The Hidden Law

The Hidden Law, the fourth Henry Rios mystery, is back in print after 15 years in a revised edition with an author's endnote that details Henry Rios's back story. A Lambda Literary award winner, it was praised upon its publication by Publisher's Weekly as "an intricate, satisfying novel."

“Mine” is one of the first words babies learn, and by the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether we are buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you, reclining, or the squished laptop user behind you? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it’s okay to knock off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, while in New York you lose both the space and the chair? In Mine!, Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading authorities on ownership, explain these puzzles and many more. Remarkably, they reveal, there are just six simple rules that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the rule that steers us to do what they want. But we can pick differently. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. Mine! draws on mind-bending, often infuriating, and always fascinating accounts from business, history, courtrooms, and everyday life to reveal how the rules of ownership control our lives and shape our world.

In this study - the fruit of a lifelong critical and imaginative engagement with W H. Auden's works - Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poet's extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations, literary and otherwise. Hecht acknowledges that Auden's poems "both invite the intrusive scrutiny of the cryptographer and deny him access". Yet the readings he offers of poems from every phase of Auden's career, along with dramatic works and critical essays, manage to explicate and illuminate Auden's rich (and often cryptic) allusiveness without murdering to dissect. Among the themes that connect Auden's works are his deep interest in the workings of language; his notion of the ultimate frivolity of art; his interest in the nature of heroism; his understanding of the relation of public to private life; the development of his religious thought; and what Auden called the "hidden law" that governs human existence - a strict and retaliatory force, something like poetic justice, that gives form to our best literature and shapes our personal fates. Hecht identifies these preoccupations in Auden's work - and shows how they cut across the many genres in which he wrote - without losing sight of each poem's individual history and context. As one of Auden's most distinguished poetic heirs, Anthony Hecht is uniquely qualified to illuminate both the reading and the writing of these essential works of twentieth-century literature.

Child abuse - Affirmative action - Divorce - Domestic violence - Discrimination - Equal opportunity - Family law - Sexual harassment - Surrogacy.

A 2022 PROSE Award finalist in Legal Studies and Criminology A 2022 American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award Finalist A Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Book of 2021 Freakonomics for the law—how applying behavioral science to the law can fundamentally change and explain misbehavior Why do most Americans wear seatbelts but continue to speed even though speeding fines are higher? Why could park rangers reduce theft by removing “no stealing” signs? Why was a man who stole 3 golf clubs sentenced to 25 years in prison? Some laws radically change behavior whereas others are consistently ignored and routinely broken. And yet we keep relying on harsh punishment against crime despite its continued failure. Professors Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine draw on decades of research to uncover the behavioral code: the root causes and hidden forces that drive human behavior and our responses to society’s laws. In doing so, they present the first accessible analysis of behavioral jurisprudence, which will fundamentally alter how we understand the connection between law and human behavior. The Behavioral Code offers a necessary and different approach to battling crime and injustice that is based in understanding the science of human misconduct—rather than relying on our instinctual drive to punish as a way to shape behavior. The book reveals the behavioral code’s hidden role through illustrative examples like: • The illusion of the US’s beloved tax refund • German walls that “pee back” at public urinators • The $1,000 monthly “good behavior” reward that reduced gun violence • Uber’s backdoor “Greyball” app that helped the company evade Seattle’s taxi regulators • A $2.3 billion legal settlement against Pfizer that revealed how whistleblower protections fail to reduce corporate malfeasance • A toxic organizational culture playing a core role in Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal • How Peter Thiel helped Hulk Hogan sue Gawker into oblivion Revelatory and counterintuitive, The Behavioral Code catalyzes the conversation about how the law can effectively improve human conduct and respond to some of our most pressing issues today, from police misconduct to corporate malfeasance.

International law has played a crucial role in the construction of imperial projects. Yet within the growing field of studies about the history of international law and empire, scholars have seldom considered this complicit relationship in the Americas. The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas offers the first exploration of the deployment of international law for the legitimization of U.S. ascendancy as an informal empire in Latin America. This book explores the intellectual history of a distinctive idea of American international law in the Americas, focusing principally on the evolution of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL). This organization was created by U.S. and Chilean jurists James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez in Washington D.C. for the construction, development, and codification of international law across the Americas. Juan Pablo Scarfi examines the debates sparked by the AIIL over American international law, intervention and non-intervention, Pan-Americanism, the codification of public and private international law and the nature and scope of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the international legal thought of Scott, Alvarez, and a number of jurists, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals from the Americas. Professor Scarfi argues that American international law, as advanced primarily by the AIIL, was driven by a U.S.-led imperial aspiration of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law. By providing a convincing critical account of the legal and historical foundations of the Inter-American System, this book will stimulate debate among international lawyers, IR scholars, political scientists, and intellectual historians.