Legal Research

New Acquisitions in April

Here is the list of new titles the Law Library acquired in April 2010: April Acquisitions List . The list also is available on the Library's home page.

In addition, here are some highlighted titles of particular interest:

Crawford, Emily. The treatment of combatants and insurgents under the law of armed conflict / Emily Crawford. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.
KZ6495 .C73 2010

Publisher's Description: This book makes the case for eliminating the distinction between types of armed conflict under international humanitarian law (IHL), specifically as they apply to persons taking a direct part in the hostilities - be they soldiers or insurgents. Currently, IHL makes a distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts. International armed conflicts are regulated by more treaties than their non-international counterparts. The regulation of international armed conflicts is also considerably more comprehensive than that offered for participants in and victims of non-international armed conflicts. This bifurcation of the law was logical at the time the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were drafted and adopted, as the majority of armed conflicts prior to that point had been international in character. However, in the years following the adoption of the Conventions, there has been a proliferation of non-international armed conflicts, which presents challenges to a body of law that has few tools to adequately address such occurrences. The adoption of the Additional Protocols in 1977 went some way to addressing the legal lacunae that existed, but significant gaps still remain.

Mindful of this history, this book tracks the growth and evolution of the laws of armed conflict in the modern era, since the first document of the laws of war produced for the American Civil War. In doing so, this book demonstrates how the law of armed conflict has become increasingly harmonized in its application, with more rules of IHL being generally applicable in all instances of armed conflict, regardless of characterization. This book then makes the argument that the time has come for the final step to be taken, the elimination of the distinction between types of armed conflict, and the complete harmonization of the laws of war. Focusing specifically on the issue of combatants and POWs in armed conflicts, and drawing on the recent US treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay in the "War on Terror", this book draws on considerable legal precedent, legal theory, and policy arguments to make the case that it is time for the law relating to the regulation of armed conflicts to be more uniformly applied.

Poetry of the law : from Chaucer to the present / edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, c2010.
Literature and the Arts PR1195.L37 P64 2010

Publisher's description: Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. Poetry of the Law, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law.

Poetry of the Law is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, serious need not imply solemn. Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present.

Set in courtrooms, lawyers' offices, law-school classrooms, and judges' chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think "Scottsboro") or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. Poetry of the Law is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.

Honneth, Axel, 1949- The pathologies of individual freedom : Hegel's social theory / Axel Honneth ; translated from the German by Ladislaus Lob. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2010.
K230.H432 H665 2010

Publisher's description: This is a penetrating reinterpretation and defense of Hegel's social theory as an alternative to reigning liberal notions of social justice. The eminent German philosopher Axel Honneth rereads Hegel's Philosophy of Right to show how it diagnoses the pathologies of the overcommitment to individual freedom that Honneth says underlies the ideas of Rawls and Habermas alike. Honneth argues that Hegel's theory contains an account of the psychological damage caused by placing too much emphasis on personal and moral freedom. Although these freedoms are crucial to the achievement of justice, they are insufficient and in themselves leave people vulnerable to loneliness, emptiness, and depression. Hegel argues that people must also find their freedom or "self-realization" through shared projects. Such projects involve the three institutions of ethical life--family, civil society, and the state--and provide the arena of a crucial third kind of freedom, which Honneth calls "communicative" freedom. A society is just only if it gives all of its members sufficient and equal opportunity to realize communicative freedom as well as personal and moral freedom.

Full post as published by LexLibris on May 04, 2010 (boomark / email).