Marke, Julius J., Editor. A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University With Selected Annotations. New York: The Law Center of New York University, 1953. xxxi, 1372 pp. Reprinted 1999 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-19939. ISBN 1-886363-91-9. Cloth. $195. * Reprint of the massive, well-annotated catalogue compiled by the librarian of the School of Law at New York University. Classifies approximately 15,000 works excluding foreign law, by Sources of the Law, History of Law and its Institutions, Public and Private Law, Comparative Law, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Political and Economic Theory, Trials, Biography, Law and Literature, Periodicals and Serials and Reference Material. With a thorough subject and author index. This reference volume will be of continuous value to the legal scholar and bibliographer, due not only to the works included but to the authoritative annotations, often citing more than one source. Besterman, A World Bibliography of Bibliographies 3461.

In The Massachusetts State Constitution, Lawrence Friedman and Lynnea Thody present a comprehensive and accessible survey of Massachusetts constitutional history and constitutional law. The Massachusetts Constitution is the oldest state constitution and has remained essentially unchanged since it was drafted in 1780. It served as a model for the United States Constitution and many of the state constitutions that followed. The Massachusetts State Constitution provides an outstanding constitutional and historical account of the state's governing charter. It begins with an overview of Massachusetts's constitutional history, and then provides an in-depth, section-by-section analysis of the entire constitution, detailing important changes that have been made since its drafting. This treatment, which includes a list of cases, index, and bibliography, makes this guide indispensable for students, scholars, and practitioners of the Massachusetts constitution. The Oxford Commentaries on the State Constitutions of the United States is an important series that reflects a renewed international interest in constitutional history and provides expert insight into each of the 50 state constitutions. Each volume in this innovative series contains a historical overview of the state's constitutional development, a section-by-section analysis of its current constitution, and a comprehensive guide to further research. Under the expert editorship of Professor G. Alan Tarr, Director of the Center on State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers University, this series provides essential reference tools for understanding state constitutional law. Books in the series can be purchased individually or as part of a complete set, giving readers unmatched access to these important political documents.

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas--before and after 1848--that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg shows, they developed a rich theoretical tradition that influenced not only subsequent strains of feminist thought but also ideas about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally. By focusing on rights discourse and political theory, Isenberg moves beyond a narrow focus on suffrage. Democracy was in the process of being redefined in antebellum America by controversies over such volatile topics as fugitive slave laws, temperance, Sabbath laws, capital punishment, prostitution, the Mexican War, married women's property rights, and labor reform--all of which raised significant legal and constitutional questions. These pressing concerns, debated in women's rights conventions and the popular press, were inseparable from the gendered meaning of nineteenth-century citizenship.

The social organization of criminal courts is the theme of this collection of articles. The volume provides contributions to three levels of social organization in criminal courts: (1) the macro-level involving external economic, political and social forces (Joachim J. Savelsberg; Raymond Michalowski; Mary E. Vogel; John Hagan and Ron Levi); (2) the meso-level consisting of formal structures, informal cultural norms and supporting agencies in an interlocking organizational network (Malcolm M. Feeley; Lawrence Mohr; Jo Dixon; Jeffrey T. Ulmer and John H. Kramer), and (3) the micro-level consisting of interactional orders that emerge from the social discourses and categorizations in multiple layers of bargaining and negotiation processes (Lisa Frohmann; Aaron Kupchik; Michael McConville and Chester Mirsky; Bankole A. Cole). An editorial introduction ties these levels together, relating them to a Weberian sociology of law.