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Writing for the July 17 Times Higher Eduction Laurel Brake delivers an enthusiastic review of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a book whose look at the provocative weeklies that proliferated in mid-nineteenth century NYC Brake notes, reveals an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of the city's history and culture. From the review:

Generically, [the "flash" papers] mostly seem to be saucily illustrated weeklies, ranging from titillating to soft porn, including simple woodcuts, more than 50 of which are reproduced here. Their distribution points (which included hawker-newsboys, saloons, oyster bars, barber shops, steamboats and theatres), sporting connections and maps and accounts of brothels suggest that most were aimed at a bachelor subculture. An exception is the Whip and Satirist, whose detailed woman's fashion column implies that it both sought female readers and employed women writers.

Commentary and excerpts support the authors' contention that the existence of this genre in antebellum New York establishes the city as cultural capital of the republic in low culture as well as high and indicates a dimension of this period and its press neglected in hegemonic accounts of this "Victorian" city.

Read the review on the THE website. Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In last Saturday's edition of the Daily Telegraph Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviewed The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. In his review Douglas-Fairhurst gives a short overview of the social and historical significance of the "flash" papers—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York City's extensive sexual underworld—touching on their appeal to readers in the UK and taking an amusing jab at one of the Telegraph's competitors:

"Flash" newspapers offered a titillating guide to the pleasures of urban life that had hitherto been spoken of only in hushed whispers: brothels, pornography, dog fights, playhouses, bare-knuckle boxing and more.

Crammed into a handful of closely printed pages was up-to-date gossip, sexual scandal, handy tips on how to avoid picking up a prostitute with a glass eye (the key, it seemed, was to avoid women wearing veils), and blustering attacks on anyone, such as immigrants or "sodomites", who might have threatened the developing group identity of these cocky young men about town.

By 1842, four rival publications in New York "squawked in competition" for their custom. Adventurous readers could use the Flash, the Whip, the Rake or the Libertine as a map to the seamy corners of a city that was often described, with pride and alarm, as "a modern Sodom.…"

The engagingly written introduction to this anthology argues plausibly that the flash press was the last occasion on which mainstream American journalism tried to titillate as well as entertain its readers.

For a British reader, the spectacle of writing that smacks its lips over the vices it claims to be disgusted by will seem far more familiar. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover that many of the most salacious stories printed in the flash press were taken from newspapers originally published in London.

Still, it is a nice historical coincidence that two of the New York papers from which the flash press evolved were called the Star and the Sun, just as it is fun to learn that one of the editors also started up a "frothy weekly with literary pretensions called the Sunday Times."

Read the full review on the Telegraph website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an excellent piece on Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York—a fascinating exhumation and examination of the weekly periodicals that covered and publicized nineteenth-century New York City's extensive sexual underworld. Novelist Nicholson Baker writes for NYTBR:

Cohen, Gilfoyle and a third writer, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz have together produced The Flash Press, the first book-length survey of this strange rock-pool of 1840s profligacy. Readers of Kurt Andersen's recent historical novel Heyday—and indeed everyone interested in knowing what New York City was like before the Civil War—will want to have a peek. The authors have managed to unearth and collate a remarkable amount of enriching detail about a curiously fleshy moment in the history of New York publishing.

Nicholson concludes his review:

Thanks to… the meticulous research of these three scholars, we once again have a way of looking through a tiny, smudged window into New York's long-past illicit life. Oh, and the drawing of the chambermaid and her warming pan is on Page 101.

Read the full review. NYT writer Jennifer Schuessler has a posting on the Paper Cuts blog about the book. We have three excerpts from the flash press on our website.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for last Tuesday's Village Voice, none other than Tom Robbins has given Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's new book, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York an approving thumbs-up for its revealing look at New York City's "flash papers"—the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York's extensive sexual underworld. All but forgotten after the era's burgeoning censorship and obscenity laws shut them down, as Robbins notes, the author's recent discovery of a cache of these papers held by the American Antiquarian Society sheds new light on the magazines' lurid tales of libidinous lechery. Robbins writes:

Sex has always sold well. Most of us just assumed it took the likes of Larry Flynt, Al Goldstein, and the rest of that merry band of porn purveyors to finally get it openly on the newsstands. But now comes news that more than a century before them, an earlier breed of devilish publishers delighted readers with similar publications right here in New York.

