Featured Books from our Faculty

In this fascinating book written by a team of scientists, economists, and legal experts, Brian Gray and his co-authors argue that a new approach is needed to manage California's aquatic ecosystems. Examining the failure of the state's current water management strategy, the authors advocate a broader approach that creates better conditions for many species and addresses the multiple causes of ecosystem decline.

In this elegantly written account of the changing nature of friendship, Professor Ethan Leib takes stock of this most ancient of social institutions and its ongoing transformations, and contends that it could benefit from better and more sensitive public policies. Leib shows that the law has not kept up with changes in our society: it sanctifies traditional family structures but has no thoughtful approach to other aspects of our private lives. Contrasting our excessive legal sensitivity to marriage and families with the lack of legal attention to friendship, Leib offers a number of practical proposals that can support new patterns of interpersonal affinity without making friendship an onerous legal burden.

In this book, Professor Ashutosh Bhagwat argues that the primary purpose and effect of constitutional rights in our society is structural. These rights restrain governmental power in order to maintain a balance between citizens and the State and an appropriately limited role for the State in our society. The book addresses the constitutional issues posed in many areas of law and public policy, including flag-burning, affirmative action, same-sex marriage, and the battle over executive power, and explains why a structural approach to constitutional rights illuminates these disputes in ways that an autonomy-based approach cannot.

In this illuminating book, Professor Evan Lee traces the cultural, social, and intellectual forces that shaped the contours of judicial restraint from the time of John Marshall, through the "vested property rights" courts of the early twentieth century, through the Warren Court, and up to the present. The book aims to demonstrate that the concept of judicial restraint cannot be meaningfully viewed outside of the varying contexts of American history and that the notion of judicial restraint only makes sense in light of the waxing and waning American commitments to property rights and Protestant idealism, to scientific pragmatism, to racial equality, and even to environmental protection and the need to stem climate change.

Conventional wisdom attributes women's decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Professor Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men-both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it-as well as women. Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families.

While most authors frame problems at the intersection of law and science in terms of how rapidly scientific information changes and how frequently the legal system distorts science, Professor Robin Feldman’s book argues that problems at the intersection of law and science flow not from the changing nature of science, but from the changing nature of law. With this in mind, the book uses examples from doctrines related to abortion, gene patenting, copyright, environmental regulation, antitrust law, the insanity defense, and other doctrines to explore the nature of law and to suggest approaches for making science work more effectively within the domain of law.

In this fascinating book co-authored with Jennifer M. Collins and Dan Markel, Professor Ethan Leib answers two basic questions: how does the American criminal justice system address a defendant's family status and how should a defendant's family status be recognized, if at all, in a criminal justice system situated within a liberal democracy committed to egalitarian principles of non-discrimination? After surveying the variety of "family ties benefits" and "family ties burdens" in our criminal justice system, the authors explain why policymakers and courts should view with caution and skepticism any attempt to distribute these benefits or burdens based on one's family status.

In this riveting book, Professor Joel Paul tells the untold true story of the secret diplomacy that won the American Revolution. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin decides to send Silas Deane—a shopkeeper who has never left Connecticut in his life and can’t speak a word of French—on a secret mission to persuade the French king to arm the Americans. Hounded by spies, betrayed by his own colleagues, and besieged by privateers, Deane succeeds with the help of Beaumarchais, a French playwright, and the Chevalier d’Eon, the French ambassador to London. Full of political intrigue, betrayal, and espionage, the book is a bold reinterpretation of the struggle for Independence that exposes the complexity of human motivation and the accidental path of history.

Providing an important analysis of a subject that has been largely ignored by constitutional scholars, Professor David Faigman’s Constitutional Fictions is the first book-length examination of the role of fact-finding in constitutional cases. Faigman examines some of the most controversial subjects of the late twentieth century, including physician-assisted suicide, abortion, sexual predators, free speech, and privacy, and explains how contemporary facts should be incorporated into constitutional decisions, thus allowing the Constitution to endure for the ages.

In this provocative book co-authored with Laura Nader, Professor Ugo Mattei examines the dark side of the Rule of Law and explores how it has been used as a powerful political weapon by Western countries in order to legitimize plunder – the practice of violent extraction by stronger political actors victimizing weaker ones. Challenging traditionally held beliefs in the sanctity of the Rule of Law, the book examines the Rule of Law's relationship with plunder and dares to ask the paradoxical question – is the Rule of Law itself illegal?