Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, Reconstituting the American Renaissance reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation—involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom—lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteen...

Searing essays from International Booker Prize-winning Israeli author and long-time peace activist David Grossman carry us up to and through the cataclysm of Oct 7th and what followedWe know David Grossman's voice of ringing moral clarity from way back: since the late 1980s and The Yellow Wind, his classic work on the urgency of the two-state solution and the price paid by both occupier and occupied, he has been criticizing his country's government and pus...

"A fine, invaluable book. . . . It is always instructive to study Lincoln, but now is a particularly good time to consider his devotion to words." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book WorldFor Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered. In Lincoln, acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan explores the life of America's 16th president through his use of language both as a ve...

An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism.**"Clever and intellectually persuasive ... A thoughtful introduction to this famous paradigmatic opposition.” -**Washington PostIn The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke...

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases.

Time magazine called Mortimer J. Adler a "philosopher for everyman." In this guide to considering the big questions, Adler addresses the topics all men and women ponder in the course of life, such as "What is love?", "How do we decide the right thing to do?", and, "What does it mean to be good?" Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Western literature, history, and philosophy, the author considers what is meant by democracy, law, emotion, language, truth, and other abstract concepts in lig...

“A tour de force. . . . No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of BooksOur Declaration has already come to be regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and with over a decade of hindsight, renowned political philosopher Danielle Allen recontextualizes her revelatory book with ...

For Richard Posner, legal formalism and formalist judges--notably Antonin Scalia--present the main obstacles to coping with the dizzying pace of technological advance. Posner calls for legal realism--gathering facts, considering context, and reaching a sensible conclusion that inflicts little collateral damage on other areas of the law.

The future of the U.S. Supreme Court hangs in the balance like never before. Will conservatives or liberals succeed in remaking the court in their own image? In A Constitution of Many Minds, acclaimed law scholar Cass Sunstein proposes a bold new way of interpreting the Constitution, one that respects the Constitution's text and history but also refuses to view the document as frozen in time.Exploring hot-button issues ranging from presidential power to same-sex relations ...

In The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, C.A. Tripp offers a full examination of Lincoln's inner life and relationships that, as Dr. Jean Baker argues in the Introduction, "will define the issue for years to come."The late C. A. Tripp, a highly regarded sex researcher and colleague of Alfred Kinsey, and author of the runaway bestseller The Homosexual Matrix, devoted the last ten years of his life to an exhaustive study of Abraham Lincoln's writin...

In their famous debates, Lincoln and Douglas struggled with how to behave when an ethical conflict like slavery strained democracy’s commitment to rule by both consent and principle. What conscience demands and what it can persuade others to agree to are not always the same. Ultimately, this tragic limitation of liberalism led Lincoln to war.

This book contains a series of essays discussing the uses of precedent as a source of law and a basis for legal arguments in nine different legal systems, representing a variety of legal traditions. Precedent is fundamental to law, yet theoretical and ideological as well as legal considerations lead to its being differently handled and rationalised in different places. Out of the comparative study come the six theoretical and synoptic essays that conclude the volume.