That discovery was no small thrill for historians of American smut when they unearthed copies of long-forgotten sex rags that flared briefly in the early 1840s. These Dead Sea Scrolls of sleaze were discovered when Patricia Cline Cohen, one of a trio of authors of The Flash Press, was visiting the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1987: "On one memorable day, Dennis R. Laurie, reference specialist of newspapers and periodicals, asked her if she might like to see some uncataloged New York titles of a somewhat disreputable character."

Cohen tipped co-author Timothy J. Gilfoyle to her discovery for his own book on the history of prostitution in New York (City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialism of Sex, 1790-1920); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz joined the team when another researcher whispered to her about some "racy primary sources."

Like Goldstein's Screw, the publishers chose titles that got right to the point: The Whip, The Rake, The Libertine, The Flash, and others with even shorter publishing lives. One of these, The New York Sporting Whip, offered a kind of mission statement: "Man is endowed by nature with passions that must be gratified," the newspaper asserted, "and no blame can be attached to him, who for that purpose occasionally seeks the woman of pleasure."

Read the rest of the review on the Village Voice website.

Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hugely popular in nineteenth century New York, "flash" papers—weeklies like the Flash and the Whip—capitalized on lurid tales of New York City's extensive sexual underworld. But, due in part to the evolution of obscenity laws and libel, their success was short lived and the papers themselves fell into obscurity. Now, as Chronicle of Higher Education reviewer Kacie Glenn notes, the authors of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York have produced a comprehensive historical document of both the tumultuous history of the papers, and the culture that consumed them. Glenn writes:

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, written in association with the antiquarian society by Patricia Cline Cohen, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a professor of American studies and history at Smith College, has two parts: a critical analysis of the papers' role in society and a collection of excerpts.

The average flash-press reader was both a man about town and a respectable citizen, and the authors aim to decode the texts in light of those conflicting identities. "Ambiguity and deceit" were the rule, they say, so that the weeklies simultaneously celebrated and condemned promiscuity and high-society romps. The Flash Press traces the papers' brief but turbulent run through the litigation and public outcry that eventually shut them down.…

Although the sporting weeklies were short-lived, First-Amendment victories for today's risqué periodicals suggest that the earlier papers were ahead of their time. As the authors of The Flash Press note, "Seen from the perspective of the early 21st century, the editors of the flash press certainly have the last laugh."

Archived in History | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Soon after The Hollow Hope’s initial publication, a reviewer declared that “one may not always agree with Rosenberg’s book, but it will be impossible to ignore it. It should set the terms of the debate about the role of the Supreme Court during the last decade of the twentieth century.” Having fulfilled all of this promise and then some during nearly two decades of intense argument over its conclusions, The Hollow Hope now returns—substantially expanded and updated—to chart the course of twenty-first century debate about whether courts can spur political and social reform.

With new chapters that respond to his critics and address the courts’ role in the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, Gerald Rosenberg emphatically reasserts his powerful contention that it’s nearly impossible to generate significant reforms through litigation. The reason? American courts are ineffective and relatively weak—far from the uniquely powerful sources for change they’re often portrayed as. Rosenberg supports this claim by documenting the direct and secondary effects of key court decisions—particularly Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Further illuminating these cases, as well as the ongoing fight for same-sex marriage rights, he also marshals impressive evidence to overturn the common assumption that even unsuccessful litigation can advance a cause by raising its profile.

The Hollow Hope has indisputably vindicated another reviewer’s prediction that it would “fundamentally reshape how we see the courts and what questions we ask about them.” As legal battles over hot-button social issues stretch on, the new Hollow Hope is poised to reignite the landmark debate sparked by its first incarnation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Disputes over tenure know no ideological bounds.

Controversy surrounds the tenure status of another UCP author, this time with the criticism coming from a different corner of the political arena. John Yoo, author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 is a tenured professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He has long been under attack for his role in authoring memos while working for the Department of Justice that were used to justify DoJ policies for the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists (including practices defined in international law as torture). A campaign has developed calling for Yoo's ouster from his academic position.

The story was covered today by the online publication Inside Higher Ed. Last week Christopher Edley, Jr. , the Dean of Boalt Hall, released a statement asserting that he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing that would merit Yoo's dismissal.

