Legal Upheaval

This book is for anyone invested in the future of the legal profession, be it someone tasked with transforming their practice, someone looking to approach their work in a new way, someone looking for a fresh approach to client relations, or someone new to the field interested in a forecast of the world to come.

In today's legal marketplace, clients are demanding services that require a new skill set and a new mindset from lawyers. In Legal Upheaval, Professor Michele DeStefano lays out the trifecta for success in a changed legal landscape: creativity, collaboration, and innovation. DeStefano, a former marketing executive, now a professor at the University of Miami and guest faculty at Harvard Law School's Executive Education program, has spent more than a decade researching the evolving legal marketplace. The book provides powerful evidence that collaboration toward innovation is the new value equation in law, creating stickier and more profitable client relationships. In a conversational fashion, DeStefano takes us on a journey from why lawyers need to innovate to how they can do so. She unveils the Lawyer Skills Delta and maps out a methodology for filling the gaps in current legal skill sets: The 3 Rules of Engagement and The 3-4-5 Method of Innovation for Lawyers. Full of points of reflection, as well as concrete directions, Legal Upheaval makes innovation accessible. Why should you learn how to innovate? Even if you agree that lawyers could use a refresher on creativity and collaboration, you might still be skeptical. This book is written to inspire lawyers and legal professionals to embrace innovation practices, even if their business model isn't "broken." In the process of innovating, lawyers hone the mindsets, skills, and habits that clients desire--and, in the future, that clients will require. of the expectations of clients.

This book describes the experiences of undocumented migrants, all around the world, bringing to life the challenges they face from the moment they consider leaving their country of origin, until the time they are deported back to it. Drawing on a broad array of academic studies, including law, interpretation and translation studies, border studies, human rights, communication, critical discourse analysis and sociology, Robert Barsky argues that the arrays of actions that are taken against undocumented migrants are often arbitrary, and exercised by an array of officials who can and do exercise considerable discretion, both positive and negative. Employing insights from a decade-long research project, Barsky also finds that every stop along the migrant’s pathway into, and inside of, the host country is strewn with language issues, relating to intercultural communication, interpretation, gossip, hearsay, and the challenges of peddling of linguistic wares in the social discourse marketplace. These language issues are almost always impediments to anodyne or productive interactions with host country officials, particularly on the "front-lines" where migrants encounter border patrol and law enforcement officers without adequate means of communicating their situation or understanding their rights. Since undocumented people are categorized as ‘illegal’, they can be subjected to abuse and exploitation by host country officials, who can choose to either tolerate or punish them on the basis of unpredictable, changeable, and even illusory or "arbitrary" laws and regulations. Citing experts at every level of the undocumented immigrant apparatuses worldwide, from public defenders to interpreters, Barsky concludes that the only viable policy to address prevailing abuses and inequalities is to move towards open borders, an approach that would address prevailing issues and, surprisingly, provide security and economic benefits to both host and home countries.

A Study of Mixed Legal Systems: Endangered, Entrenched, or Blended takes the reader on a fascinating voyage of discovery. It includes case studies of a number of systems from across the globe: Cyprus, Guyana, Jersey, Mauritius, Philippines, Quebec, St Lucia, Scotland, and Seychelles. Each combines its legal legacies in novel ways. Large and small, in Europe and beyond, some are sovereign, some part of larger political units. Some are monolingual, some bilingual, some multilingual. Along with an analytical introduction and conclusion, the chapters explore the manner in which the elements of these mixed systems may be seen to be ‘entrenched’, ‘endangered’, or ‘blended’. It explores how this process of legal change happens, questions whether some systems are at greater risk than others, and details the strategies that have been adopted to accelerate or counteract change. The studies involve consideration of the colourful histories of the jurisdictions, of their complex relationships to parent legal systems and traditions, and of language, legal education and legal actors. The volume also considers whether the experiences of these systems can tell us something about legal mixtures and movements generally. Indeed, the volume will be helpful both for scholars and students with a special interest in mixed legal systems as well as anyone interested in comparative law and legal history, in the diversity and dynamism of law.

This book is an account of how water rights were designed as a key part of the state’s largest public water system, the Central Valley Project. Along sixty miles of the San Joaquin River, from Gustine to Mendota, four corporate entities called “exchange contractors” retain paramount water rights to the river. Their rights descend from the days of the Miller & Lux Cattle Company, which amassed an empire of land and water from the 1850s through the 1920s and protected these assets through business deals and prolific litigation. Miller & Lux’s dominance of the river relied on what many in the San Joaquin Valley regarded as wasteful irrigation practices and unreasonable water usage. Economic and political power in California’s present water system was born of this monopoly on water control. Stroshane tells how drought and legal conflict shaped statewide economic development and how the grand bargain of a San Joaquin River water exchange was struck from this monopoly legacy, setting the stage for future water wars. His analysis will appeal to readers interested in environmental studies and public policy.

Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and promotes work that not only focuses on the whole array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, philosophy, social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also work that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative and interdisciplinary studies of every kind, including but not limited to manuscript and book history, linguistics and literature, post-colonial and global studies, the digital humanities and media studies, performance studies, the history of affect and the emotion, the theory and history of sexuality, ecocriticism and environmental studies, theories of the lyric, of aesthetics, of the practices of devotion, and ideas of medievalism. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta traces processes of literary training and experimentation across the early history of the English common law, from its beginnings in the reign of Henry II to its tumultuous consolidations under the reigns of John and Henry III. The period from the mid-twelfth through the thirteenth centuries witnessed an outpouring of innovative legal writing in England, from Magna Carta to the scores of statute books that preserved its provisions. An era of civil war and imperial fracture, it also proved a time of intensive self-definition, as communities both lay and ecclesiastic used law to articulate collective identities. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta uncovers the role that grammatical and rhetorical training played in shaping these arguments for legal self-definition. Beginning with the life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the book interweaves the histories of literary pedagogy and English law, showing how foundational lessons in poetics helped generate both a language and theory of corporate autonomy. In this book, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's phenomenally popular Latin compositional handbook, the Poetria nova, finds its place against the diplomatic backdrop of the English Interdict, while Robert Grosseteste's Anglo-French devotional poem, the Château d'Amour, is situated within the landscape of property law and Jewish-Christian interactions. Exploring a shared vocabulary across legal and grammatical fields, this book argues that poetic habits of thought proved central to constructing the narratives that medieval law tells about itself and that later scholars tell about the origins of English constitutionalism.