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An Invisible Crisis In Plain Sight: The Emergence Of The "Eviction Economy," Its Causes, And The Possibilities For Reform In Legal Regulation And Education, David A. Dana Apr 2017

An Invisible Crisis In Plain Sight: The Emergence Of The "Eviction Economy," Its Causes, And The Possibilities For Reform In Legal Regulation And Education, David A. Dana

Michigan Law Review

Review of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.


Nudge, Choice Architecture, And Libertarian Paternalism, Pierre Schlag Apr 2010

Nudge, Choice Architecture, And Libertarian Paternalism, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

By all external appearances, Nudge is a single book-two covers, a single spine, one title. But put these deceptive appearances aside, read the thing, and you will actually find two books-Book One and Book Two. Book One begins with the behavioral economist's view that sometimes individuals are not the best judges of their own welfare. Indeed, given the propensity of human beings for cognitive errors (e.g., the availability bias) and the complexity of decisions that need to be made (e.g., choosing prescription plans), individuals often make mistakes. Enter here the idea of the nudge-the deliberate effort to channel people into …


The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys Jan 2010

The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys

Michigan Law Review

The proposition that "the people" are the preeminent sovereign in the United States has long been a tenet of American public life. The authors of the Declaration of Independence characterized the American people's sovereignty as a "self-evident" truth when announcing the colonies' decision to sever their ties with Great Britain, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 invoked the people's sovereignty when framing the nation's Constitution, and Americans today exercise their sovereignty each time they cast their ballots on Election Day. Yet what prerogatives, precisely, does the people's sovereignty entail? In modern America, where neither a bloody revolution nor …


Scandal, Sukyandaru, And Chouwen, Benjamin L. Liebman Apr 2008

Scandal, Sukyandaru, And Chouwen, Benjamin L. Liebman

Michigan Law Review

This Review proceeds in four parts. Part I describes West's account of scandal in Japan and the United States and explores some of the ramifications of his account. Part II examines the formation of scandal in contemporary China. Part III compares scandal in China with West's conclusions about scandal in Japan and the United States. Part IV discusses defamation litigation in China, with a view to adding further comparative insight to West's discussion of Japanese libel suits.


Life-Giving Speech Amid An Empire Of Silence, Walter Brueggemann Apr 2007

Life-Giving Speech Amid An Empire Of Silence, Walter Brueggemann

Michigan Law Review

It will come as no surprise to readers of the Law Review that James Boyd White is a daring and wise practitioner of what Clifford Geertz terms "blurred genres." By appeal to Kenneth Burke, Victor Turner, and Paul Ricoeur, among others, Geertz envisions a broad interpretive venture that breaks out of the rigid regulations of a particular discipline to the larger constructive enterprise that entertains life and its meaning as a "game" of face-to-face engagement, or as a "drama" that presses on to the next scene. White's work fits that vision precisely. In Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force, …


Judging Magic: Can You See The Sleight Of Hand?, Rebecca Johnson Apr 2007

Judging Magic: Can You See The Sleight Of Hand?, Rebecca Johnson

Michigan Law Review

Cultural critic bell hooks says, "Movies make magic. They change things. They take the real and make it into something else right before our very eyes." Movies do not, of course, have an exclusive hold on this ability to change one thing into something else. Law, too, possesses this power. Certainly, one must acknowledge some significant differences in the "magic" of filmic and legal texts. For the most part, as willing consumers of cultural products, we "choose" to subject ourselves to the magic of film. We sit in a darkened theater and let ourselves be taken away to a different …


Uncovering Identity, Paul Horowitz Jan 2007

Uncovering Identity, Paul Horowitz

Michigan Law Review

This Review raises several questions about Yoshino's treatment of identity, authenticity, and the "true self' in Covering. Part I summarizes Yoshino's book and offers some practical criticisms. Section II.A argues that Yoshino's treatment of authenticity and identity leaves much to be desired. Section II.B argues that Yoshino's focus on covering as an act of coerced assimilation fails to fully capture the extent to which one's identity, and one's uses of identity, may be fluid and deliberate. Section II.C focuses on another identity trait that runs through Yoshino's book, always present but never remarked upon: those aspects of identity and …


Harry Potter And The Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, Benjamin H. Barton May 2006

Harry Potter And The Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, Benjamin H. Barton

Michigan Law Review

What would you think of a government that engaged in this list of tyrannical activities: tortured children for lying; designed its prison specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; placed citizens in that prison without a hearing; ordered the death penalty without a trial; allowed the powerful, rich, or famous to control policy; selectively prosecuted crimes (the powerful. go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); conducted criminal trials without defense counsel; used truth serum to force confessions; maintained constant surveillance over all citizens; offered no elections and no democratic lawmaking process; and controlled the press? …