When we published his book, Yoo explained his view of executive war powers in an interview.

Updated: The Chronicle of Higher Education has a roundup of blogger commentary on the Yoo case.

Archived in Books for the News | Law
Posted by DB at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last Wednesday the Drug Law Blog authored by San Francisco attorney Alex Coolman ran an interesting interview with Doris Marie Provine, author of Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. The interview focuses on the topic of her book, exploring how issues of race have influenced American anti-drug efforts. Coolman prefaces the interview with some positive words about Provine's fascinating new book:

Professor Doris Marie Provine of Arizona State University's School of Justice & Social Inquiry is the author of a really interesting and challenging new book called Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. I keep coming back to this book as a reference point for talking about some of the thorniest issues related to the intersection of race with American action—and inaction—on drug policy. These are issues that are so big and obvious that they're almost hard to recognize as issues. Unequal Under Law, however, does a really nice job of emphasizing that we are, in fact, making racial choices in drug policy—both consciously and unconsciously—that profoundly affect the lives of our fellow citizens.

Read the interview on the Drug Law Blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Barry B. LePatner's Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry is featured in today's Wall Street Journal business section. Reviewer James R. Hagerty uses LePatner's book to cite one possible benefit of the otherwise gloomy housing market crisis—weeding out the weaklings in the contracting businesses. Hagerty writes:

Every now and then, a major construction project is completed on time and on budget. Everyone is amazed.

Barry LePatner, a New York lawyer specializing in construction cases, thinks this exception should become the rule. Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets outlines his proposals for making that possible.

Mr. LePatner's swift kick to the construction industry comes when it is already down. Commercial construction is slowing, and house building is in a severe slump, partly caused by a glut of new homes erected by overly optimistic builders even before the subprime crisis made it harder to find qualified buyers. The downturn will apply the wrecking ball to many of the weaker construction companies. But that won't be enough, according to Mr. LePatner. He argues that the industry will become efficient only when its customers become savvier and more demanding.

His solutions involve, among other things, hiring experts who can monitor builders and who have financial incentives to prevent needless overruns. Tougher contracts should enforce fixed costs or, at least, severely limit the scope for escalation. And thorough background checks—looking for lawsuits, public complaints and financial troubles—may lower the chance of hiring dodgy engineers and construction teams.

Such steps would force out of business weak firms that can't deliver on their promises. The survivors, Mr. LePatner thinks, would be larger firms that are less reliant on subcontractors and are better able to train employees and invest in technology.

To find out more see the WSJ article (available for seven days free to non-subscribers) or navigate to www.brokenbuildings.com.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The situation in our surveillance state is such that the government can monitor many of our daily activities, using closed-circuit TV, global positioning systems, and a wide array of other sophisticated technologies—without warning, and at any time. But despite the growing public awareness of these intrusions, our post-9/11 environment of fear makes people reluctant to question them. Yet, as Christopher Slobogin explains in Privacy at Risk, these shocking violations of privacy are often perpetrated by those in positions of power.

This ground-breaking book argues that courts should prod legislatures into enacting more meaningful protection against government overreach by applying the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Slobogin demonstrates how we can thus preserve rights guaranteed by the Constitution—without compromising the government’s ability to investigate criminal acts—in a book that will intrigue anyone concerned about privacy rights in the digital age.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week we mentioned that Barry B. LePatner, author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry was going to be featured on Chris Gondek's business management podcast, The Invisible Hand. Well, while the podcast officially airs on Mr. Gondek's site this Saturday, he was kind enough to give us a link to the full audio from his talk with LePatner a couple of days in advance.

Listen to The Invisible Hand Podcast Episode 61 (mp3) as LePatner and Gondek engage in a fascinating discussion about how America's fractured construction industry is costing the nation billions of dollars, and what LePatner suggests can be done to fix it.

Also check out LePatner's special website for the book with excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Law
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David P. Currie, a constitutional scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 45 years, died yesterday in Chicago at the age of 71. Currie was the author of 19 books, and the University of Chicago Press was pleased to be the publisher of eight of them, including his magnificent works in the history of the Constitution of the United States.

In the two volumes of The Constitution in the Supreme Court, The First Hundred Years and The Second Century, Currie delivered both legal analysis and a narrative history of the highest court's interpretation of the Constitution.

