Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
Engaged – and Engaging – Scholarship – Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free
posted by Rachel Godsil
I am thrilled to be back at Concurring Opinion – thanks to Solangel, Dan and the other regulars for having me. The timing of this visit is propitious for me – I am returning from a policy-focused (and surprisingly non-academic) sabbatical and I have been thinking a great deal about how best to stay engaged in policy/politics while also returning to academic culture. The worlds of advocacy and academia are distinct, obviously, and reconciling them can be challenging.
While I have been wrestling with these challenges, some of our academic colleagues, have I think, been meeting them – Richard Thompson Ford’s, The Race Card, Kenji Yoshino’s, Covering are two examples. Most recently, and in some ways the most salient to my own aspirations, is Paul Butler’s recent book, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice.
Butler’s book is extraordinary – he is a wonderful writer and tells a compelling story about his days as a prosecutor and his own improbable arrest and trial. But while books by lawyers about their practice are often fun reads – and this one is – what is most impressive is that Butler’s book is a theory of criminal justice. Butler is doing far more than telling a good story about lawyering. He has taken his scholarly agenda (which as many of us know has landed him impressive placements in law reviews) and rendered it readable. He weaves high level traditional theory, data, narrative, very candid self-critique, and insights from hip-hop. It may seem like a gimmick to have a sentence containing Snoop Dogg and Jeremy Bentham – but in Butler’s book, it’s not. He obviously knows both intimately and uses them to brilliant effect (and for the record, I don’t particularly like hip-hop).
November 3, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Civil Rights, Uncategorized
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The Will of the People
posted by Gerard Magliocca
I recently read Barry Friedman’s book on judicial review, which I would definitely recommend for anyone who wants to learn about the evolution of the Supreme Court. While the history that Barry covers is useful in and of itself (and I’ll need to grapple with some of his points as I revise my book), there are some larger themes that are worth discussing.
October 23, 2009 at 11:35 am
Posted in: Book Reviews
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Understanding Privacy in Paperback
posted by Daniel Solove
I’m pleased to announce that my book, Understanding Privacy, has just come out in paperback from Harvard University Press, with a price that’s much more reasonable and affordable than the hardcover.
Understanding Privacy offers a comprehensive overview of the many difficulties involved in discussions of privacy. Drawing from a broad array of interdisciplinary sources, I set forth a framework for understanding privacy that provides clear practical guidance for engaging with privacy issues.
September 14, 2009 at 7:36 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Privacy (National Security)
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Concurring Opinions Book Reviews
posted by Daniel Solove
Sandy Levinson has a thoughtful new essay lamenting the dwindling number of book reviews of books about the law — The Vanishing Book Review in Student Edited Law Reviews and Potential Responses, 87 Tex. L. Rev. 1205 (2009). He discusses how the Michigan Law Review used to run 30 to 40 book reviews in its book review issue but now is running only about 10 to 15. He notes that among the top 20 law reviews, in 1987-88, they published about 125 reviews; in 2007-08, they published only 42 reviews.
Brian Leiter notes, in the title of his post about Levinson’s article, that “academic law needs more fora for serious book reviews.”
Beyond law reviews, the number of book reviews in newspapers is rapidly diminishing.
This is why we’re starting a new project at Concurring Opinions — we’ll serve as a forum for book reviews.
We will accept submissions from our readers — law professors, lawyers, law students, and academics in other fields are welcome to submit reviews.
The reviews we envision would be approximately the length of a New York Times book review — somewhere between 500 to 2000 words.
We will try to accept as many reviews as we can, but we will exercise editorial discretion if we think a review isn’t appropriate for our blog. We’re aiming for serious reviews.
If you’re interested in writing a book review for us, we recommend that you first email us with a brief description of what book you’d like to review and your background, as we don’t want you to go through the work of writing a review only for us to think it doesn’t fit with our blog. Emailing us in advance won’t guarantee acceptance, but we would hope to give you a good indication of whether we’d be interested in your review.
