Review
Review
Prisons as Laboratories of Antidemocracy
Jeffrey Bellin's Mass Incarceration Nation robustly analyzes how state and federal policies have combined to drive up prison populations. Mass incarceration represents a failure of democracy, but the repressive policies of American prisons represent an even graver threat as laboratories of antidemoc…
Review
What We Ask of Law
This Book Review asks what comprises a well-functioning legal system in light of new evidence of how law operated across a wide historical panorama. Such contextualization has implications for a sound working definition of law, understanding law’s relation to the rule of law, and law’s role in emanc…
Review
Rights, Structure, and Remediation
In The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, Aziz Huq contends federal courts exacerbate societal inequities by overzealously enforcing constitutional limits on government regulation while neglecting individual-rights violations. Though some of Huq’s criticisms are spot-on, others are overstated, and…
Review
Capitalist Development, Labor Law, and the New Working Class
Gabriel Winant’s The Next Shift charts the transformation of Pittsburgh’s political economy from World War II through 2008. This Review suggests that the long-term process of capitalist development—which is central to Winant’s account—also helped to reshape our labor law over the same period.
Review
Unwritten Law and the Odd Ones Out
In a new book, Douglas Baird argues that the values of reorganization professionals, more than statute or case law, define the norms of corporate bankruptcy. This Book Review shows how rule-by-reorganizers can explain Chapter 11's troubling tendency to disregard the interests of legacy creditors.
Review
Writing About the Past That Made Us: Scholars, Civic Culture, and the American Present and Future
This Review assesses the arguments made in Akhil Amar’s The Words That Made Us about the impoverished nature of our current discourse on our constitutional system of government.
Review
(Re)Framing Race in Civil Rights Lawyering
This Review examines the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, for the study of racism in our nation’s legal system and for the regulation of race in the legal profession.
Review
Reevaluating Legal Theory
Law is a social practice that pursues a moral purpose. Analyzing Professor Julie Dickson’s Evaluation and Legal Theory, this Review brings the natural-law tradition into conversation with contemporary philosophy of social science to seek an approach to general jurisprudence that respects both the fa…
Review
Truer U.S. History: Race, Borders, and Status Manipulation
Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire rewrites U.S. history with empire at the core. Building on that accomplishment, this Review sketches a U.S. legal history of indigeneity, race, slavery, immigration, and empire in which legal “status manipulation” accomplished and hid the myriad wrongs done.
Review
Examining the Case for Socialized Law
In Equal Justice: Fair Legal Systems in an Unfair World, Frederick Wilmot-Smith argues that it is only by deprivatizing markets for legal services that we can ever hope to achieve equal justice. This Book Review explains why his bold prescription is worthy of serious examination and critical debate.…
Review
The Law of Informational Capitalism
Informational capitalism brings new dangers of surveillance and manipulation—but also of accelerating monopoly, inequality, and democratic disempowerment. Examining two important new books on the topic, this Review maps the law and political economy of informational capitalism, a domain of rising pr…
Review
Fidelity and Construction
Lawrence Lessig’s Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution makes an important contribution to “New Originalism.” This Review explores how Lessig’s theory of fidelity to role can inform an originalist understanding of constitutional construction.
Review
The Politics of Decarceration
Can the political process help undo mass incarceration? This Book Review argues that changes in the two major political parties, the results of recent state-level elections, and changes in public opinion all provide reason to hope that democratic politics is compatible with ending mass incarceration…
Review
Equality of Opportunity and the Schoolhouse Gate
Cases involving schools have implicated nearly every major civil right. In this Review of Justin Driver’s The Schoolhouse Gate, however, Professors Michelle Adams and Derek Black demonstrate that the right to equal educational opportunity is the tie that binds together the Supreme Court’s many dispa…
Review
The High Stakes of Low-Level Criminal Justice
Alexandra Natapoff reviews Misdemeanorland, summarizing the book’s key contributions and extending its insights about New York City’s system of misdemeanor managerial social control to illuminate the broader dynamics and democratic significance of the U.S. misdemeanor process.
Review
State Courts and Constitutional Structure
Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court reviews Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s new book, 51 Imperfect Solutions: The Making of American Constitutional Law.
Review
The New Jim Crow Is the Old Jim Crow
A vast divide exists in the national imagination between the racial struggles of the civil rights era and those of the present. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Jeanne Theoharis, this Review argues that complexifying this oversimplified history is critical to contemporary racial …
Review
Who Locked Us Up? Examining the Social Meaning of Black Punitiveness
In this Review of James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, Darren Hutchinson reconciles Forman’s research with antiracist accounts of U.S. crime policy. Literature on implicit bias, social dominance orientation, and right-wing authoritaria…
Review
Brief Lives
In this Review of Owen Fiss’s book, Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition, Laura Kalman explores Fiss's views on the legal figures appearing in the book. In addition, Kalman discusses the criticisms of Brown v. Board of Education and legal liberalism that are missing in Fiss’s accoun…
Review
Pregnancy, Poverty, and the State
In this Review of Khiara Bridges’s book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights, Michele Goodwin and Erwin Chemerinsky argue that state legislatures, as well as the federal government and courts, express moral disregard and even outright contempt for poor women in multitudinous ways that include, but extend …
Review
How Long Is History’s Shadow?