Currie turned to the legislative branch for his volumes of The Constitution in Congress. He analyzed the work of the first six Congresses in The Federalist Period and examined the period of Republican hegemony in The Jeffersonians. The antebellum years required two volumes: Democrats and Whigs, which covered the Jacksonian revolution and economic changes, and Descent into the Maelstrom, which was devoted to the great debate over slavery. Currie was working on the next volume in the series at the time of his death.

For the bicentennial of the Constitution, Currie wrote a book for the student and lay audiences, The Constitution of the United States: A Primer for the People, which we issued in a second edition in 2000. Currie was not only a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, but examined the foundational documents of other countries as well. We published one of his international studies, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.

An obituary was released by the Law School and many comments from colleagues and students can be found on the Law School's Faculty Blog.

Archived in Law | UCP News
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Barry B. LePatner's new book, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry, was featured in an interesting article in Monday's edition of the Architectural Record. Writer James Murdock contrasts the opinions of Stephen Sandherr, chief executive of the Associated General Contractors of America, with LePatner's argument that the industry is in urgent need of reform. Murdock writes:

Barry LePatner, a Manhattan-based attorney who counts Frank Gehry and other big-name architects among his clients, sees a problem with the construction industry in the United States—clearly indicated by the title of his book Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, published today by the University of Chicago Press. "This is the industry that time has forgotten," he says. "Mom-and-pop shops, composed of 20 people or less, make up 92 percent of the industry. They are hugely inefficient, and they have no money to spend on improving performance and technology."

The result, LePatner continues, is tremendous waste in a $1.2-trillion-a-year business—nearly half of labor expenses on a project, according to some studies, are squandered due to schedule conflicts and late deliveries.… LePatner also says that the construction industry suffers from "the winner's curse": Contractors bid so low that the profit margin erodes and the only way to reclaim it is by filing change orders.

But Sandherr disagrees:

Few contractors abuse change orders to drive profits, he contends, and "to say that the construction industry has not embraced innovation or collaboration is naïtve. Just look at the innovations in the past 20 years: design-build, construction management at-risk, and value engineering. Look at building information modeling (BIM), which embraces new technology and allows for enhanced collaboration between designers, contractors, and suppliers.…"

LePatner welcomes such developments, but believes more systemic changes are needed. He recommends consolidation within the commercial construction industry, creating vertically integrated firms like Toll Brothers, Pulte, and other large residential builders.…

LePatner hopes that the business will redefine itself. "If we save only 10 percent in the construction industry, we put back $120 billion a year into the economy."

Read the rest of the article or find out more on the author's website for the book which features several excerpts and other resources.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Economics | Law | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A decision by the European Court of First Instance upholding a 2004 ruling by the European Commission that levied a fine of almost 500 million euros against Microsoft and required the company to share server protocols with competitors has once again brought the issue of antitrust to the legal forefront.

William H. Page and John E. Lopatka, authors of The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare, are blogging this week on the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog. They will discuss the European case as well as the litigation in the U.S., which they see as "the defining antitrust case of our era."

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Law
Posted by DB at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea Brague takes his readers back three thousand years to trace the idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times. Brague explains how divine law, which served in ancient Greece as a metaphor for natural law, was seen in ancient Israel as divine revelation. Then, in the Middle Ages, it took on different sacred meanings within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Illuminating these meanings with a wide array of philosophical, political, and religious sources, he goes on to address the recent break in the alliance between law and divinity—when modern societies, far from connecting the two, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. Powerfully expanding on the project he began with his critically acclaimed The Wisdom of the World, Brague explores what this disconnect means for the contemporary world, ultimately inviting us to re-imagine the implications of our own modernity.

Read the press release.

Archived in History | Law | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday's New York Sun features a review of Rémi Brague's new book The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea. Comparing Brague's newest work with his fascinating cultural history of cosmology, The Wisdom of the World, reviewer Adam Kirsch writes:

In The Law of God, Mr. Brague undertakes another journey through the buried continent of the ancient and medieval mind. But his topic this time—the idea of divine law, as it was understood from the ancient Greeks through the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish middle ages—does not seem nearly so remote. Humanity has long conceded that the structure of the inanimate world is the province of science. But most of us continue to believe that the moral law has other, deeper sources. …

That is why The Law of God strikes the reader with more intimate force than The Wisdom of the World. Mr. Brague's earlier book was archaeology, the digging up of something dead and buried; his new one is genealogy, tracing the descent of ideas that are still living. …

Brague's sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that anyone concerned with today's religious struggles ought to take up.

