Uncertain Justice

With the Supreme Court more influential than ever, this eye-opening book tells the story of how the Roberts Court is shaking the foundation of our nation's laws From Citizens United to its momentous rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has profoundly affected American life. Yet the court remains a mysterious institution, and the motivations of the nine men and women who serve for life are often obscure. Now, in Uncertain Justice, Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show the surprising extent to which the Roberts Court is revising the meaning of our Constitution. This essential book arrives at a make-or-break moment for the nation and the court. Political gridlock, cultural change, and technological progress mean that the court's decisions on key topics—including free speech, privacy, voting rights, and presidential power—could be uniquely durable. Acutely aware of their opportunity, the justices are rewriting critical aspects of constitutional law and redrawing the ground rules of American government. Tribe—one of the country's leading constitutional lawyers—and Matz dig deeply into the court's recent rulings, stepping beyond tired debates over judicial "activism" to draw out hidden meanings and silent battles. The undercurrents they reveal suggest a strikingly different vision for the future of our country, one that is sure to be hotly debated. Filled with original insights and compelling human stories, Uncertain Justice illuminates the most colorful story of all—how the Supreme Court and the Constitution frame the way we live.

In 1754 Eleanor Powers was hung for a murder committed during a botched robbery. She was the first woman condemned to die in Canada, but would not be the last. In Uncertain Justice, Beverley Boissery and Murray Greenwood portray a cast of women characters almost as often wronged by the law as they have wronged society. Starting with the Powers trial and continuing to the not-too-distant past, the authors expose the patriarchal values that lie at the core of criminal law, and the class and gender biases that permeate its procedures and applications. The writing style is similar to that of a popular mystery: "Harriet Henry lay dead. Horribly and indubitably. Her body sprawled against the bed, the head twisted at a grotesque angle. Foam engulfed the grinning mouth." Scholarly analysis combines with the narrative to make Uncertain Justice a fascinating and engaging read. There is a wealth of information about the emerging and evolving legal system and profession, the state of forensic science, the roles of juries, and the political turmoil and growing resistance to a purely class-based aristocratic form of government.

The crime genre entered Italy in the late nineteenth century, and if initially Italian authors followed models developed abroad—principally in the United States, England and France—a uniquely Italian brand began to emerge soon. Il giallo, as the crime genre has been known in Italy since the 1930s, proved to be the ideal instrument to confront pressing and often uncomfortable issues which were pertinent to the Italian context: it became a useful tool to restore, symbolically at least, the truth and justice that were, and still are, perceived by a large part of the Italian reading public to be systematically denied in reality. In today’s Italy, the crime genre, and particularly its noir sub-genre, narrates so that readers might remember, so that they might take heed and action, turning cognition into an act of resistance against oblivion and of rebellion against injustice. Uncertain Justice explores three broad areas that contemporary Italian noir literature appears particularly keen to debate, retrieving them from the silence to which they might otherwise be consigned: unresolved historical and political legacies, the repercussions of which still inform and affect life and practices in the present times; the problematic institution of the family, considered as the bedrock of Italian culture and the founding principle of Italian society, with specific attendant questions of gender politics; and the justice system seen through some of its operators, nominally in charge of putting the wrongs right and frequently accused of preventing this from happening. These explorations are conducted through an analysis of texts published in the last twenty years, which represent an effort to expose and counter injustice through the power of the word. Crime literature authors often revisit recent Italian history in their novels, and genre fiction plays a prominent role in acts of resistance against cover-ups or revisionist views of history. The volume starts with an analysis of this role, through novels that look back at the years of the fascist regime and, more recently, at the period from the anni di piombo onwards. It then considers the contribution made to the giallo and noir genre by women writers, looking at the effects that female practitioners in Italy have had on the ethics and aesthetics of a genre that, in other cultures, has traditionally been firmly conservative. A further section examines novels set in a familial context and looks at a range of family dynamics, expressed in the relationships between mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, large extended families or small nuclear ones. If some of the texts expose the devastating effects of the violence perpetrated “in the name of love,” others more positively offer hope, demonstrating how more desirable options do exist and can be pursued. Finally the volume looks at justice as a system and at its practitioners, as, in an interesting development peculiar to Italy, a significant number of judges, lawyers and senior police officers have recently become involved in crime fiction writing. The concluding chapter investigates the contribution that these “specialists,” who have extensive theoretical and technical knowledge in a field which crime fiction routinely frequents, can make to the genre; it also analyses whether these authors, who bring together the moral function of unveiling the truth (prerogative of the investigator) and the social function of rectifying a wrong (prerogative of the upholders of the law), may have a role in forming a more ethically and socially aware Italian citizen.

Over the last 30 years, we have made great progress in curbing the most obvious pollution largely due to effective enforcement of federal and state environmental statutes. Now, however, there is increasing skepticism of the efficiency and even the constitutionality of our bedrock environmental laws from all branches of the federal government, including the courts. This book is the result of lively debate at the conference Alternative Grounds: Defending the Environment in an Unwelcome Judicial Climate, held on November 11, 2004, and co-sponsored by the University of Florida's Levin College of Law and the Environmental Law Institute. Topics ranged from U.S. Supreme Court trends in environmental law jurisprudence, to innovative federal and state constitutional and statutory arguments that defend environmental protections, to federal provisions most vulnerable to attack on federalism, takings, and separation-of-powers grounds. This thought-provoking and insightful collection of essays provides smart, realistic solutions to the profound and complex legal challenges facing defenders of our environmental protections. With contributions by: Richard J. Lazarus, Sean H. Donahue, Paul Boudreaux, William W. Buzbee, Robert L. Glicksman, Alyson C. Flournoy, Christopher H. Schroeder, Douglas T. Kendall, Susan George, J.B. Ruhl, Donald W. Stever, and Mary Jane Angelo.

Community Development in an Uncertain World is an essential resource for students and professionals in the human services.

In this age of nearly unprecedented partisan rancor, you’d be forgiven for thinking we could all do with a smaller daily dose of politics. In his provocative and sharp book, however, Ned O’Gorman argues just the opposite: Politics for Everybody contends that what we really need to do is engage more deeply with politics, rather than chuck the whole thing out the window. In calling for a purer, more humanistic relationship with politics—one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange—O’Gorman draws on the work of Hannah Arendt (1906–75). As a German-born Jewish thinker who fled the Nazis for the United States, Arendt set out to defend politics from its many detractors along several key lines: the challenge of separating genuine politics from distorted forms; the difficulty of appreciating politics for what it is; the problems of truth and judgment in politics; and the role of persuasion in politics. O’Gorman’s book offers an insightful introduction to Arendt’s ideas for anyone who wants to think more carefully