We believe that there’s a need for serious yet short book reviews, ones that aren’t as long as those published in law reviews. That’s why we’re starting this project. We expect it to be ongoing, so if you’ve read a law-related book recently and want a forum to publish your views about it, please think about doing a review for us.
If you publish a book review here, you keep copyright in your work, so you can use it, publish it, and disseminate it later in whatever way you desire.
So please email us if you’re interested.
August 18, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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The Institutional Turn in Budget Politics and Election Law
posted by Michael Kang
Thanks so much to Danielle, Dan, and their co-bloggers for inviting me to visit for the month of August. I start my guest stint at Concurring Opinions by writing a bit about an interesting proposal by Chris Elmendorf and Ethan Lieb for breaking state budget stalemates that appeared in the New York Times op-ed page last week. Elmendorf and Lieb point out that California’s embarrassing budget stalemate, during which the state of California was forced to issue IOUs, threatens to become a yearly ritual during the economic downturn. They propose “[i]f the Legislature and the governor fail to adopt a budget four weeks before the deadline for the new fiscal year, a group of randomly selected citizens – one from each legislative district – would be convened to resolve the stalemate.” This citizen’s assembly would be presented with proposed budgets from the governor and each party’s legislative caucus, hear arguments from interested experts and groups for two weeks about each proposal, and choose one of the proposed budgets, which then would become law.
The idea is not only creative and promising, but representative of a larger movement toward institutional solutions in election law that I discuss in a recent book review of Heather Gerken’s The Democracy Index. Increasingly, election law reform is turning to the creation of new political institutions that seek not to deny politics or remove politics from lawmaking, but to channel lawmaking in healthier directions by restructuring leadership incentives more closely with the public interest. The Democracy Index, the subject of Heather’s book, is one such institutional solution. It would aggregate data about election administration into an ordinal ranking of state performance that might make an otherwise arcane subject more accessible to voters. Another institutional solution is my own proposal for gerrymandering reform, which would place competing districting maps prepared by the parties on the ballot for public selection. The hope is that inducing electoral competition between the major political parties pushes both sides toward fairer proposals that appeal to the median voter in what would be a public and avowedly political process. Elmendorf and Lieb’s idea is in this same family of institutional solutions.
Heather and I are working on a new project that identifies, assesses, and ultimately advocates this “institutional turn” in election law with much greater elaboration than I could offer in my short book review (or this post). We think this institutional turn is characterized by at least three important qualities. First, institutional solutions by their nature do not look to courts as neutral regulators of politics who can impose fairness from outside the political process. Second, institutional solutions attempt to harness politics to fix politics. They try to restructure political processes to channel competition among leaders in the direction of the public good. Third, institutional solutions generally enlist popular participation in creative ways and engage the public with central questions of election law, to the extent feasible. Each of these qualities is clear in Elmendorf and Lieb’s proposal, which embodies, at least in my view, exactly the right normative instincts emerging in election law.
August 3, 2009 at 9:37 am
Posted in: Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Current Events, Politics
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Not Too Late for Summer Reading Lists
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
There’s still enough summer left to consult the numerous summer reading lists that suggest the most interesting titles. My favorite annual list for the past ten years is the one compiled by JP Morgan. This is my favorite list for three reasons.
First, JPM partners with Barnes & Noble so books bought there using the JPM Summer Reading site generate commissions that JPM donates to Room to Read, the nonprofit dedicated to making education and books available to some 120 million children worldwide not currently enrolled in schools.
Second, the list always works for me. It is produced after a global review committee culls through some 500 books each year looking for those most likely to “capture interest, spark imagination and take readers to worlds we had not known.” Consider the wide variety of stimulating books chosen this year.
July 23, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews
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Book Review: Kate Kelly, Street Fighters
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
Over at Conglomerate, Gordon Smith is hosting a book club discussion of Kate Kelly, Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Beart Stearns, The Toughest Firm on Wall Street (Portfolio 2009), to which my following review is a contribution.