Archived in History | Law | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As reported by Nina Bernstein in the New York Times today, Eric L. Muller is filing an amicus curiae brief in the case of Turkmen v. Ashcroft, a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants who were swept up and held on alleged immigration violations in the wake of the attacks of September 11.

Muller wrote the brief on behalf of Karen Korematsu-Haigh, Jay Hirabayashi, and Holly Yasui, children of the three Japanese Americans who unsuccessfully challenged racial curfew and detention in court during World War II (Korematsu v. United States).

According to the story in the Times, the amicus brief argues that the ruling by a federal district judge in New York in 2006 "overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a 'fundamental injustice' warranting an apology and the payment of reparations."

Eric Muller has a posting about the brief on his blog. He is the author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II. We have an excerpt from his book.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Law
Posted by DB at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the recent furor over the publication of O.J. Simpson's "confession" demonstrates, the impact of a high-profile trial doesn’t end with the delivery of the verdict—the emotional, cultural, and political effects can resonate for decades. With The Trial in American Life, distinguished legal scholar Robert Ferguson explores the role of the high-profile trial from America’s earliest days to the present, arguing that far from being mere spectacles, such trials provide an essential forum for discussion of contentious issues.

In a bravura performance that ranges from Aaron Burr to O.J. Simpson, Ferguson traces both the legal implications and the cultural ripples of prominent trials. He brings together courtroom transcripts with newspaper and literary accounts of high-profile trials—including those of John Brown, Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt, the Haymarket defendants, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—to show what happens when courtrooms are forced to cope with unresolved communal anxieties and make legal decisions that change the American public’s very idea of itself.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Law | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In order to evade charges of racism, defenders of profiling point to actuarial data to bolster their claims that profiling is the most cost-effective way to fight crime, relying on the seeming logic of concentrating police resources on the people most likely to commit crime. Meanwhile anecdotal evidence—such as Al Gore being searched—serves to challenge the effectiveness of a purely random approach and nurtures the conventional wisdom that our security depends on targeting certain people. Yet, as Bernard Harcourt brilliantly argues in Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, relying on profiling or other prediction tools can have the opposite effect—they can actually increase crime, depending on how targeted populations respond to intensified policing and the increased difficulties for certain groups, such as the recently paroled, to find jobs or pursue education. Harcourt's compelling analysis is required reading for anyone concerned with the effects of our society's increasing fixation on security, crime, and punishment.

Read the press release.

Archived in Law | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bernard Harcourt, author of the recent Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, gave a talk last month for the Chicago's Best Ideas series at the University of Chicago Law School exploring and expanding on the topics he discusses in his new book. According to the Law School's Faculty Blog, "the talk was a very interesting look at law enforcement profiling and whether it works. Professor Harcourt approached this empirically, discussing whether it works on a practical level, injecting a new element in a debate that is traditionally about morals and ethics."

You can listen to the podcast of Harcourt's talk and follow along with the slides from his PowerPoint presentation. You can find his book on our website. Either way it would be ill advised to overlook his timely and revealing critique of the methods underlying our modern law enforcement policy.

Update: Chicago Public Radio's 848 also recently interviewed Harcourt about his new book. The audio can be found on the 848 website. Enjoy!

Archived in Author Events | Law
Posted by TXM at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After the arrests in Britain involving a plot to bomb several airliners bound for the U.S., the Transportation Security Administration says it will train and deploy screeners in airports to identify terrorists using behavioral cues. But is this really the best way to secure the safety of our airways? Bernard L. Harcourt, a University of Chicago professor of law and the author of Language of the Gun, wrote an intriguing op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he discusses the shortcomings of the statistical methods behind behavioral profiling—a discussion that sets the stage for his forthcoming book Against Predicition: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.

Harcourt's article makes the case that "investing heavily in seemingly high-tech airport security methods like behavioral profiling" is not a viable solution to securing the nation's airways and, in fact, "may make air travel less safe on the whole." Harcourt backs up his claim by citing the "many studies of the ability to detect truth and deception" recently conducted that, he says, have been "largely disappointing."

