Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom

by Charles Halpern and Robert B. Reich

This inspiring memoir is about working for a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world, while cultivating the wisdom that supports and deepens this work. Everyone who is trying to make waves to bring about needed social and institutional change will enjoy this real-world guide to effectively navigating the currents to achieve success while also maintaining balance, compassion, and hope. Charles Halpern, one of America's most distinguished public interest advocates and social innovators, shares his revealing experiences and learnings along a journey from corporate attorney to activist and social entrepreneur. People of all ages will learn about integrating the inner and outer work of their lives through the practice of wisdom.

Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk

by James E. Bessen and Michael J. Meurer

In the last several years, business leaders, policymakers, and inventors have complained to the media and to Congress that today's patent system stifles innovation instead of fostering it. But like the infamous patent on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much of the cited evidence about the patent system is pure anecdote--making realistic policy formation difficult. Is the patent system fundamentally broken, or can it be fixed with a few modest reforms?

Moving beyond rhetoric, Patent Failure provides the first authoritative and comprehensive look at the economic performance of patents in forty years. James Bessen and Michael Meurer ask whether patents work well as property rights, and, if not, what institutional and legal reforms are necessary to make the patent system more effective.
Patent Failure presents a wide range of empirical evidence from history, law, and economics. The book's findings are stark and conclusive.

While patents do provide incentives to invest in research, development, and commercialization, for most businesses today, patents fail to provide predictable property rights. Instead, they produce costly disputes and excessive litigation that outweigh positive incentives. Only in some sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry, do patents act as advertised, with their benefits outweighing the related costs.

By showing how the patent system has fallen short in providing predictable legal boundaries, Patent Failure serves as a call for change in institutions and laws. There are no simple solutions, but Bessen and Meurer's reform proposals need to be heard. The health and competitiveness of the nation's economy depend on it.

How Judges Think

by Richard A. Posner

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning.
Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

by Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new take—from neither the left nor the right—on many hot-button issues, for individuals and governments alike. This is one of the most engaging and provocative books to come along in many years.

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All

by Peter Linebaugh

This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny--and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture--are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.

Liberty's Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World

by Michael I. Meyerson

The fascinating story of how the Federalist Papers were written, along with a controversial new interpretation of their meanings, then and now.
Aside from the Constitution itself, there is no more important document in American politics and law than The Federalist-the series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to explain the proposed Constitution to the American people and persuade them to ratify it. Today, amid angry debate over what the Constitution means and what the framers' "original intent" was, The Federalist is more important than ever, offering the best insight into how the framers thought about the most troubling issues of American government and how the various clauses of the Constitution were meant to be understood.
Michael Meyerson's Liberty's Blueprint provides a fascinating window into the fleeting, and ultimately doomed, friendship between Hamilton and Madison, as well as a much-needed introduction to understanding how the lessons of The Federalist are relevant for resolving contemporary constitutional issues from medical marijuana to the war on terrorism. This book shows that, when properly read, The Federalist is not a "conservative" manifesto but a document that rightfully belongs to all Americans across the political spectrum.

In the Ring: The Trials of a Washington Lawyer

by Robert S. Bennett

Robert S. Bennett has been a lawyer for more than forty years. In that time, he’s taken on dozens of high-profile and groundbreaking cases and emerged as the go-to guy for the nation’s elite. Bob Bennett gained international recognition as one of America’s best lawyers for leading the defense of President Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case. But long before, and ever since, representing a sitting president, he has fought for justice for many famous (and some now infamous) clients. This is his story.

Born in Brooklyn and an amateur boxer in his youth, Bennett has always brought his street fighter’s mentality to the courtroom. His case history is a who’s who of figures who have dominated legal headlines: super lobbyist Tommy Corcoran, former Secretaries of Defense Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger, Marge Schott, and, most recently, New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. Bennett also served as special counsel to the Senate during the ABSCAM and Keating Five scandals and was a leading member of the National Review Board for the Protection of Children & Young People, created by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in response to the sex abuse allegations.