Kate Kelly is a gifted young journalist who prepared useful accounts of the federally-orchestrated and partially-financed fire sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan published in The Wall Street Journal two months afterwards. Revised versions of the reporting now appear in a short book, Street Fighters, of about 64,000 words, consisting of a well-written chronology of events and personalities whisking through the four-day weekend leading to Bear’s death.
The book is a well-told chronology, not having a theme or point of view, other than a preface saying the book’s purpose is to help people understand the “brutal impact” an enterprise’s collapse has on “workers.” I only detect a slight thematic whiff of that in the book and don’t see why Bear is a peculiarly good firm to illustrate the “brutal impact” notion.
Instead, I find in the chronology a few points of greater interest. It is difficult to be sure about the points because the reader must wade through haphazard minute-by-minute chaos of that weekend to determine what the facts add up to. Yet I discern several points relevant to people interested in economic crisis, government’s response and corporate governance during crisis.
The most important is the forceful, directive, role the US Treasury Department, especially then Secretary Henry Paulson and now Secretary Tim Geithner, played commanding, czar-like, the termination of Bear and sale of it to JP Morgan, in a weekend. They dictated an extraordinarily low price, $2 per share, and played some directive role in identifying and securing JP Morgan as buyer, instead of other potential suitors. The story dramatizes how Paulson called the shots:
• Paulson told US President, George Bush, to remove a line from a pending speech disparaging bailouts, as Bush intended, because his administration was about to orchestrate one.
• Paulson told Bear CEO, Alan Schwartz, who Paulson perceived to be “in denial,” that its receipt earlier that week of federal financial support meant Bear did not so much get a life line as become an instrument of the government.
• When JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, expressed difficulty accepting the deal at the original $8-12 level, Paulson told him he should pay less, saying “I can’t see why they’re getting anything. I could see something nominal, like one or two dollars per share.”
That’s the basis on which the forced deal was formally approved, under a façade of regularity.
June 16, 2009 at 9:28 am
Posted in: Book Reviews
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Summer Reading
posted by Sarah Waldeck
This is just a quick post to urge property professors to add Jeff Benedict’s Little Pink House to their summer reading lists. The book, which Dahlia Lithwick and Ilya Somin thoroughly reviewed a while back, is a law-lite acocunt of the conflict between Suzette Kelo and the City of New London, Connecticut. Benedict clearly sides with Kelo early in the book, so I found myself reading Little Pink House with a very large grain of salt. But it’s still a great beach book for property profs, primarily because it’s chockfull of details that many are unlikely to have read elsewhere. There’s no question that my class on the meaning of public use will be better for having read this book.
June 3, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Property Law
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Book Review: Posner, A Failure of Capitalism
posted by Lawrence Cunningham
It took only two hours to read Richard Posner’s breezy, odd and disjointed new book, A Failure of Capitalism. This awkwardly compact volume (346 pages in a trim size of 5×7) reassembles meditations first surfaced on his blog. It describes well-known points about the global financial crisis and offers little new. It contains a few statements commentators see as startling rebukes to free market capitalism unlikely from this conservative pioneer of law and economics (see, e.g., Solow, NYT, WaPo). Underappreciated in the excitement capitalism’s critics see in a devotee’s rebuke are insights on pragmatism, greater hallmarks of Posner’s work.
Although the book is disjointed, repetitious and disorganized, one may discern two themes, one I share and one I don’t. The one I share is that pragmatism is the way to approach financial policy. The diagnostic take from the financial crisis is subordination of pragmatism to ideology. This is due to free-market ideologues who deregulated too much by over-confidence in market capacity for self-correction. But this is no endorsement of extensive government intervention into the economy that equally ideological opponents of free markets may equally culpably prescribe.