"A review of the literature," says Harcourt, "published in 2000 found that in experiments where subjects were trying to detect whether others were telling the truth or lying, the subjects had an overall success rate of 56.6 percent—slightly better than a coin toss. In the studies that broke down their data, it was found that subjects were able to determine that they were bieng lied to only 44 percent of the time—meaning that they would have done better closing their eyes and guessing."

In light of such bad odds Harcourt suggests a back-to-basics approach. "Rather than divert hundreds of screeners and untold dollars to high tech-fantasies, we need to invest those resources in hiring more routine screeners and giving them better training in basic," (and unbiased), "searches."

In a social climate that makes it all too easy for law enforcement officials to target and punish individuals without just cause, Mr. Harcourt's book promises to be a timely and significant read. Against Prediction is scheduled for publication early in 2007.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The recent convictions of former Enron executives Ken Lay and Tom Skilling are merely the latest names in a spate of verdicts handed down against high-profile executives. In only the past few years, Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, Adelphia’s John Rigas, and the American goddess of domesticity Martha Stewart each received legitimate jail time. But should Americans really feel confident that these verdicts and measures are anything more than window dressing? Are we really beginning to solve the problem? For William Laufer, author of Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds, the answers are "no" and "no."

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Law | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by DB at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 20 edition of the London Review of Books has a review by Jeremy Waldron of a recent book by John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition. Waldron notes: "Courting the Abyss is about free speech generally, but it focuses on this suggestion that we all become better people through tolerating the most hateful and diabolical speech, by staring at and listening to the Nazis and the racists in our midst." Though Waldron—a law school professor—wishes for a book that is more analytical and less literary—Peters's discipline is communication studies—Waldron's engaging review nonetheless allows that the book is "interesting and provocative."

An excerpt will acquaint you with both the literary and provocative nature of the book.

Archived in History | Law | Religion | Reviews
Posted by DB at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ezra Klein, who writes on health and medicine for Slate, posted an article today about the ongoing political battle over malpractice lawsuits. The Republican leadership in the Senate wants to cap jury awards in medical malpractice cases, while the Democrats are focused on cutting the number of malpractice lawsuits by reducing medical errors.

Klein brings Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth into the debate, calling it "the best attempt to synthesize the academic literature on medical malpractice." "Baker marshals an overwhelming array of research," says Klein, who goes on to use that evidence—as well as other just-released studies of medical malpractice suits—to argue that it makes more sense to improve medical practice.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Washington Times recently reviewed Robin L. Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery. From the review by James Srodes: "In American Taxation, American Slavery, Robin Einhorn, a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley, tells what might have been a complicated story in an engaging and accessible manner. It is her contention that slavery and the reaction to it to a great extent shaped the kind of nation we are today, because it shaped the kind of tax policies we constructed to fund the kind of government we got."

For all the recent attention to the slaveholding of the founding fathers, we still know remarkably little about the influence of slavery on American politics. American Taxation, American Slavery tackles this problem in a new way. Rather than parsing the ideological pronouncements of charismatic slaveholders, it examines the concrete policy decisions that slaveholders and non-slaveholders made in the critical realm of taxation. The result is surprising—that the enduring power of antigovernment rhetoric in the United States stems from the nation's history of slavery rather than its history of liberty.

Back in April we published a web essay by Einhorn "Tax Aversion and the Legacy of Slavery."

Archived in Economics | History | Law | Reviews
Posted by at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday, June 5, Bernard E. Harcourt, author of Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy appeared on Chicago Public Radio's morning talk show Eight Forty-Eight. Listen to the segment as posted to the WBEZ Web site. Harcourt is also the author of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, which we will publish in the fall.

Archived in Author Events | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
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Museum News has praised Susan M. Bielstein's Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property. From the review: "[Bielstein] gives life to what could be the driest subject ever with chapters such as 'Permissions: A Love Story,' 'Privacy Woes and the Duchess of York,' and 'Doing and Saying Whatever It Takes.' And besides enjoying the tongue-in-cheek prose, readers will learn how to determine if an artwork is copyrighted, how to get a high-quality reproduction, and what 'fair use' is."

