Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
Book Review: Hartog’s Someday All This Will be Yours
posted by Naomi Cahn
Hendrik Hartog, Someday All This Will be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (Harvard University Press 2012)
Dirk Hartog’s Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age is a book about story telling in the law, as well as a rich description of work within families, of the complex relationship between labor, money, and love. It is also a new and critical (in several senses of that word) text for the developing field of elder law. Elder law as a discipline that is just now coming into its own, an event that, not coincidentally, is occurring as the baby boomers begin to hit retirement age and as the sandwich generation has become increasingly vocal. More than half of all law schools now include, in their listed curriculum, a course on elder law.
Hartog, who is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, is also the author of Man and Wife in America (2000), which served as a legal history of marriage in America from the late 18th century through the middle of the 20th century, and was based on studying how ordinary men and women attempted to use the law either to escape their dissatisfying marriages or to seek shelter through the status of marriage. Someday All This Will Be Yours does something similar, also arguably within the context of family law, by studying how, from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, ordinary men and women arranged for their own care as they aged, and then how their alleged caretakers attempted to use the law to make good on these arrangements. Aging individuals used the promise (in these cases, the illusion) of inheritance to induce the needed caretaking at a time when there was no default of Social Security and Medicaid and before the widespread development of pensions. The book analyzes the resulting conflicts about property inheritance, using an extensive database of more than 200 cases from 19th- and 20th-century New Jersey courts as well as more extensive trial transcripts in 60 of those suits. Hartog closely, carefully, and painstakingly examines these cases for what they show about changing patterns in care for the elderly, parent-child relations, the tensions between family and commodification, and the development of the common law outside of precedent-setting and frequently cited cases. As he points out, the cases involve two different “shadowy figures within family la as it has ordinarily been conceived: the adult child and the elderly person.” (p. 21)
January 8, 2012 at 9:59 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Wills, Trusts, and Estates
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Review of “The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan”
posted by Gerard Magliocca
This review is courtesy of “Choice” Magazine, which is published by the American Library Association:
This brief but intriguing book argues that although most studies focus on successful constitutional movements, failure is also instructive, specifically the doomed Populist reforms of the 1890s. Although Bryan failed to gain the presidency and the Populists produced negligible immediate legal reform, Magliocca (Indiana Univ. School of Law) claims that the movement’s effects were dramatic, though unintended. Constitutional doctrine changed radically, becoming more reactionary because of anti-Populist backlash. Virtually all of Magliocca’s contentions will invoke sharp controversy, especially his reliance on a cyclical/generational theory of US politics, yet his sober although provocative assessment of failed reform is powerful and original. Joining the fray concerning realignments, Magliocca shares with Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970), a defense of realigning elections as the motors of political change and an assessment of 1896 as a pivotal, realigning election. Magliocca, however, contributes new dimensions to the literature by highlighting the huge constitutional changes produced by the “system of 1896.” A good read for undergraduates and the general public as well as advanced scholars, this history of politics in the Gilded Age presents crucial background for contextualizing contemporary constitutional debates. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. — A. B. Cochran, Agnes Scott College
January 1, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Uncategorized
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The Year in Privacy Books 2011
posted by Daniel Solove
Here’s a list of notable privacy books published in 2011.
Previous lists:
| Saul Levmore & Martha Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet (Harvard 2011)
This is a great collection of essays about the clash of free speech and privacy online. I have a book chapter in this volume along with Martha Nussbaum, Cass Sunstein, Brian Leiter, Danielle Citron, Frank Pasquale, Geoffrey Stone, and many others. |
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| Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (Yale 2011)
Nothing to Hide “succinctly and persuasively debunks the arguments that have contributed to privacy’s demise, including the canard that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from surveillance. Privacy, he reminds us, is an essential aspect of human existence, and of a healthy liberal democracy—a right that protects the innocent, not just the guilty.” — David Cole, New York Review of Books |
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| Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (Simon & Schuster 2011)
I strongly disagree with a lot of what Jarvis says, but the book is certainly provocative and engaging. |
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| Daniel J. Solove & Paul M. Schwartz, Privacy Law Fundamentals (IAPP 2011)
“A key resource for busy professional practitioners. Solove and Schwartz have succeeded in distilling the fundamentals of privacy law in a manner accessible to a broad audience.” – Jules Polonetsky, Future of Privacy Forum |
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| Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (Penguin 2011)
An interesting critique of the personalization of the Internet. We often don’t see the Internet directly, but through tinted goggles designed by others who determine what we want to see. |
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| Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (U. California 2011)
A vigorous critique of Google and other companies that shape the Internet. With regard to privacy, Vaidhyanathan explains how social media and other companies encourage people’s sharing of information through their architecture — and often confound people in their ability to control their reputation. |
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| Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security? The Risk Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT 2011)
A compelling argument for how designing technologies around surveillance capabilities will undermine rather than promote security.
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| Kevin Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires (Little Brown 2011)
A fascinating account of the exploits of Kevin Mitnick, the famous ex-hacker who inspired War Games. His tales are quite engaging, and he demonstrates that hacking is often not just about technical wizardry but old-fashioned con-artistry. |
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| Matt Ivester, lol . . . OMG! (CreateSpace 2011)
Ivester created Juicy Campus, the notorious college gossip website. After the site’s demise, Ivester changed his views about online gossip, recognizing the problems with Juicy Campus and the harms it caused. In this book, he offers thoughtful advice for students about what they post online. |