What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg May 2006

What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg

Michigan Law Review

By meditating on displays of cunning in literature, history, and current events, Don Herzog in his new book isolates and probes difficult puzzles concerning how to understand and evaluate human conduct. The point of the exercise is not to offer a system or framework for resolving these puzzles. Quite the opposite, Cunning aims to discomfit its academic audience in two ways. First, it sets out to show that some of the central dichotomies of modem thought-those between means and ends, reason and desire, self-interest and morality, fact and value, virtue and vice, knowledge and politics, authenticity and artifice, and appearance …


For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig May 2005

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Michigan Law Review

Fifty years after the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, black comedian and philanthropist Dr. Bill Cosby astonished guests at a gala in Washington, D.C., when he stated, "'Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. (Black people] have got to take the neighborhood back . . . . (Lower economic Blacks] are standing on the comer and they can't speak English.'" Cosby, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, complained about "lower economic" Blacks "not holding up their end in this deal." He then asked the question, "'Well, Brown …


Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke May 2005

Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke

Michigan Law Review

When is homicide reasonable? That familiar, yet unanswered question continues to intrigue both courts and criminal law scholars, in large part because any response must first address the question, "reasonable to whom?" The standard story about why that threshold question is both difficult and interesting usually involves a juxtaposition of "objective" and "subjective" standards for judging claims of reasonableness. On the one hand, the story goes, is a "subjective" standard of reasonableness under which jurors evaluate the reasonableness of a criminal defendant's beliefs and actions by comparing them to those of a hypothetical reasonable person sharing all of the individual …


National Identity In A Multicultural Nation: The Challenge Of Immigration Law And Immigrants, Kevin R. Johnson, Bill Ong Hing May 2005

National Identity In A Multicultural Nation: The Challenge Of Immigration Law And Immigrants, Kevin R. Johnson, Bill Ong Hing

Michigan Law Review

Samuel Huntington's provocative new book Who Are We?: The Challenges to National Identity is rich with insights about the negative impacts of globalization and the burgeoning estrangement of people and businesses in the United States from a truly American identity. The daunting question posed by the title of the book is well worth asking. After commencing the new millennium with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military torture of Iraqi prisoners, indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens declared by the President to be "enemy combatants," and a massive domestic "war on terror" that has punished and frightened Arab, Muslim, and other …


Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza May 2005

Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza

Michigan Law Review

Books about tax administration tend to fall into one of two broad categories: those that paint the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") as an agency peopled by corrupt, out-of-control bureaucrats who take pleasure in seeing innocent taxpayers suffer, and those that tell readers how to structure their affairs to minimize the risk of incurring an IRS employee's wrath during a tax audit. Perfectly Legal, the full title of which communicates David Cay Johnston's intent to focus on the tax system, does neither of those things. Instead, it is a book much like The Great American Tax Dodge, which explained …


Does The Supreme Court Matter? Civil Rights And The Inherent Politicization Of Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Lassiter Jan 2005

Does The Supreme Court Matter? Civil Rights And The Inherent Politicization Of Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Lassiter

Michigan Law Review

More than a decade ago, in a colloquium sponsored by the Virginia Law Review, scholars of the civil rights movement launched a fierce assault on Michael J. Klarman's interpretation of the significance of the Supreme Court's famous school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Klarman's "backlash thesis," initially set forth in a series of law review and history journal articles and now serving as the centerpiece of his new book, revolves around two central claims. First, he argues that the advancements toward racial equality generally attributed to Brown were instead the inevitable products of long-term political, …


Public Opinion And Foreign Policy, Michigan Law Review Jun 1949

Public Opinion And Foreign Policy, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of PUBLIC OPINION AND FOREIGN POLICY Edited by Lester Markel.


Curiae: Law In Action. An Anthology Of The Law In Literature, Michigan Law Review Dec 1947

Curiae: Law In Action. An Anthology Of The Law In Literature, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of LAW IN ACTION. AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE LAW IN LITERATURE. Edited by Amicus Curiae. Introduction by Roscoe Pound.


If Men Were Angels: A Review, E. Blythe Stason Oct 1942

If Men Were Angels: A Review, E. Blythe Stason

Michigan Law Review

Occasionally one encounters a new book that is genuinely interesting because of the refreshing vigor with which it attacks an important and timely problem. Such a book is Jerome Frank's new volume, If Men Were Angels. Indeed in some of its chapters its vigor approaches violence, a fact which adds spice to the reading.


Adequacy Of Strike Injunctions, J. P. Dawson Mar 1933

Adequacy Of Strike Injunctions, J. P. Dawson

Michigan Law Review

A book review of STRIKE INJUNCTIONS IN THE NEW SOUTH. By Duane McCracken.