Big-ticket litigation is becoming a way of life in this country. But something new is afoot-something typified by the $246 billion tobacco settlement, and by other courtroom assaults against companies producing guns, cars, breast implants, asbestos, lead paint, and more. Each massive class-action suit seeks to invent new law, to ban, tax, or regulate something that elected lawmakers had chosen to leave alone. And each time the new attack process works as intended, the new litigation elite reaps billions in fees-which they invest in fresh rounds of suits, as well as political...

Law punishes violence, yet law depends on violence. In this book, a group of leading interdisciplinary legal scholars seeks to map the inexorable but unstable relationship of law to violence. What does it mean to talk about the violence of law? Do high incarceration rates and increased reliance on capital punishment indicate that U.S. law is growing more violent at a time when violence is being restrained in other legal systems? How is the violence of law represented in popular culture and does this affect law's actual legitimacy? Does violence express or distort the essence of law? Does...

This anthology presents, for the first time, full texts of the twenty most important works of American legal thought since 1890. Drawing on a course the editors teach at Harvard Law School, the book traces the rise and evolution of a distinctly American form of legal reasoning. These are the articles that have made these authors--from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to Ronald Coase, from Ronald Dworkin to Catherine MacKinnon--among the most recognized names in American legal history.

These authors proposed answers to the classic question: "What does it mean to think like a...

Regulating Lives looks at the roles of the state, society, the individual, and the law in the regulation of public and private life. In nine original essays, the authors apply the concepts of social control, moral regulation, and governmentality, as developed by influential social theorists such as Stanley Cohen, Michel Foucault, and Philip Corrigan, to the specific conditions that prevailed in early British Columbia. Along a span of nearly a century and a half ? and across a diversity of topics including intermarriage, mental disorder, prohibition, incest, children's aid, venereal...

The Passions of Law is the first anthology to treat the role that emotions play, don't play, and ought to play in the practice and conception of law and justice. Lying at the intersection of law, psychology, and philosophy, this emergent field of law scholarship raises some of the most profound and interesting questions at the heart of jurisprudence. For example, what role do emotions ranging from disgust to compassion play in the decision-making processes of judges, lawyers, juries, and clients? What emotions belong in which legal contexts? Is there a hierarchy of emotions, and, if...

The relationship between religion and the law is a hot-button topic in America, with the courts, Congress, journalists, and others engaging in animated debates on what influence, if any, the former should have on the latter. Many of these discussions are dominated by the legal perspective, which views religion as a threat to the law; it is rare to hear how various religions in America view American law, even though most religions have distinct views on law.

In Faith and Law, legal scholars from sixteen different religious traditions contend that religious discourse...

The relationship between religion and the law is a hot-button topic in America, with the courts, Congress, journalists, and others engaging in animated debates on what influence, if any, the former should have on the latter. Many of these discussions are dominated by the legal perspective, which views religion as a threat to the law; it is rare to hear how various religions in America view American law, even though most religions have distinct views on law.

In Faith and Law, legal scholars from sixteen different religious traditions contend that religious discourse has an...

In order to determine whether two participants in a discussion are in real dis/agreement, one must compare their propositions. Comparison presupposes yardsticks in common. This work thematises such yardsticks, in that it demonstrates the existence, content and factual significance of a relatively well-delimited set of proposition types and proposition patterns, with their accompanying tenability criteria and motivating interests. It is for philosophers, legal theorists, lawyers, and linguists.