How
Lawyers Lose Their Way
A
Profession Fails Its Creative Minds
By
Jean Stefancic and
Richard Delgado.
Durham and London:
Duke
University Press, 2005.
Call number: KF300.S698
2005
From
the Publisher
In
this penetrating book, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado use
historical investigation and critical analysis to explore the
unlikely friendship between Archibald MacLeish and Ezra Pound
through 40 years of correspondence. MacLeish, a successful but
dissatisfied lawyer gave up his career to pursue his literary
dreams. The authors use this scenario to diagnose the cause
of the pervasive unhappiness among practicing lawyers. Most
previous writers have blamed the high rate of burnout, depression,
divorce, and drug and alcohol dependency among these highly
paid professionals on the narrow specialization, long hours,
and intense pressures of modern legal practice. Stefancic and
Delgado argue that these professional demands are only symptoms
of a deeper problem: the way lawyers are taught to think and
reason. They show how legal education and practice have been
rendered arid and dull by formalism, a way of thinking that
values precedent and doctrine above all, exalting consistency
over ambiguity, rationality over emotion, and rules over social
context and narrative. Drawing on MacLeish's story, Stefancic
and Delgado contend that literature, public interest work, and
critical legal theory offer tools to contemporary attorneys
for finding meaning and overcoming professional dissatisfaction.
About
the Authors
Jean Stefancic is Research Professor and Richard Delgado is
Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where
both are Derrick Bell Fellows.
Additional
Information Online
 Private
Lives
Families,
Individuals and the Law
By
Lawrence M. Friedman
Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Call number:
KF505.F75
2004
From the Publisher
What
is a family? Grandparents, mom, dad, and kids around a Thanksgiving
turkey? An egg mother, a womb mother, a sperm donor, and their
mutual child? Two gay men caring for their adopted son? In
this provocative essay, a leading American legal historian
argues that laws about family are increasingly laws about
individuals and their right to make their own, sometimes contentious,
choices.
Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases
of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short
history of the complexities of family law and family life--including
the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary
arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing.
Informal common-law marriage was once widely accepted as a
means to regularize property arrangements, but it declined
as the state asserted its authority to dictate who could marry
and reproduce. In the twentieth century, state attempts to
control private life were swept away, most famously in the
creation of "no-fault" divorce, a system in which
laws that made divorce nearly unattainable were circumvented.
Private life, the author argues, as a legitimate sphere, was
once basically confined to life in nuclear families; but the
modern law of "privacy" extends the accepted zone
of intimate relations. The omnipresence of the media and our
fascination with celebrity test the boundaries of public and
private life. Meanwhile, laws about cohabitation and civil
unions, among others, suggest that family and commitment,
in their many forms, remain powerful ideals.
About
the Author
Lawrence M. Friedman is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of
Law at Stanford University.
Additional
Information Online
 Rights
from Wrongs
A Secular Theory
of the Origins of Right
By Alan Dershowitz New
York: Basic Books, 2004. Call Number: JC571.D3985
2004
From the Publisher
Where do our rights come from? Does "natural law"
really exist outside of what is written in constitutions and
legal statutes? If so, why are rights not the same everywhere
and in all eras? On the other hand, if rights are nothing
more than the product of human law, why should we ever allow
them to override the popular will? In Rights from Wrongs,
renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz puts forward a wholly
new and compelling answer to this age-old dilemma: Rights,
he argues, do not come from God, nature, logic, or law alone.
They arise out of particular human experiences with injustice.
Rights from Wrongs is the first book to propose a theory of
rights that emerges not from a theory of perfect justice but
from its opposite: from the bottom up, from trial and error,
and from our collective experience of injustice
About
the Author
A columnist, lecturer, book reviewer, and prolific author,
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law
at Harvard Law School
Additional
Information Online
 DNA
and the Criminal Justice System
The Technology of Justice
Edited
by David Lazer Cambridge
and London: MIT Press, 2004. Call number: KF9666.5.D63
2004
From the Publisher
Is DNA technology the ultimate diviner of guilt or the ultimate
threat to civil liberties? Over the past decade, DNA has been
used to exonerate hundreds and to convict thousands. Its expanded
use over the coming decade promises to recalibrate significantly
the balance between collective security and individual freedom.
… [T]he use of DNA technology will involve tough trade-offs
between individual and societal interests.
This book, written
by a distinguished group of authors including US Supreme Court
Justice Stephen Breyer, explores the ethical, procedural,
and economic challenges posed by the use of DNA evidence as
well as future directions for the technology. …[T]he
book considers bioethical issues raised by the collection
of DNA… then turn[s] to the possible genetic bases of
human behavior and the implications of this still-unresolved
issue for the criminal justice system. Finally, the book examines
the current debate over the many roles that DNA can and should
play in criminal justice.
About
the Editor
David Lazer is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Additional
Information Online
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