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it's a good bet that at least half of those words relate to the picture's copyright status. Art historians, artists, and anyone who wants to use the images of others will find themselves awash in byzantine legal terms, constantly evolving copyright law, varying interpretations by museums and estates, and despair over the complexity of the whole situation. Susan Bielstein offers her decades of experience as an editor working with illustrated books. In doing so, she unsnarls the threads of permissions that have ensnared scholars, critics, and artists for years.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Law | Reference and Writing | Reviews
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On Monday, May 8, on the Senate floor, Democratic Leader Harry Reid gave a speech about medical malpractice legislation. The Senator's analysis drew extensively on The Medical Malpractice Myth by Tom Baker.

Reid said: "Over the weekend, I reviewed an insightful book entitled The Medical Malpractice Myth by Professor Tom Baker and published by the University of Chicago Press. . . . In this book, Professor Baker methodically debunks the most common myths in the medical malpractice debate." Reid summarized the major claims of the book and utilized them to oppose two Senate bills that would impose significant limitations on medical liability lawsuits.

Our excerpt from the book introduces Baker's argument.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
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Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries recently reviewed Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth: "This excellent study should be read by anyone interested in the contentious issue of medical malpractice reform. Highly recommended."

Tom Baker—a leading authority on insurance and law—pulls together the research that demolishes the myths that have taken hold about medical malpractice and suggests a series of legal reforms that would help doctors manage malpractice insurance while also improving patient safety and medical accountability.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, Bernard Harcourt lectured at the University of Chicago Law School. His lecture was based on his book Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy. In the book, Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-male correctional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies.

The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog features an audio file of Harcourt's talk, along with slides that accompanied his presentation.

Archived in Author Events | Law | Sociology
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The Claremont Review of Books recently reviewed John Yoo's The Powers of War and Peace. Joseph M. Bessette praised the book in a lengthy review, in which he concluded that "[John Yoo] makes a compelling case that Congress need not formally authorize many, perhaps most, military commitments abroad, for which the president possesses ample constitutional authority. It is rare that one scholar fundamentally recasts the debate on a constutional issue of pressing public importance. In The Powers of War and Peace, John Yoo has done exactly that."

John Yoo, formerly a lawyer in the Department of Justice, here makes the case for a completely new approach to understanding what the Constitution says about foreign affairs, particularly the powers of war and peace. Looking to American history, Yoo points out that from Truman and Korea to Clinton's intervention in Kosovo, American presidents have had to act decisively on the world stage without a declaration of war. They are able to do so, Yoo argues, because the Constitution grants the president, Congress, and the courts very different powers, requiring them to negotiate the country's foreign policy. Yoo roots his controversial analysis in a brilliant reconstruction of the original understanding of the foreign affairs power and supplements it with arguments based on constitutional text, structure, and history.

Read an interview with John Yoo.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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On April 5 at 12:15 p.m., Bernard Harcourt will speak at the University of Chicago Law School's Fourth Annual Chicago's Best Ideas series. Harcourt will lecture on "Language of the Gun: A Semiotic for Law & Social Science." The event is free and open to the public.

Harcourt is author of Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy. Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.

We will publish Harcourt's new book, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, later this year. See our earlier post about the subject of that book.

Archived in Author Events | Law
Posted by at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Malcom Gladwell, posting to his blog yesterday, discussed the book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics, and the implications of the arguments in that book for his “theory of broken windows,” which Gladwell developed in The Tipping Point. Concludes Gladwell, “I prefer to think of Freakonomics not as contradicting my argument in Tipping Point, but as completing it.”

Then he goes on to say: “Since Tipping Point has come out, there have been a number of economists who have looked specifically at broken windows—and tried to test the theory directly. Some have found support for it. Others—particularly Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago—find it wanting. If you crave a rigorous critique of broken windows, read Harcourt. He's every bit as smart as Levitt.”

Later this year we will publish Harcourt's new book, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age which will include Harcourt's argument against the theory of broken windows. We also published Harcourt's book Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Commentary recently reviewed John Yoo's The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11. From Andrew C. McCarthy's review: "An essential guide for thinking about national-security challenges in an era of transnational terror networks that flout the laws of civilized warfare.… Yoo's thesis in this book is strongest as an argument grounded in text—the text, that is, of our founding law.… In a world beset by the constant threat of sudden destructive force, a robust and firmly grounded view of presidential power is imperative.… For showing how that power derives from the very system the framers bequeathed us, John Yoo deserves our deep thanks."