Second, primary responsibility for the global financial crisis is with markets and market participants. Although I share this viewpoint, I part company when Posner argues that they did not act irrationally. He says there is no place in critique for insights from behavioral economics concerning limited cognition or biases. Government is to blame only in failing to protect against dangers that arise from market failure and inept responses once crises manifested, Posner argues. He says the principal justification for government regulation of economic activity is to prevent disruptions like recessions from turning into crises like depressions.
In short, this is rightly not a call for ideologically-driven government intervention on one side or ideologically-based laissez faire non-intervention on the other. It is a clarion call to pragmatic balancing that allows markets vast space for self-operation with government oversight and a regulatory system available to avert excesses when necessary to prevent challenges from becoming crises. The following review gives chapter-by-chapter accounts of this little book’s contents, including notes on the book’s awkward style in content, writing, documentation and publishing. Read the rest of this post »
May 28, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Current Events
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Ethics and Government Lawyers Redux: Jeff Powell’s Happy Constitution
posted by Andrew Taslitz
In an earlier post, I noted that two recent books had important things to say relevant to the ethics of government lawyers. That first post reviewed one of those books. This post reviews the second, H. Jefferson Powell’s beautifully written and spiritually uplifting new book, Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (2008). Despite what the book’s title might suggest, Powell’s lessons concern the ethics that should guide all constitutional decisionmakers, not only government lawyers. Indeed, his lessons explicitly apply to such lawyers as well, including a chapter-length illustration. Here I simply summarize his ethical theory, leaving it to the reader to imagine applications.
I note one preliminary point: while much constitutional law scholarship is depressing, either foolishly pretending law to be a mechanical enterprise divorced from politics or a cynical one masking politics, Jeff Powell offers a third, happier way ignored by fools and cynics alike: that of virtue. Those embracing the first two approaches may see Powell’s way as hopelessly idealistic, but Powell himself sees it as highly realistic, and his extended examples, which I do not have space to recount here, strongly support the pragmatic viability of his suggestions. Read the rest of this post »
May 19, 2009 at 9:16 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Politics, Supreme Court, Uncategorized
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Government Lawyers’ Ethical Obligations and the War on Terror
posted by Andrew Taslitz
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post this week had stories on a forthcoming DOJ Report expected to slam several of the Bush Administration lawyers’ for ethical lapses in preparing various memos justifying questionable techniques in the War on Terror. Both articles also addressed calls for disbarring those lawyers, as well as for impeaching Jay Bybee, who is now a federal judge.
These stories stress the importance of government lawyers’ advisory role and start from the assumption that there is a sort of “truth” about what the law is on a particular matter. That need not mean that there is only one “right” answer, but it does mean that some answers are outside the realm of the plausible; that even within the plausible, the case for some answers is far weaker than for others; and that there are widely understood standards for what is “good lawyering,” including adequate research, factual investigation, consideration of opposing arguments, and sensitivity to the practical effects of government policy.
The articles also assume that government lawyers as advisors have an obligation to tell their client things he or she might not care to know, to act as the government’s conscience, and to be attentive to history and constitutional values as much as case law precedent. I agree with these assumptions and write only to direct the reader to two new books with much to say about these matters — books worthy of careful study and debate by all who are interested, but particularly by those who are or hope to be government lawyers serving in advisory roles. Those books are Peter M. Shane’s Madison’s Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy and Jefferson H. Powell’s Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision. My post today will be brief and focus on Shane’s book. A future post will focus on Powell’s book.
May 8, 2009 at 4:05 pm
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Posted in: Book Reviews, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, Culture, Current Events, History of Law, Law Practice, Politics
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Lawrence Friedman and the History of Privacy
posted by Neil Richards
I recently uploaded to SSRN a short review essay of Lawrence Friedman’s “Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety and Privacy (Stanford 2007). No book is perfect, but this one is probably the best book on the history of privacy law that I have read.
