Legal Research

New Acquisitions in February 2010

Here is the list of new titles the Law Library acquired in February 2010: February 2010 Acquisitions. The list is also available on the Library's home page. In addition, here are some highlighted titles of particular interest:

Morgan, Thomas D. The vanishing American lawyer / Thomas D. Morgan. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, c2010.
Call number: KF300 .M67 2010

Publisher's description: Over 4,000 lawyers lost their positions at major American law firms in 2008 and 2009. In The Vanishing American Lawyer , Professor Thomas Morgan discusses the legal profession and the need for both law students and lawyers to adapt to the needs and expectations of clients in the future. The world needs people who understand institutions that create laws and how to access those institutions' works, but lawyers are no longer part of a profession that is uniquely qualified to advise on a broad range of distinctly legal questions. Clients will need advisors who are more specialized than many lawyers are today and who have more expertise in non-legal issues. Many of today's lawyers do not have a special ability to provide such services.

While American lawyers have been hesitant to change the ways they can improve upon meeting client needs, lawyers in other countries, notably Great Britain and Australia, have been better at adapting. Law schools must also recognize the world their students will face and prepare them to operate successfully within it. Professor Morgan warns that lawyers must adapt to new client needs and expectations. The term "professional" should be applied to individuals who deserve praise for skilled and selfless efforts, but this term may lead to occupational suicide if it becomes a justification for not seeing and adapting to the world ahead.

Pole, J. R. (Jack Richon) Contract & consent : representation and the jury in Anglo-American legal history / J.R. Pole. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2010.
Call number: KD606 .P65 2010

Publisher's description: In Contract and Consent, the renowned legal historian J. R. Pole posits that legal history has become highly specialized, while mainstream political and social historians frequently ignore cases that figure prominently in the legal literature. Pole makes a start at remedying the situation with a series of essays that reintegrate legal with political and social history.

A central theme of the essays is the link between Anglo-American common law and contract law and American political and constitutional principles. Pole also emphasizes the political functions of legal institutions in English and American history, going so far as to suggest that we need to divest ourselves of any notion of the separation of powers. Instead, we need to acknowledge the historical role of courts, juries, and the common law as agencies of political representation and as promulgators of law and policy.

Other essays show the implications of independence for American law, and how American political scientists converted the concept of sovereignty from its authoritarian claims in the eighteenth century into a product of the political process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the American colonies made their own versions of the common law, there was no simple division between "English" and "American" law. But it was of fundamental importance that an entitled, landed aristocracy was never imported into or allowed to take root in America, with the result that American law was much simpler than its English counterpart, with the latter's accretion of esoteric language and procedures.

Having established the basis of Anglo-American legal history in contract and common law in part one, in the second half of the volume Pole explores various constitutional and legal themes, from bicameralism in Britain and America and the role of the Constitution in the making of American nationality to the performance of representative institutions in the century following the American Revolution.

Estlund, Cynthia. Regoverning the workplace : from self-regulation to co-regulation / Cynthia Estlund. New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, c2010.
Call number: KF3369 .E88 2010

Publisher's description: This original book seeks to shape current trends toward employer self-regulation into a new paradigm of workplace governance in which workers participate. The decline of collective bargaining and the parallel rise of employment law have left workers with an abundance of legal rights but no representation at work. Without representation, even workers' legal rights are often under-enforced. At the same time, however, many legal and social forces have pushed firms to self-regulate--to take on the task of realizing public norms through internal compliance structures.

Cynthia Estlund argues that the trend toward self-regulation is here to stay, and that worker-friendly reformers should seek not to stop that trend but to steer it by securing for workers an effective voice within self-regulatory processes. If the law can be retooled to encourage forms of self-regulation in which workers participate, it can help both to promote public values and to revive workplace self-governance.

Lepard, Brian D. Customary international law : a new theory with practical applications / Brian D. Lepard. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, c2010.
Call number: KZ1277 .L47 2010

Publisher's description: Customary international law, although long recognized as a primary source of international law, remains replete with enigmas, both conceptual and practical. These include how to determine the existence of opinio juris, the function of the state practice requirement, the definition of jus cogens customary norms, and the relationship between customary international law and ethics. In part because of these enigmas, the subject has generated a wide-ranging literature. However, no recent book-length work has attempted to articulate a comprehensive theory of customary international law that can effectively resolve these questions.

This book sets out to accomplish this goal. Its approach is unique in a number of ways. For example, it is multidisciplinary and draws insights from fields such as legal theory, philosophy, political science, and game theory. In addition, it is anchored in a sophisticated ethical framework and explores at length the interconnections between customary international law and ethics.

Full post as published by LexLibris on March 02, 2010 (boomark / email).