Taking the reader deep within his most intriguing and difficult cases, In the Ring shows how Bennett has argued for what’s right, won for his clients, and effected his share of change on the system. This is an intimate and compelling memoir of one lawyer’s attempt to fight hard and fair.

Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas

by Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher

There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from racially conscious admissions policies.

Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have never spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candid conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.

Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court

by Thomas R. Marshall

Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court offers the most thorough evidence yet in favor of the U.S. Supreme Court representing public opinion. Thomas R. Marshall analyzes more than two thousand nationwide public opinion polls during the Rehnquist Court era and argues that a clear majority of Supreme Court decisions agree with public opinion. He explains that the Court represents American attitudes when public opinion is well informed on a dispute and when the U.S. Solicitor General takes a position agreeing with poll majorities. He also finds that certain justices best represent public opinion and that the Court uses its review powers over the state and federal courts to bring judicial decision making back in line with public opinion. Finally, Marshall observes that unpopular Supreme Court decisions simply do not endure as long as do popular decisions.

Commemorating Brown: The Social Psychology of Racism and Discrimination

edited by Glenn Adamns, Nyla R. Branscombe, Monica Biernat, and Christian S. Crandall

Brown v. Board of Education was the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation illegal in the United States. Commemorating Brown offers a critical retrospective on the role of psychological research in the fight against racism and discrimination and an up-to-date review of the psychology of racism and its implications for schools, the workplace, and public policy. The chapters provide a historical perspective on the Brown decision. Equally important, chapter authors identify emerging directions for action in the continuing struggle against racism and oppression, including multicultural and international perspectives on racism that highlight the role of identity processes and collectively constructed realities (e.g., social representations of fairness, integration, merit, and American history). Finally, the editors describe a sociocultural approach to the psychology of racism and oppression that integrates diverse programs of theory and research in social psychology.

Oral Arguments before the Supreme Court: An Empirical Approach

by Lawrence Wrightsman

When the Supreme Court agrees to decide a case, the litigants make an (usually one-hour) oral presentation to the Court. In all the steps in the Court's decision, this is the only public part. As such, it provides an important window into the Court's decision-making processes. Using original transcripts from the last 8 sessions of the Supreme Court, Wrightsman's empirical research is the first of its kind. The purpose of this book is to examine how the oral arguments work, and their effect on the Court's decisions. It also draws the important distinction between ideological cases (i.e. hot-button issues such as the death penalty, affirmative action, abortion, and the environment) and non-ideological cases (bankruptcy, tax code, civil litigation), and shows the different ways in which they're treated.

Who Owns Knowledge?: Knowledge and The Law

edited by Nico Stehr and Bernd Weiler

Knowledge and the Law explores the emerging linkages between the extension of knowledge and the law. It anticipates that the legal system will not only be called upon to adjudicate in matters of creative minds, but will be expected to do so to an ever increasing degree. Linkages between the legal system and knowledge are bound to multiply in modern societies. Ironically, while increasingly relying on knowledge, we are simultaneously investing significant resources into controlling this same knowledge. This includes developing a system of legal governance over how knowledge is extended or enlarged. Such modes of governance may take the form of regulatory legal codes, or legal challenges and judgments that shape the evolution of modern society and potentially transform knowledge itself, as a productive force.

Knowledge and the Law asks such questions as: What is the appropriate balance of public and private interests involved in this process? How can creative powers, natural resources and indigenous knowledge be protected from either public or private exploitation? Does the law have the power to prevent this exploitation, or is adaptive technology needed? Also, in this identity theft conscious age, how can the rights of the individual be protected against policies allowing access to any kind of information, especially confidential information? The editors and contributors demonstrate that the relationship between knowledge and the law needs to be further researched and discussed.

Knowledge and the Law should be of interest to anyone interested in the subjects of intellectual property, the history and development of modern legal and economic systems and their entanglements, and how judicial systems make choices between the legal and economic systems and, especially, between the public and private good and their often opposing interests.