Josh Chafetz, in Congress’s Constitution, urges Congress to rehabilitate its underused but important nonlegislative powers. In this Book Review, Anita Krishnakumar argues that while reinvigorating these powers is a good idea in theory, Congress may not have the ability or inclination to do so.
Review
The Original Theory of Constitutionalism
The conflict between various versions of “originalism” and “living constitutionalism” has long defined the landscape of constitutional theory and practice. In this Review of Richard Tuck’s The Sleeping Sovereign, David Grewal and Jedediah Purdy adapt the sovereignty-government distinction at the hea…
Review
Privacy’s Trust Gap: A Review
Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest By Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum Cambridge and London: The MIT Press 2015 author. Neil Richards is Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law; Affiliate Scholar, The Center for Internet…
Review
Systemic Triage: Implicit Racial Bias in the Criminal Courtroom
Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court By Nicole van cleve Stanford university press, april 2016 author. Professor of Law, U.C. Irvine School of Law. A.B. Harvard College, J.D. Yale Law School. I wish to thank Rick Banks, Erwin Chemerins…
Review
A Review
The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities BY STEPHEN BREYER, ALFRED A. KNOPF, 2015 author. Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Will Baude and Curt Bradley for helpful comments, Kathrine Gutierrez f…
Review
Eighteen Years On: A Re-Review
The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment BY WILLIAM N. ESKRIDGE, JR. NEW YORK: THE FREE PRESS, 1996. author. Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School. In 1992 I published a book called…
Review
The Banality of Racial Inequality
Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage BY DARIA ROITHMAYR NEW YORK: NYU PRESS, 2014, PP. 205. $25.00. author. Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School. I…
Review
Constitutions of Hope and Fear
Citizens Divided: Campaign Finance Reform and the Constitution BY ROBERT C. POST CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014, PP. 264. $29.95. author. David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia. I am gra…
Review
Judging Justice on Appeal
A review of Injustice on Appeal: The United States Courts of Appeals in Crisis
Review
Why Protect Religious Freedom?
Why Tolerate Religion? BY BRIAN LEITER PRINCETON, NJ: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012, PP. 208. $24.95. author. Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. The auth…
Review
Next-Generation Civil Rights Lawyers: Race and Representation in the Age of Identity Performance
122 Yale L.J. 1484 (2013).
This Book Review addresses two important new books, Professor Kenneth Mack’s Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and Professors Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America, and utilizes their insights to bo…
Review
Lightning in the Hand: Indians and Voting Rights
120 Yale L.J. 1420 (2011).
American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights
By Laughlin McDonald
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, pp. 347. $55.00.
Review
The Common School Before and After Brown: Democracy, Equality, and the Productivity Agenda
120 Yale L.J. 1455 (2011).
In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark
By Martha Minow
New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 320. $24.95.
Review
Multiplicity in Federalism and the Separation of Powers
120 Yale L.J. 1084 (2011).
The Ideological Origins of American Federalism
By Allison L. Lacroix
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19th ed., 2010, PP. 312. $35.00.
Review
The Bluebook Blues
120 Yale L.J. 850 (2011).
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation
By the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal
Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard Law Review Association, 19th ed., 2010, pp. xvii, 511. $32.00 (paperbound).Review
Integrity and the Incongruities of Justice: A Review of Daniel Markovits's A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Democracy in a Democratic Age
119 Yale L.J. 1948 (2010).
Review
Contract Interpretation Redux
119 Yale L.J. 926 (2010).
Contract interpretation remains the largest single source of contract litigation between business firms. In part this is because contract interpretation issues are difficult, but it also reflects a deep divide between textualist and contextualist theories of interpretatio…
Review
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright
118 Yale L.J. 1126 (2009).
Copyright’s Paradox
BY NEIL WEINSTOCK NETANEL
NEW YORK, NY: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008, PP.ix, 274. $34.95.
Review
From Litigation, Legislation:A Review of Brian Landsberg’s Free at Last To Vote: The Alabama Origins of the 1965 Voting Rights Act
117 Yale L.J. 1132 (2008).
Review
Wealth Without Markets?
116 Yale L.J. 1472 (2007)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
BY YOCHAI BENKLER
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006. PP. 528. $40.00
Review
Save the Cities, Stop the Suburbs?
