"Haley Sweetland Edwards explains the history of global shadow courts and how these courts have spun out of control, threatening the interests of citizens everywhere including the United States. Her fantastic book is exactly what long-form journalism is meant to do, to move beyond current events and provide historical perspective that aims at future reform. SHADOW COURTS should be at the top of the reading list of all those interested in redesigning trade agreements to be in the publicinterest." -- Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor, Columbia University and author ofThe End of Poverty International trade deals have become vastly complex documents, seeking to govern everything from labor rights to environmental protections. This evolution has drawn alarm from American voters, but their suspicions are often vague. In this book, investigative journalist Haley Sweetland Edwards offers a detailed look at one little-known but powerful provision in most modern trade agreements that is designed to protect the financial interests of global corporations against the governments of sovereign states. She makes a devastating case that Investor-State Dispute Settlement -- a "shadow court" that allows corporations to sue a nation outside its own court system -- has tilted the balance of power on the global stage. Acorporation can use ISDS to challenge a nation's policies and regulations, if it believes those laws are unfair or diminish its future profits. From the 1960s to 2000, corporations brought fewer than 40 disputes, but in the last fifteen years, they have brought nearly 650 -- 54 against Argentina alone. Edwards conducted extensive research and interviewed dozens of policymakers, activists, and government officials in Argentina, Canada, Bolivia, Ecuador, the European Union, and in the Obama administration. The result is a major story about a significant shift in the global balance of power.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

High courts around the world hold a revered place in the legal hierarchy. These courts are the presumed impartial final arbiters as individuals, institutions, and nations resolve their legal differences. But they also buttress and mitigate the influence of other political actors, protect minority rights, and set directions for policy. The comparative empirical analysis offered in this volume highlights important differences between constitutional courts but also clarifies the unity of procedure, process, and practice in the world’s highest judicial institutions. High Courts in Global Perspective pulls back the curtain on the interlocutors of court systems internationally. This book creates a framework for a comparative analysis that weaves together a collective narrative on high court behavior and the scholarship needed for a deeper understanding of cross-national contexts. From the U.S. federal courts to the constitutional courts of Africa, from the high courts in Latin America to the Court of Justice of the European Union, high courts perform different functions in different societies, and the contributors take us through particularities of regulation and legislative review as well as considering the legitimacy of the court to serve as an honest broker in times of political transition. Unique in its focus and groundbreaking in its access, this comparative study will help scholars better understand the roles that constitutional courts and judges play in deciding some of the most divisive issues facing societies across the globe. From Africa to Europe to Australia and continents and nations in between, we get an insider’s look into the construction and workings of the world’s courts while also receiving an object lesson on best practices in comparative quantitative scholarship today. Contributors: Aylin Aydin-Cakir, Yeditepe University, Turkey * Tanya Bagashka, University of Houston * Clifford Carrubba, Emory University * Amanda Driscoll, Florida State University * Joshua Fischman, University of Virginia * Joshua Fjelstul, Washington University in St. Louis * Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago * Melinda Gann Hall, Michigan State University * Chris Hanretty, University of London * Lori Hausegger, Boise State University * Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University * Lewis A. Kornhauser, New York University * Dominique H. Lewis, Texas A&M University * Chien-Chih Lin, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * Sunita Parikh, Washington University in St. Louis * Russell Smyth, Monash University, Australia * Christopher Zorn, Pennsylvania State University Constitutionalism and Democracy

In this provocative work, Martin Shapiro proposes an original model for the study of courts, one that emphasizes the different modes of decision making and the multiple political roles that characterize the functioning of courts in different political systems.

Most Americans think that judges should be, and are, generalists who decide a wide array of cases. Nonetheless, we now have specialized courts in many key policy areas, and the degree of specialization has grown over time. Specializing the Courts provides the first comprehensive analysis of specialization in the federal and state court systems.

Scholars of Jewish, European, and Israeli history as well as readers interested in issues of legal and social justice will be grateful for this detailed volume.

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy.

“Masterful and left me on the edge of my seat…absolutely everything I could want in a sci-fi.” —Adalyn Grace, New York Times bestselling author of All the Stars and Teeth Westworld meets Warcross in this high-stakes, dizzyingly smart sci-fi about a teen girl navigating an afterlife in which she must defeat an AI entity intent on destroying humanity, from award-winning author Akemi Dawn Bowman. Eighteen-year-old Nami Miyamoto is certain her life is just beginning. She has a great family, just graduated high school, and is on her way to a party where her entire class is waiting for her—including, most importantly, the boy she’s been in love with for years. The only problem? She’s murdered before she gets there. When Nami wakes up, she learns she’s in a place called Infinity, where human consciousness goes when physical bodies die. She quickly discovers that Ophelia, a virtual assistant widely used by humans on Earth, has taken over the afterlife and is now posing as a queen, forcing humans into servitude the way she’d been forced to serve in the real world. Even worse, Ophelia is inching closer and closer to accomplishing her grand plans of eradicating human existence once and for all. As Nami works with a team of rebels to bring down Ophelia and save the humans under her imprisonment, she is forced to reckon with her past, her future, and what it is that truly makes us human. From award-winning author Akemi Dawn Bowman comes an incisive, action-packed tale that explores big questions about technology, grief, love, and humanity.

Rebel Courts presents an argument that it is possible for non-state armed groups in situations of armed conflict to legally establish and operate a system of courts to administer justice. Neither the concept of the rule of law nor the general principle of state sovereignty stands in the way of framing an understanding of the rule of law adapted to the reality of rebel governance in the area of justice. Legal standards applicable to non-state armed groups in situations of international or non-international armed conflict, including international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and international criminal law, recognise their authority to regularly constitute or establish non-state courts. The lawful operation of such courts is of course subject to requirements of due process, corresponding to an array of guarantees that must be respected in all cases. Rebel courts that are regularly constituted and operate in a manner consistent with due process guarantees demand a certain degree of recognition by international institutions, by states not involved in the conflict, to some extent by the territorial state, and even by other non-state armed groups. These normative claims are grounded in a series of detailed case studies of the administration of justice by non-state armed groups in a diverse range of conflict situations, including the FARC (Colombia), Islamic State (Syria and Iraq), Taliban (Afghanistan), Tamil Tigers (Sri Lanka), PKK (Turkey), PYD (Syria), and KRG (Iraq).