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University of Michigan Law School

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Book review

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Eighty Years Of Federalism Forbearance: Rationing, Resignation, And The Rule Of Law, Gil Seinfeld Jan 2020

Eighty Years Of Federalism Forbearance: Rationing, Resignation, And The Rule Of Law, Gil Seinfeld

Reviews

Andrew Coan’s book, Rationing the Constitution, offers a novel account of the forces that drive Supreme Court decisions across a wide array of highly controversial, vitally important areas of law. The project is ambitious. It endeavors to improve our understanding of forces that constrain the form and, ultimately, the substance of our constitutional law along each of its major axes: federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights. I think it succeeds. The book’s central claim—that familiar (but underexplored) institutional constraints and background norms sharply limit the range of choices available to the Court when it is called upon to …


Review Of Rights And Demands: A Foundational Inquiry, Nicholas B. Cornell Jan 2019

Review Of Rights And Demands: A Foundational Inquiry, Nicholas B. Cornell

Reviews

No abstract provided.


Social Freedom, Democracy And The Political: Three Reflections On Axel Honneth's Idea Of Socialism, Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, James T. Sparrow Jan 2019

Social Freedom, Democracy And The Political: Three Reflections On Axel Honneth's Idea Of Socialism, Stephen W. Sawyer, William J. Novak, James T. Sparrow

Articles

Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an important clarion call for an urgent rethinking of the possibilities of a socialism for the twenty-first century. One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects of Axel Honneth’s timely new book is its recovery of the continued vitality of John Dewey’s pragmatic democratic philosophy. These reflections on Honneth’s use of John Dewey for democratizing social freedom, take stock of and explore the political limits of Honneth’s social reconstruction.


A Partial View Of China's Governance Trajectory, Nicholas Calcina Howson Jan 2017

A Partial View Of China's Governance Trajectory, Nicholas Calcina Howson

Reviews

Minxin Pei’s new book China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay recites in detail the morass of corruption and collusion in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) party-state finds itself. Encyclopedic in scope, the book addresses corruption, extraction, and network formation in many of modern China’s formal settings—including in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the nomenklatura system, state institutions, enterprises, the investment sector, and the real property market, among others—but also in nonformal contexts such as the rise of the “local mafia state.” The book’s basic storyline is this: the PRC’s radical devolution of intertwined political power and …


No Reason To Blame Liberals (Or, The Unbearable Lightness Of Perversity Arguments), Margo Schlanger Jan 2015

No Reason To Blame Liberals (Or, The Unbearable Lightness Of Perversity Arguments), Margo Schlanger

Reviews

In addition to the current extraordinary number of people behind American bars, the other key feature of our current carceral state is the very high concentration of non-whites in that population. That concentration of non-whites has grown significantly since the 1960s, when whites constituted nearly two thirds of American prison population; today, they are only a bit over one-third. Since 72% of Americans are white, the distinction in terms of incarceration rate is far more stark: among white men, the current imprisonment rate (counting only sentenced prisoners) is 4.7/1000; among Latino men it is two-and-a-half times that (11.3/1000); and among …


Damaška: Evidence Law Adrift. A Book Review, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1998

Damaška: Evidence Law Adrift. A Book Review, Richard O. Lempert

Reviews

Let me state my biases at the start. I am a great fan of Professor Damaska and have been ever since I read his first book, The Faces of Justice and State Authority. Professor Damaska's most recent book, Evidence Law Adrift, adds to my admiration. In Evidence Law Adrift Professor Dama~ka examines Continental and Anglo-American trial procedures and argues that changes in the way Anglo-American courts resolve cases, especially the marginalization of the jury trial, strip common law evidence doctrine of its theoretical base and place it in danger of becoming an intellectual curiosity confined, in Professor Damaska's words, "to …


Review Of Social Science In The Courtroom: Statistical Techniques And Research Methods For Winning Class-Action Suits, Richard O. Lempert Mar 1984

Review Of Social Science In The Courtroom: Statistical Techniques And Research Methods For Winning Class-Action Suits, Richard O. Lempert

Reviews

If publishers had to conform to anything like truth-in-packaging laws, the title of James Loewen' s book would be something like A Simple Introduction to Elementary Statistical Methods That Might Be of Use in Class­Action Suits for Discrimination, Homilies on the Legal System for Social Scientists, Homilies on Social Science for Lawyers, and Examples from My Own Experience. No one who is interested in the deeper intellectual issues that surround the use of social science in the courtroom, such as the debate over when courts may appropriately tum to social science for aid in resolving fundamental value questions, has reason …