Delaware Campus Library Blogs

Nancy Levit, Douglas O. Linder. The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. KF300 .L485 2010

From the publisher: You get good grades in college, pay a small fortune to put yourself through law school, study hard to pass the bar exam, and finally land a high-paying job in a prestigious firm. You’re happy, right? Not really. Oh, it beats laying asphalt, but after all your hard work, you expected more from your job. What gives?

The Happy Lawyer examines the causes of dissatisfaction among lawyers, and then charts possible paths to happier and more fulfilling careers in law. Eschewing a one-size-fits-all approach, it shows how maximizing our chances for achieving happiness depends on understanding our own personality types, values, strengths, and interests.

Covering everything from brain chemistry and the science of happiness to the workings of the modern law firm, Nancy Levit and Doug Linder provide invaluable insights for both aspiring and working lawyers. For law students, they offer surprising suggestions for selecting a law school that maximizes your long-term happiness prospects. For those about to embark on a legal career, they tell you what happiness research says about which potential jobs hold the most promise. For working lawyers, they offer a handy toolbox–a set of easily understandable steps–that can boost career happiness. Finally, for firm managers, they offer a range of approaches for remaking a firm into a more satisfying workplace.

Read this book and you will know whether you are more likely to be a happy lawyer at age 30 or age 60, why you can tell a lot about a firm from looking at its walls and windows, whether a 10 percent raise or a new office with a view does more for your happiness, and whether the happiness prospects are better in large or small firms.

No book can guarantee a happier career, but for lawyers of all ages and stripes, The Happy Lawyer may give you your best shot.

Seth Stern, Stephen Wermiel. Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.  KF8745 .B68 S74 2010

From the publisher: This book is a sweeping and revealing insider look at court history and the life of William J. Brennan Jr., widely considered the most influential Supreme Court justice of the twentieth century. First appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, Brennan became the Supreme Court’s leading liberal during his 34 terms as a justice.

Before his death, Brennan granted coauthor Stephen Wermiel access to a trove of personal and court materials that will not be available to the public until 2017. Wermiel also conducted more than 60 hours of interviews with Brennan over the course of six years. No other biographer has enjoyed this kind of access to a Supreme Court justice or to his papers.

Justice Brennan makes public for the first time the full contents of Brennan’s case histories, in which he recorded the strategizing behind all the major battles of the past half century, including Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, the death penalty, obscenity law, and the constitutional right to privacy.

Revelations on a more intimate scale include how Brennan refused to hire female clerks even as he wrote groundbreaking women’s rights decisions; his complex stance as a justice and a Catholic; and new details on Brennan’s unprecedented working relationship with Chief Justice Earl Warren. This riveting information—intensely valuable to readers of all political persuasions—will cement Brennan’s reputation as epic playmaker of the Court’s most liberal era.

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:

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.”

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