The Letter Of The Law

World-famous criminal law professor Eric Lipton has been accused of the murder of one of his students. He calls on Casey Jordan to represent him. Just when she is tempted to use her privileged information to discover the truth, more bodies turn up.

One of the hallmark features of the post–civil rights United States is the reign of colorblindness over national conversations about race and law. But how, precisely, should we understand this notion of colorblindness in the face of enduring racial hierarchy in American society? In Letters of the Law, Sora Y. Han argues that colorblindness is a foundational fantasy of law that not only informs individual and collective ideas of race, but also structures the imaginative capacities of American legal interpretation. Han develops a critique of colorblindness by deconstructing the law's central doctrines on due process, citizenship, equality, punishment and individual liberty, in order to expose how racial slavery and the ongoing struggle for abolition continue to haunt the law's reliance on the fantasy of colorblindness. Letters of the Law provides highly original readings of iconic Supreme Court cases on racial inequality—spanning Japanese internment to affirmative action, policing to prisoner rights, Jim Crow segregation to sexual freedom. Han's analysis provides readers with new perspectives on many urgent social issues of our time, including mass incarceration, educational segregation, state intrusions on privacy, and neoliberal investments in citizenship. But more importantly, Han compels readers to reconsider how the diverse legacies of civil rights reform archived in American law might be rewritten as a heterogeneous practice of black freedom struggle.

"Well, clearly, and articulately written, Living Letters of the Law is among the most important books in medieval European history generally, as well as in its particular field."—Edward Peters, author of The First Crusade

Scholars have long been aware of the looming presence of law in medieval English literature, from Christ as a litigious redemptor to Chaucer's deal-making Host in The Canterbury Tales. Most scholarly work on the subject has been confined either to tracking down representations of legal practices in texts or to examining formal questions relating to legal discourse. In a groundbreaking departure, The Letter of the Law suggests that law and literature should be understood as parallel forms of discourse -- at times complementary, at times antagonistic, but always mutually illuminating. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386.

"Dr. Gao finds the best provisions and practices in respect of the fraud rule in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and applies these standards to the reformulation of the fraud rule in the PRC. In the process be surveys the entire field of the fraud rule in the law of letters of credit in its substantive aspects, thus going deeper than mere banking law analyses and revealing, for the benefit of jurists everywhere, the fundamental legal issues that must underlie all sound judicial reasoning in the area. In more practical terms, this approach also allows judges to meet their essential responsibility - that of giving an answer when a case is put before them - with the widest and best possible degree of discernment."--BOOK JACKET.

This study examines the association of "implanted logos" and the "perfect law of freedom" in the Letter of James. It argues that James understands the Torah to be a written expression of the divine law the Stoics correlated with human reason. After showing how past interpretation of James's logos has been guided by a problematic essentialist approach to Christian origins, the Stoic theory of law is reconstructed with special attention to Cicero's concept of "implanted reason." Adaptations of the Stoic theory in ancient Jewish and Christian literature are examined, and the Letter of James is analyzed in detail. The work makes original contributions to the study of James and of Stoicism. It also highlights the importance of broad reconstructions of Christian origins for the interpretation of the early Christian literature.

"The definitive guide to studying law at university, Letters to a Law Student is an indispensable guide for any law student, at any point in their undergraduate degree. It is packed full of practical advice and helpful answers to the most common questions about studying law at university across every stage of taking, or thinking about taking, a law degree."--