116 Yale L.J. 598 (2006)
Sprawl: A Compact History
BY ROBERT BRUEGMANN
CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2005. PP. 306. $27.50
The City: A Global History
BY JOEL KOTKIN
NEW YORK: MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES, 2005. PP. 256. $21.95
Review
The Pragmatic Passion of Stephen Breyer
115 Yale L.J. 1675 (2006)
Now in his twelfth year as a Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Breyer has written an important book, Active Liberty, which crystallizes a fundamental set of beliefs about the American Constitution and his role as a Justice. Taking Active Liberty as the entry point, this piece p…
Review
Justice Breyer Throws Down the Gauntlet
115 Yale L.J. 1699 (2006)
A Supreme Court Justice writing a book about constitutional law is like a dog walking on his hind legs: The wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all. The dog's walking is inhibited by anatomical limitations, the Justice's writing by political ones. Supre…
Review
Justice Breyer's Democratic Pragmatism
115 Yale L.J. 1719 (2006)
As a law professor at Harvard Law School, Stephen Breyer specialized in administrative law. His important work in that field was marked above all by its unmistakably pragmatic foundations. In an influential book, Breyer emphasized that regulatory problems were "mismatched" t…
Review
Viewing CSI and the Threshold of Guilt: Managing Truth and Justice in Reality and Fiction
The "CSI effect" is a term that legal authorities and the mass media have coined to describe a supposed influence that watching the television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has on juror behavior. Some have claimed that jurors who see the high-quality forensic evidence presented on CSI raise th…
Review
Who Will Find the Defendant if He Stays with His Sheep? Justice in Rural China
114 Yale L.J. 1675 (2005)
In Song fa xiaxiang: Zhongguo jiceng sifazhidu yanjiu [Sending Law to the Countryside: Research on China's Basic-Level Judicial System], Dean Zhu Suli of Beijing University Law School claims that Chinese legal scholars uncritically accept foreign models and rule-of-law ideol…
Review
Property in All the Wrong Places?
114 Yale L.J. 991 (2005)
In Who Owns Native Culture? and Public Lands and Political Meaning, an anthropologist and a historian document an ever-increasing deployment of property categories in two quite different domains: native people's recent cultural claims in the first book and the longer story o…
Review
Judicial Power and Civil Rights Reconsidered
114 Yale L.J. 593 (2004)
Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on both the history of the civil rights struggle and judicial power more generally. Klarman argues that for much of…
Review
The Law and Economics of Critical Race Theory
112 Yale L.J. 1757 (2003)
Our story is about the production and consumption of racial prototypes. The regulatory thrust of homogeneity creates both a demand for, and a supply of, specific racial prototypes--outsiders who can fit within predominantly white workplace cultures without "disturb[ing] the …
Review
The Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation
112 Yale L.J. 1829 (2003)
Why do corporate governance systems differ quite substantially around the world? The American model supervises managers through a board representing a diffuse mass of external shareholders whose rights are defended by a variety of institutional rules (such as those governing…
Review
The Grounds of Welfare
112 Yale L.J. 1511 (2003)
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell are talented and distinguished legal academics who for the past several years have been working jointly on a massive project in normative law and economics. The project's goal is to answer the question: What are the criteria by which legal pol…
Review
What Ails Us?
112 Yale L.J. 1135 (2003)
Is American democracy sick? If so, what ails it? More importantly, can the disease be cured? Can its symptoms be alleviated by imaginative and well-crafted laws? Or is it a genetic disorder embedded in the DNA of modern representative government and thus unlikely to yield to…
Review
Friedman's Law
112 Yale L.J. 925 (2003)
In this appraisal of Lawrence M. Friedman's American Law in the Twentieth Century, I begin in Part I with a survey of the several "schools" of American legal history that have risen to prominence in the years since World War II, utilizing a suggestive framework first offered …
Review
Homes Rule
112 Yale L.J. 617 (2002)
In this important new book on local governance, economist William Fischel presents and defends a deceptively simple and intuitively resonant proposition: "that homeowners, who are the most numerous and politically influential group within most localities, are guided by their …
Review
Method and Principle in Legal Theory
111 Yale L.J. 1757 (2002)
The Practice of Principle is an excellent book that practically overflows with interesting and original arguments. Coleman is a superb analytical philosopher, as every page of the book attests. This is one of the most important contributions to legal theory to come along in …
Review
Why Tax the Rich? Efficiency, Equity, and Progressive Taxation
111 Yale L.J. 1391 (2002)
In Greek mythology, Atlas was a giant who carried the world on his shoulders. In Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Atlas represents the "prime movers"--the talented few who bear the weight of the world's economy. In the novel, the prime movers go on strike against the o…
Review
Tobacco Unregulated: Why the FDA Failed, and What To Do Now
111 Yale L.J. 1179 (2002)
The book jacket promises drama. David Kessler, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is said to tell "a gripping detective story," a story of "right and wrong" and "moral courage." The "unlikely heroes" are a small team of FDA employees who set out t…
Review
Signaling Discount Rates: Law, Norms, and Economic Methodology
110 Yale L.J. 625 (2001)
For decades, sociologists and law-and-society scholars have studied law in a broader social context that includes norms. More recently, the subject of social norms has come to the sustained attention of rational choice scholars, including economists, philosophers, politica…
Review
Animal Rights
110 Yale L.J. 527 (2000)
The "animal rights" movement is gathering steam, and Steven Wise is one of the pistons. A lawyer whose practice is the protection of animals, he has now written a book in which he urges courts in the exercise of their common-law powers of legal rulemaking to confer legally en…