Here’s the abstract of my review:
A short review essay of Lawrence Friedman’s “Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy” (Stanford Press 2007). The essay argues that Friedman tells a nuanced and compelling story of the rise and fall of the “Victorian Compromise,” a series of interlocking legal doctrines protecting the reputations of elites around the turn of the twentieth century. “Dark Secrets” undeniably advances our understanding of both the genesis of privacy law and the relationships between law and culture in the Gilded Age. As a work of legal history, it is an instant classic – a must-read for anyone interested in privacy law. But although Dark Secrets is first-rate legal history, it is less successful in its latter chapters when Friedman shifts his focus from the past to the present. The limits of Friedman’s social criticism raise important questions about the ability of history alone to provide answers to social problems in our modern, networked information society.
May 7, 2009 at 8:42 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Cyberlaw, History of Law, Law and Humanities, Privacy
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The History of the Conservative Legal Movement
posted by Nate Oman
Crooked Timber is going to be hosting an online symposium on Steve Teles book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. They have what looks to be a good line up and first out of the gate is Jack Balkin. Check it out.
April 27, 2009 at 11:24 am
Posted in: Blogging, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence
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First Amendment Theory Study Aid: Make No Law
posted by Neil Richards
Thanks to Dan and everyone else for inviting me back (and then putting up with me as I delayed accepting the invitation). At this time of the year, as the semester ends and the opportunities for faculty writing time increase, student attention turns understandably towards exams. I’ve been teaching the basic First Amendment course at Wash. U. for six years now, and the more I have taught the course, the more interested I have become in the theory and structure of free speech law at the expense of its often technical doctrinal rules. As my course has evolved to reflect these interests, my students understandably have asked me to suggest a study aid that could supplement some of the things I talk about in class (though “gibberish” may be more accurate). For doctrine, I have always suggested the First Amendment section of Erwin Chemerinsky’s excellent one-volume treatise Constitutional Law. But I always struggled to suggest a good, one-volume, accessible primer on the history and theory of the First Amendment. But in rereading Anthony Lewis’ Make No Law (Vintage 1991) for a paper earlier this semester, I think I might have found the answer. Lewis’ book tells the story of the landmark 1964 case of New York Times v. Sullivan, which applied rigorous First Amendment scrutiny to state defamation law, and held the “core meaning” of the First Amendment to be criticism of public officials. What I had forgotten about the book is the masterful and accessible way that Lewis situates the Times case in the evolution of First Amendment thought more broadly, both in its intellectual origins in the work of Milton, Madison, Holmes, and Brandeis, as well as in its effect on First Amendment law more generally. It’s not perfect; Lewis has a tendency at times to be uncritical of the Court’s opinion in Times and to view the result as foreordained. But although it is a bit of a hagiography of the case, its early chapters are the best basic treatment of elementary First Amendment history and theory that I’ve seen. So I thought I’d pass it on, should any First Amendment teachers or students feel the need to brush up on their free speech theory as we approach the business end of the semester.
April 21, 2009 at 11:53 am
Posted in: Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Law School (Teaching), Teaching
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Lessons from the Identity Trail
posted by Daniel Solove
There’s a terrific new book of essays about privacy out from Oxford University Press — LESSONS FROM THE IDENTITY TRAIL: ANONYMITY, PRIVACY AND IDENTITY IN A NETWORKED SOCIETY (Oxford University Press 2009). It’s edited by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, and Carole Lucock. The essays are fascinating and are written by a number of very prominent privacy scholars. Highly recommended!
The book is available free for download under a Creative Commons license. One third of the essays are now posted online. The rest will become available in two more stages — on April 22th and May 6th. This is the first book to be published by Oxford University Press under a Creative Commons license.
The book is available on Amazon.com or on our special Concurring Opinions Oxford University Press promo page for 20% off.
