Featured Titles

In 1966, thirteen black employees of the Duke Power Company in North Carolina sued the company, challenging its requirement of a high school diploma or a passing grade on an intelligence test for internal transfer or promotion. In the groundbreaking decision Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding such employment practices violated Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when they disparately affected minorities. Legal scholars rank this decision on a par with Brown v. Board of Education in terms of its impact on eradicating race discrimination from American institutions. This work offers the first full-length historical examination of the case and its connection to civil rights activism during the second half of the 1960's.

Jacket Photograph by Yu Feng Chen
Jacket Design by Michelle A. Neustrom

This work takes readers through the changing landscape of academic freedom, from the aftermath of September 11 to the new frontier of blogging, as it examines the tension between institutional and individual interests. The author shows how courts increasingly restrict professorial judgment, and how the protection of what is posted on the internet and written in email makes academics more vulnerable than ever. He also argues that the newest threats to academic freedom come not from government, but from the private sector: corporations that increasingly sponsor and control university-based research and self-appointed watchdogs that systematically harass individual teachers on websites and blogs. Insisting that new concepts of academic freedom and new strategies for maintaining it are needed, he urges academics to work together across rigid divisions between "left" and "right" and to be alert to new threats from within the academic world itself.

Jacket Design: Graciela Galup
Cover Art: Jonathan Kitchen/Photographer's Choice/Getty Images

In this work, the author describes what he calls the range wars of the information age - today's heated battles over intellectual property. He argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment and civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and, he argues, today's policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation. This work identifies as a major problem the widespread failure to understand the importance of the public domain, arguing that the public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as the material protected by intellectual property rights. The author calls for a movement akin to the environmental movement to preserve it.

Jacket Design by katsiedesign

This work traces the history of what today is called "judicial review." Historical accounts have tended to suggest that judges themselves largely developed judicial review, giving credence to the view that judges enjoy considerable discretion over the extent and exercise of this power. This book, however, presents a very different history and a very different conception of the power of judges. Drawing on previously unexplored evidence, the author shows that what is currently considered the power of judicial review was once understood simply as a matter of judicial duty - the duty of judges to decide in accord with the law of the land. The book challenges many modern assumptions about the extent of judicial power, and by exploring judicial duty in its social context, the book raises questions about the nature of law and the possibility of government under law.