In Reinventing American Jurisprudence: Law through the Lens of Value, George David Miller and Laura Brown unfurl an original approach to value and an imaginative landscape in philosophy of law. Value essentialism identifies value formations such as a sacred cow and scapegoat tandem and the intensification of “oughtness” as it approaches sacred zenith values. Readers learn how Occam’s razor has been responsible for the death of many ideas; how the celebrated Other gains nuance as near and remote; and where a spectral assessment of probability and necessity leads. Analyses of Supreme Court cases grow out in different and exciting directions. Buck was not about eugenics, but another iteration of the value of efficiency and Yo Wick was decided less on law and more on a justice’s finding humanity in Chinese laundry mat proprietors. Lochner involved not an ideological binary but three distinct value schemes. “Separate but equal” was refined as parallelism and exploitative tangents. In Brown, the Fourteenth Amendment took a significant subjective turn. In Heller, the communitarian position of stopping violence before it began could be contrasted with the individualistic position of waiting until you see the whites of their eyes in your bedroom. Citizens United was distilled into the question: was the First Amendment designed to maximize participation or maximize democracy?

The Threats of Algorithms and A.I. to Civil Rights, Legal Remedies, and American Jurisprudence addresses the many threats to American jurisprudence caused by the growing use of algorithms and artificial intelligence (A.I.). Although algorithms prove valuable to society, that value may also lead to the destruction of the foundations of American jurisprudence by threatening constitutional rights of individuals, creating new liabilities for business managers and board members, disrupting commerce, interfering with long-standing legal remedies, and causing chaos in courtrooms trying to adjudge lawsuits. Alfred R. Cowger, Jr. explains these threats and provides potential solutions for both the general public and legal practitioners. Scholars of legal studies, media studies, and political science will find this book particularly useful.

Should judges in United States courts be permitted to cite foreign laws in their rulings? In this book Jeremy Waldron explores some ideas in jurisprudence and legal theory that could underlie the Supreme Court's occasional recourse to foreign law, especially in constitutional cases. He argues that every society is governed not only by its own laws but partly also by laws common to all mankind (ius gentium). But he takes the unique step of arguing that this common law is not natural law but a grounded consensus among all nations. The idea of such a consensus will become increasingly important in jurisprudence and public affairs as the world becomes more globalized.

The findings reported in this book are based upon ethnographic observations of drug courts throughout the United States and provide a glimpse into the unique character of the American drug court model, considering the qualities and consequences of this form of criminal adjudication.

Pragmatism, Logic and Law offers a view of legal pragmatism consistent with pragmatism writ large, tracing it from origins in late 19th century America to the present, covering various issues, legal cases, personalities, and relevant intellectual movements within and outside law. It addresses pragmatism’s relation to legal liberalism, legal positivism, natural law, critical legal studies (CLS), and post-Rorty “neopragmatism.” It views legal pragmatism as an exemplar of pragmatism’s general contribution to logical theory, which bears two connections to the western philosophical tradition: first, it extends Francis Bacon’s empiricism into contemporary aspects of scientific and legal experience, and second, it is an explicitly social reconstruction of logical induction. Both notions were articulated by John Dewey, and both emphasize the social or corporate element of human inquiry. Empiricism is informed by social as well as individual experience (which includes the problems of conflict and consensus). Rather than following the Aristotelian model of induction as immediate inference from particulars to generals, a model that assumes a consensual objective viewpoint, pragmatism explores the actual, and extended, process of corporate inference from particular experience to generalization, in law as in science. This includes the necessary process of resolving disagreement and finding similarity among relevant particulars.

"Argues that the fundamental reason for church-state conflict is our aversion to questions of religious truth. By trying to avoid the question of religious truth, law and religion has ultimately reached a state of incoherence. He asserts that the answer to this dilemma is to take the agnostic turn: to take an empathetic and imaginative approach to questions of religious truth, one that actually confronts rather than avoids these questions, but without reaching a final judgment about what that truth is"--Jacket.

One of the hallmark features of the post–civil rights United States is the reign of colorblindness over national conversations about race and law. But how, precisely, should we understand this notion of colorblindness in the face of enduring racial hierarchy in American society? In Letters of the Law, Sora Y. Han argues that colorblindness is a foundational fantasy of law that not only informs individual and collective ideas of race, but also structures the imaginative capacities of American legal interpretation. Han develops a critique of colorblindness by deconstructing the law's central doctrines on due process, citizenship, equality, punishment and individual liberty, in order to expose how racial slavery and the ongoing struggle for abolition continue to haunt the law's reliance on the fantasy of colorblindness. Letters of the Law provides highly original readings of iconic Supreme Court cases on racial inequality—spanning Japanese internment to affirmative action, policing to prisoner rights, Jim Crow segregation to sexual freedom. Han's analysis provides readers with new perspectives on many urgent social issues of our time, including mass incarceration, educational segregation, state intrusions on privacy, and neoliberal investments in citizenship. But more importantly, Han compels readers to reconsider how the diverse legacies of civil rights reform archived in American law might be rewritten as a heterogeneous practice of black freedom struggle.

In a series of fascinating essays that explore topics in American politics from the nation's founding to the present day , The Democratic Experiment opens up exciting new avenues for historical research while offering bold claims about the tensions that have animated American public life. Revealing the fierce struggles that have taken place over the role of the federal government and the character of representative democracy, the authors trace the contested and dynamic evolution of the national polity. The contributors, who represent the leading new voices in the revitalized field of American political history, offer original interpretations of the nation's political past by blending methodological insights from the new institutionalism in the social sciences and studies of political culture. They tackle topics as wide-ranging as the role of personal character of political elites in the Early Republic, to the importance of courts in building a modern regulatory state, to the centrality of local political institutions in the late twentieth century. Placing these essays side by side encourages the asking of new questions about the forces that have shaped American politics over time. An unparalleled example of the new political history in action, this book will be vastly influential in the field. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Brian Balogh, Sven Beckert, Rebecca Edwards, Joanne B. Freeman, Richard R. John, Ira Katznelson, James T. Kloppenberg, Matthew D. Lassiter, Thomas J. Sugrue, Michael Vorenberg, and Michael Willrich.

An eye-opening look at the influential Supreme Court justice who disrupted American jurisprudence in order to delegitimize opponents and establish a conservative legal order

McCormack examines English law on Secured Credit, highlighting its weaknesses, and evaluating possible remedies. Contains the text of Article 9.