Here’s the table of contents:
April 8, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical)
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Thinking on What Hath God Wrought
posted by Nate Oman
Having spent a fair amount of time over the last two days sitting in airplanes and airports, I had a chance to read a couple of big chunks of Daniel Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. When I mentioned to a friend of mine on the history faculty here that I was reading Howe’s book, his response was “It’s dense.” Coming from someone who wades through 17th and 18th century French documents for a living, this was a bit intimidating. I don’t think that he is quite right. Indeed, one of the things that strikes me about Howe’s writing is how well he moves his narrative along and his skill in using the striking antectdote to illustrate a complex idea. The book is not so much dense as voluminous. Howe is covering a lot of material.
So far, I have gotten up through the material on the Missouri Compromise and the beginning of the Second Great Awakening. The section on the birth of the Monroe Doctrine was, I thought, a compact gem, deftly capturing the mix of personalities and international politics, in particular the role of Russian expansion in the northwest quadrant of the continent, a story that I had not heard before. The traditional narrative of the Monroe Doctrine, of course, is dominated by Latin America. Other enjoyable bits include the account of Jackson’s invasion of Florida and the carefully constructed plausible deniabilityof the Monroe Administration. Also, the sad and pathetic slide of Jefferson into a de facto defender of slavery is nicely alluded to without being heavy handed. Nevertheless, the Sage of Monticello is seen counselling his son-in-law that a good female slave producing a child every two years is more valuable than a field hand. (Her children could be sold to the cotton plantations farther south at a hansomeprofit later.) We also see him making the ultimately lame and hypocritical argument that extending slavery into Missouri will hasten its gradual decline by spreading it over a greater area, like butter scraped across toast so that it melts faster. In other words, by the end of his life Jefferson had managed in a wonderful bit of self-deception to argue that slavery must be expanded in order to be limited. Thus he could be both the prophet of human freedom, and the prophet of rising pro-slavery sectionalism. Not being a big fan of Jefferson, I relished these tid bits.
His discussion of law so far as been deft but shallow.
February 14, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews
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BRIGHT IDEAS: Timothy Zick on Speech Out of Doors
posted by Daniel Solove
Professor Timothy Zick (William & Mary College of Law) has written a superb new book, Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places (Cambridge, 2008). Tim has guest blogged with us on a few occasions, and his book raises interesting and important free speech issues involving speech in various places where people commonly gather. I asked Tim a few questions about his new book, and his answers are below.
SOLOVE: What motivated you to write about the issues in your book?
ZICK: I first became interested in the subject of spatial restrictions on speech when I witnessed how protesters and other public speakers were treated in New York City (and elsewhere), particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Of course, limits on public expression preceded these events. But the trend toward regulating public dissent and other forms of public expression through control over place increased markedly thereafter. Of the many limits placed on public expression, it was the “speech cage” erected at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston that really captured my attention. A district court judge described the structure, which was constructed as a purported “demonstration zone,” as an “internment camp” and “an affront to the First Amendment.” As did others, I found it remarkable that this repressive tactic was being used to regulate public expression in the United States. As or even more remarkable to me was that the courts held the Boston speech cage satisfied First Amendment standards.
SOLOVE: What’s the central idea in your book?
ZICK: I have always felt that the “public forum” and other First Amendment doctrines relating to place fail to appreciate some fundamental aspects of place itself, and of the intersection of place and expression. Anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, and other scholars who are closely attentive to the concept of place have demonstrated how important spatiality is to human interaction and communication, as well as to the state’s control over public contention. Through this lens, I posit in the book that place is not merely a property or “forum.” In many cases, places are distinctly expressive. They form part of an “expressive topography” – a system of places in which a variety of speech activities and contests occur. For example, beggars, proselytizers, and their potential audiences interact in embodied places (personal space); protesters often target specific contested places; and large rallies are held in inscribed places like the National Mall. Speech and spatiality intersect in unique ways in each of these and other spatial types identified in the book. For a variety of reasons, including the increasing privatization of public space, legal restrictions on public speech and assembly, and repressive forms of public policing, our expressive topography has been steadily eroding. This has negatively affected nearly every corner of the expressive topography, from public parks to college and university campuses.