Read an interview with John Yoo.

Archived in Law | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
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The snow has melted, birds are chirping, and the W2s roll into the mailbox. It can only mean one thing: tax season. Many of us will grumble about how we're paying too much, while the rich are getting off easy. But what can we do about it? What alternative is there?

In Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler, tax law expert Edward J. McCaffery proposes a straightforward and fair alternative. A "fair not flat" tax that is consistent and progressive would tax spending, not income and savings. And if it were collected at its lower levels through a national sales tax, most people would not have to file a return. A supplemental tax on spending for the wealthiest individuals would make the national sales tax progressive.

Under McCaffery's system, a family of four would pay no tax on their first $20,000 in spending, and 15 percent on the next $60,000. Only the few families who spend more than $80,000 a year would be subject to the supplemental tax. Necessities would be taxed less than ordinary and luxury items. No one would be taxed directly on savings. The estate and gift or so-called death tax would be abolished, for the simple reason that dead people don't spend. The "fair not flat" tax would fall on heirs when and as they spend their good fortune. Perhaps best of all, most Americans would not have to fill out tax returns. Simpler, more efficient, fairer, and more reflective of America's current social values, McCaffery's "fair not flat" tax could help get us out of the tax mess that politicians and special interests have gotten us into, improving the whole country in the process.

Visit Edward J. McCaffery's Fair Not Flat Web site, which includes excerpts from the book, interviews, reviews, and other special features.

McCaffery is also the author of Taxing Women, an examination of the gender bias in tax laws and the inequalities facing married couples filing jointly. Taxing Women contributed to the movement to modify the tax code that resulted in legislation removing some but not all of the so-called marriage penalty. McCaffery explains the scope and limitations of the changes an article published on the Web site of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Japan Times recently praised Mark D. West's Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes. In the review, Jeff Kingston writes: "This is a superb book that explores the interaction of law, society and culture over a range of intriguing topics. In seven captivating case studies, Mark West shows how law influences people's behavior and perceptions in everyday situations. Rather than trumping law, social norms are powerfully shaped by it. We learn that Japanese respond to incentives and penalties in ways very similar to people in other societies.… By choosing themes off the beaten track of legal analysis, West demonstrates that even the quirkiest phenomena can be analyzed. He 'examines the incentives created by law and legal institutions in everyday lives, the ways in which law intermingles with social norms, historically engrained ideas, cultural mores, and the phenomena that cannot easily be explained.' And he does so in a delightfully engaging manner."

Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes—karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide—Law in Everyday Japan offers a vibrant portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan.

Archived in Anthropology | Law | Reviews
Posted by at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Yoo, author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11, was interviewed by Steve Inskeep on NPR's Morning Edition this morning. Yoo explained his view of the president's expansive power in times of war, and the role of Congressional review and oversight. He also said that it's "an exaggeration" that his views give the President "unlimited power."

We also have an interview with Yoo on our website.

Archived in Books for the News | Law | Politics and Current Events
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On February 18, 2006, Eric Muller will be the guest speaker at the Northern California Time of Remembrance program in Sacramento, California. The program recalls Executive Order 9066, which gave the military the authority to remove from their homes more than 110,000 people—American citizens of Japanese ancestry and Japanese aliens—and place them in relocation camps during World War II. E.O. 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942.

Muller is the author of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II which tells the amazing story of some of those internees who would refuse to be drafted into that same military that evicted them from their homes. Read an excerpt from the book.

Eric Muller blogs at Is That Legal?

Archived in Author Events | History | Law
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Two of our authors will be speaking at a Yale Law Journal symposium "The Most Dangerous Branch? Mayors, Governors, Presidents and the Rule of Law" on March 24 and 25, 2006. Cass Sunstein, whose most recent Chicago book was Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide, and John Yoo, author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11, will participate in the symposium.

John Yoo's writings—in The Powers of War and Peace and in memos he authored while at the Office of Legal Counsel—have been the focus of recent discussions about presidential power in times of war and crisis. Yoo discusses these issues in an interview.

More information about the symposium.

Archived in Author Events | Law | Politics and Current Events
Posted by DB at 10:25 AM | Permalink