Why research universities remain society's most powerful engines of progress.Public trust in higher education is under strain. Expertise is questioned, costs are rising, and universities face mounting political pressure. In The Progress Machine, Darryll J. Pines responds to this moment with a clear argument: Research universities remain uniquely equipped to confront the world's most urgent challenges.Pines, the president of the University of Maryla...

In Knowing the Suffering of Others, legal scholar Austin Sarat brings together essays that address suffering as it relates to the law, highlighting the ways law imagines suffering and how pain and suffering become jurisprudential facts.From fetal imaging to end-of-life decisions, torts to international human rights, domestic violence to torture, and the law of war to victim impact statements, the law is awash in epistemological and ethical problems associated with knowing ...

The hidden history of the FBI and its hundred-year war against terrorists, spies, and anyone it deemed subversive—including even American presidents.NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A SHOWTIME ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES“Turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and important, as today’s headlines.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of American HeiressEnemies is the first d...

National Book Award Finalist: "A learned, thoughtful, witty legal history for the layman" ( The New Yorker).What do the thoughts of a ravenous tiger have to do with the evolution of America's legal system? How do the works of Jane Austen and Ludwig van Beethoven relate to corporal punishment? In The Law of the Land, Charles Rembar examines these and many other topics, illustrating the surprisingly entertaining history of US law.Best known f...

The Roman Empire was a remarkable achievement. It had a population of sixty million people spread across lands encircling the Mediterranean and stretching from drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria, and from the Rhine to the North African coast. It was, above all else, an empire of force - employing a mixture of violence, suppression, order, and tactical use of power to develop an astonishingly uniform culture. This Very Short Introduction

The renowned attorney and bestselling author reveals how notable trials throughout our history have helped to shape our nation. Offering insights into the human condition, these trials serve as a historical document, chronicling the struggles and passions of their time.

Uniquely in the United States, lawyers litigate large cases on behalf of many claimants who could not afford to sue individually. In these class actions, attorneys act typically as risk-taking entrepreneurs, effectively hiring the client rather than acting as the client’s agent. Lawyer-financed, lawyer-controlled, and lawyer-settled, such entrepreneurial litigation invites lawyers to sometimes act more in their own interest than in the interest of their clients. And because class litigatio...

This is a short and succinct summary of the unique position of Roman law in European culture by one of the world's leading legal historians. Peter Stein's masterly study assesses the impact of Roman law in the ancient world, and its continued unifying influence throughout medieval and modern Europe. Roman Law in European History is unparalleled in lucidity and authority, and should prove of enormous utility for teachers and students (at all levels) of legal history, comparative law and Eur...

Books about the work of James Joyce are an academic industry. Most of them are unreadable and esoteric. Adrian Hardiman's book is both highly readable and strikingly original.He spent years researching Joyce's obsession with the legal system, and the myriad references to notorious trials in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce was fascinated by and felt passionately about miscarriages of justice, and his view of the law was coloured ...

Lionized by the right and demonized by the left, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is the high court's quintessential conservative. Witty, outspoken, often abrasive, he is widely regarded as the most controversial member of the Court.This book is the first comprehensive, reasoned, and sympathetic analysis of how Scalia has decided cases during his entire twenty-year Supreme Court tenure. Ralph Rossum focuses on Scalia’s more than 600 Supreme Court opinions and dissents—carefully...

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, publi...

Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.