SOLOVE: You write about the diminishing public space for speech. In an age where people increasingly spend their time at home in front of their computers rather than milling about on the public square, what’s the significance of the increasing loss of public space for speech?
January 14, 2009 at 11:29 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Bright Ideas, First Amendment
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The Year in Privacy Books: 2008
posted by Daniel Solove
Here’s a list of notable books about information privacy published in 2008. Pick up a few to help stimulate the economy, save the publishing business, and learn more about privacy:
Colin J. Bennett, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press 2008)
A very informative account of those who work in the privacy advocacy community.
A great collection of essays, from a symposium at Stanford Law School. A bit dated — the symposium was held in 2003 — but still worth reading. I have a piece in the book discussing data security vulnerabilities and the law — originally penned back in 2003, so I can say “told ya so!”
The best and most comprehensive intellectual history of the Fourth Amendment ever written.
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (Tor Teen 2008)
A contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984 — thought-provoking and engaging fiction, as usual from Doctorow.
December 27, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)
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Privacy and the Media
posted by Daniel Solove
Shameless self-plug alert: I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new casebook with co-author Professor Paul M. Schwartz (Berkeley Law School) — PRIVACY AND THE MEDIA. [Amazon page here.]
This short paperback contains key cases and materials focusing on privacy issues related to the media. Topics covered include the privacy torts, free speech, First Amendment, paparazzi, defamation, online gossip and social network websites.
This book is designed for use as a supplemental text in the following courses and seminars: journalism, entertainment law, media law, Torts II (or advanced torts), cyberlaw, First Amendment, free speech, law and technology, privacy law, and information law.
More information about the book is available here. I posted the table of contents online.
To obtain a review copy, please email Diane Warren at Aspen.
I’m also pleased to announce that the new editions of my other casebooks are now in print — INFORMATION PRIVACY LAW (3rd edition) and PRIVACY, INFORMATION, AND TECHNOLOGY (2nd edition). Click here for more information.
December 18, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, First Amendment, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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William Cuddihy’s The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 602-1791
posted by Daniel Solove
I’m delighted to announce the publication of William J. Cuddihy’s The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 602 – 1791 (Oxford University Press, January 2009). The book has just come out in print, hot off the press, and it’s an absolutely essential volume for any scholar of constitutional history, criminal procedure, or the Fourth Amendment.
Cuddihy’s book is the most comprehensive history of the Fourth Amendment I’ve ever read. It spans over 1000 years of history, tracing the origins of the concepts underpinning the Fourth Amendment from the Middle Ages to the Founding. It clocks in at 940 pages, but much of the heft comes from the extensive footnoting and detailed appendices. The book it is highly readable and contains a wealth of information and insight into the intellectual history of the Fourth Amendment and its original meaning. It comes with a high price tag, but I can assure you that it’s worth every penny.
I first encountered the book as an unpublished manuscript (which was completed over 15 years ago) when I was doing research into the history of the Fourth Amendment. I kept seeing it cited in articles and judicial opinions (it was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court a few times) and so I tracked it down. I couldn’t believe that this detailed, exhaustive, and immensely valuable research had never been published. William Cuddihy wrote it while a doctoral student under the late eminent legal historian Leonard Levy. I contacted Cuddihy and helped him find a publisher. And so I’m delighted that the manuscript is now in print, revised, updated, and with an afterward that responds to scholarship by Akhil Amar and Thomas Davies. I wrote a short preface for the book, in which I conclude:
No other work on the Fourth Amendment has synthesized so many sources, let alone done so as deftly and clearly as Professor Cuddihy’s The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 602-1791. I am very honored to introduce it.
Get your copy today. Tell your librarian to get a copy for your school’s library. It’s truly an impressive book, and is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the origins of the Fourth Amendment.
December 18, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, History of Law, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement)
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