legal vision that has led to the breakdown of traditional boundaries between public and private space is resulting in a substantial reduction of autonomy and privacy for both women and men.
Melvin I. Urofsky. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York, Pantheon Books, 2009. KF8745.B67 U748 2009
From the publisher: The first full-scale biography in twenty-five years of one of the most important and distinguished justices to sit on the Supreme Court–a book that reveals Louis D. Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit.
Lawrence E. Mitchell. The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed over Industry. San Francisco, CA, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, c2008. HC103 .M684 2008
From the publisher: American businesses today are obsessed with the price of their stock, and no wonder. The consequences of even a modest decrease can be so dire that some executives would rather damage their corporation’s long-term health than allow quarterly returns to fall below projections. But how did this situation come about? When did the stock market become the driver of the American economy?
Lawrence E. Mitchell identifies the moment in American history when finance triumphed over industry. He shows how the birth of the giant modern corporation spurred the rise of the stock market and how, by the dawn of the 1920s, the stock market left behind its business origins to become the very reason for the creation of business itself.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. foreword by Stephen L. Carter. The Common Law. Chicago, Ill., ABA, c2009. KF394 .H65 1881r
From the publisher:
In the history of the law there have been many great treatises written by many great legal minds, but only a few have had the influence and staying power to truly be called the classics. The Common Law by famed Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is certainly one of these books.
First published in 1881, The Common Law has retained its relevance through the elegant writing of Justice Holmes and the sound, thorough coverage of everything from criminal law to possession and ownership to torts. As Professor Stephen L. Carter says in his new foreword to the book, “Few books have had this lasting influence on a profession, and earned as profound a reputation within it.”
Cliff Sloan and David McKean. The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. KF4575 .S56 2009
Laurence H. Tribe. The Invisible Consitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. KF4550 .T7865 2008
Michael Meyerson. Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World. New York: Basic Books, 2008. KF4520 .M49 2008
Shana Connell Noyes & Henry S Noyes. Acing Your First Year of Law School: The Ten Steps to Success You Won’t Learn in Class. Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., 2008. KF283 .N69 2008
This is one of the new books in our study aids collection. All study aids are located in the room behind the reference desk on the Delaware campus in the lobby area of the Harrisburg library.
Steven J. Heyman. Free Speech and Human Dignity.
New Haven, Conn. , Yale University Press, 2008.
KF4772 .H49 2008
Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to The Practice: a Collection of Great Writing About the Law. New York: New Press, 2007. PN6071.L33 L39 2007
From the publisher: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King Jr., and Johnny Cash
have all written it. Joseph K., Hurricane Carter, Portia, and Bigger
Thomas have starred in the most timeless examples of the genre. And
now, law school professor and noted novelist Thane Rosenbaum has
collected the crusaders and casualties of the law, both real and
imagined, in one handsome volume of “law lit.”
Some of the
finest writers in the world have been tantalized by the law and the
nature of judgment, justice, and revenge. With dozens of selections,
including prose, poetry, essays, and even TV and film scripts, Law Lit
is a dazzling collection that transcends place and time, from ancient
Greece to foggy London to the narrow streets of Prague and the
spectacle of an Alabama courthouse, offering an enlightening look at
the legal system and its practitioners and at how lives can be laid
bare before the bench.
