Shadow Courts

"Haley Sweetland Edwards explains the history of global shadow courts and how these courts have spun out of control, threatening the interests of citizens everywhere including the United States. Her fantastic book is exactly what long-form journalism is meant to do, to move beyond current events and provide historical perspective that aims at future reform. SHADOW COURTS should be at the top of the reading list of all those interested in redesigning trade agreements to be in the publicinterest." -- Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor, Columbia University and author ofThe End of Poverty International trade deals have become vastly complex documents, seeking to govern everything from labor rights to environmental protections. This evolution has drawn alarm from American voters, but their suspicions are often vague. In this book, investigative journalist Haley Sweetland Edwards offers a detailed look at one little-known but powerful provision in most modern trade agreements that is designed to protect the financial interests of global corporations against the governments of sovereign states. She makes a devastating case that Investor-State Dispute Settlement -- a "shadow court" that allows corporations to sue a nation outside its own court system -- has tilted the balance of power on the global stage. Acorporation can use ISDS to challenge a nation's policies and regulations, if it believes those laws are unfair or diminish its future profits. From the 1960s to 2000, corporations brought fewer than 40 disputes, but in the last fifteen years, they have brought nearly 650 -- 54 against Argentina alone. Edwards conducted extensive research and interviewed dozens of policymakers, activists, and government officials in Argentina, Canada, Bolivia, Ecuador, the European Union, and in the Obama administration. The result is a major story about a significant shift in the global balance of power.

Friends or Foes? A Game of Shifting Dangers The Shadow Fey arrive and turn the city upside down--and their ambassador demands that the player characters explain themselves for interfering in a legitimate assassination! So begins the looking-glass adventure that takes 7th to 10th level adventurers to the Realm of Shadows. This inventive take on courtly combat and sandbox roleplaying includes: More than 60-location map of the Courts, fully detailed with 100+ NPCs More than 40 combat and roleplaying encounters Dozens of new monsters your players have never seen! Demon lovers and dangerous liaisons for those who seek them Jealous rivals, a quick-play dueling system, and the King and Queen of Shadows A Status system to track player character prestige--and new Status powers! Enter the world of shadows, and play the 5th Edition of the world's first roleplaying game on a whole new level! More than 140 pages of real action and adventure by designers Wolfgang Baur and Dan Dillon.

Within Obsession and Lies is the sexy, action-packed first book in A Court of Gilt and Shadow Series by bestselling authors Stacy Jones and Harper Wylde. Power. Obsession. Lies. Other people dream of being special. They wouldn't, if they knew what a nightmare it is. Arawyn would give anything to be ordinary and rid herself of the power that lives inside her. Dangerous and alluring, it's caused nothing but pain and horror, making her the dark obsession of anyone who gets too close. After years of barely containing it, Arawyn thought she had control... until the night it bursts free and pulses like a beacon. As threats emerge from the shadows, each one more fixated on her than the last, she finds her life infiltrated by three mysterious men. A mafia boss, a psychopath, and a killer. Rathe, Viper, and Fear are much more than they seem. They taste of power and feel impossibly familiar. They call to her soul in a way she's never experienced and might have answers to questions she's been asking her entire life. But darkness and secrets surround them, ones covered in blood and mire. When the monsters stalking her endanger not only her power but her life, she'll have to make a decision: take a risk and let these dangerous men in, or do what she's always done-walk away and try to survive on her own. Trusting them would be a mistake. Yet, she may not have a choice. The monsters hunting her aren't human and they're out for blood. Rathe, Viper, and Fear might be her only chance of making it through this alive. There's only one problem. They aren't human either... From bestselling authors, Stacy Jones and Harper Wylde, comes a darkly seductive new series that blends romance, danger, and the supernatural into an unforgettable read.

This first critical examination of informal dispute processing links the institutionalization of alternatives to the court process and the ideology of informalism with the evolution of the American court system. The author connects dispute processing reform to the broader social and political context in which it developed, including the rise of judicial management in the Progressive period and the reconstruction of court unification in the 1970s. Harrington defines legal resources and their distribution in alternative dispute resolution policy before focusing on the institutionalization of this reform in a case study of a federally sponsored Neighborhood Justice Center. In conclusion, Harrington finds that the symbols of informalism and its institutions are a mere shadow of conventional legal practices.

"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--

This first critical examination of informal dispute processing links the institutionalization of alternatives to the court process and the ideology of informalism with the evolution of the American court system. The author connects dispute processing reform to the broader social and political context in which it developed, including the rise of judicial management in the Progressive period and the reconstruction of court unification in the 1970s. Harrington defines legal resources and their distribution in alternative dispute resolution policy before focusing on the institutionalization of this reform in a case study of a federally sponsored Neighborhood Justice Center. In conclusion, Harrington finds that the symbols of informalism and its institutions are a mere shadow of conventional legal practices.