The Law of Judicial Precedent is the first hornbook-style treatise on the doctrine of precedent in more than a century. It is the product of 13 distinguished coauthors, 12 of whom are appellate judges whose professional work requires them to deal with precedents daily. Together with their editor and coauthor, Bryan A. Garner, the judges have thoroughly researched and explored the many intricacies of the doctrine as it guides the work of American lawyers and judges. The treatise is organized into nine major topics, comprising 93 blackletter sections that elucidate all the major doctrines relating to how past decisions guide future ones in our common-law system. The authors' goal was to make the book theoretically sound, historically illuminating, and relentlessly practical. The breadth and depth of research involved in producing the book will be immediately apparent to anyone who browses its pages and glances over the footnotes: it would have been all but impossible for any single author to canvass the literature so comprehensively and then distill the concepts so cohesively into a single authoritative volume. More than 2,500 illustrative cases discussed or cited in the text illuminate the points covered in each section and demonstrate the law's development over several centuries. The cases are explained in a clear, commonsense way, making the book accessible to anyone seeking to understand the role of precedents in American law. Never before have so many eminent coauthors produced a single lawbook without signed sections, but instead writing with a single voice. Whether you are a judge, a lawyer, a law student, or even a nonlawyer curious about how our legal system works, you're sure to find enlightening, helpful, and sometimes surprising insights into our system of justice.

Improving access to justice has been an ongoing process, and on-demand justice should be a natural part of our increasingly on-demand society. What can we do for example when Facebook blocks our account, we're harassed on Twitter, discover that our credit report contains errors, or receive a negative review on Airbnb? How do we effectively resolve these and other such issues? Digital Justice introduces the reader to new technological tools to resolve and prevent disputes bringing dispute resolution to cyberspace, where those who would never look to a court for assistance can find help for instance via a smartphone. The authors focus particular attention on five areas that have seen great innovation as well as large volumes of disputes: ecommerce, healthcare, social media, labor, and the courts. As conflicts escalate with the increase in innovation, the authors emphasize the need for new dispute resolution processes and new ways to avoid disputes, something that has been ignored by those seeking to improve access to justice in the past.

Who controls how one’s identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity—a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities—to answer that question, not just for the famous but for everyone. In challenging the conventional story of the right of publicity’s emergence, development, and justifications, Rothman shows how it transformed people into intellectual property, leading to a bizarre world in which you can lose ownership of your own identity. This shift and the right’s subsequent expansion undermine individual liberty and privacy, restrict free speech, and suppress artistic works. The Right of Publicity traces the right’s origins back to the emergence of the right of privacy in the late 1800s. The central impetus for the adoption of privacy laws was to protect people from “wrongful publicity.” This privacy-based protection was not limited to anonymous private citizens but applied to famous actors, athletes, and politicians. Beginning in the 1950s, the right transformed into a fully transferable intellectual property right, generating a host of legal disputes, from control of dead celebrities like Prince, to the use of student athletes’ images by the NCAA, to lawsuits by users of Facebook and victims of revenge porn. The right of publicity has lost its way. Rothman proposes returning the right to its origins and in the process reclaiming privacy for a public world.

The Harvard Law Review is offered in a digital edition, featuring active Contents, linked notes, and proper ebook formatting. The contents of Issue 7 include a Symposium on privacy and several contributions from leading legal scholars: Article, "Agency Self-Insulation Under Presidential Review," by Jennifer Nou Commentary, "The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Myths and Realities," by Cass R. Sunstein SYMPOSIUM: PRIVACY AND TECHNOLOGY "Introduction: Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma," by Daniel J. Solove "What Privacy Is For," by Julie E. Cohen "The Dangers of Surveillance," by Neil M. Richards "The EU-U.S. Privacy Collision: A Turn to Institutions and Procedures," by Paul M. Schwartz "Toward a Positive Theory of Privacy Law," by Lior Jacob Strahilevitz Book Review, "Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights," by Philip Alston A student Note explores "Enabling Television Competition in a Converged Market." In addition, extensive student analyses of Recent Cases discuss such subjects as First Amendment implications of falsely wearing military uniforms, First Amendment implications of public employment job duties, justiciability of claims that Scientologists violated trafficking laws, habeas corpus law, and ineffective assistance of counsel claims. Finally, the issue includes several summaries of Recent Publications. The Harvard Law Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. The Review comes out monthly from November through June and has roughly 2000 pages per volume. The organization is formally independent of the Harvard Law School. Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions. This issue of the Review is May 2013, the 7th issue of academic year 2012-2013 (Volume 126).

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.