This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Steven Smith argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with the world view that prevails today in academic and professional thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into "just words"--or a kind of nonsense. The diagnosis is similar to that offered by Holmes, the Legal Realists, and other critics over the past century, except that these critics assumed that the older ontological commitments were dead, or at least on their way to extinction; so their aim was to purge legal discourse of what they saw as an archaic and fading metaphysics. Smith's argument starts with essentially the same metaphysical predicament but moves in the opposite direction. Instead of avoiding or marginalizing the "ultimate questions," he argues that we need to face up to them and consider their implications for law.

This book studies how American political reform efforts often fail because of the unrealistic ideal of a fully informed and engaged citizenry.

Legal Aspects of Emergency Services, Second Edition introduces members of fire and emergency medical services to the legal system in the United States, showing them how various types of laws affect their work in emergency services.

This 2002 book demonstrates how property law and rights shift and cycle in the US.

Intended for the general public, the readings in this collection explore the roots of American law from pre-history to ancient Greece and Rome and the common law of England. America's legal development is traced from the drafting of the Constitution to the Rehnquist Court. Themes along the way include the ?Golden Age? of the early nineteenth century, when American law took on its distinctive character, the impact of slavery and the Civil War, and the struggles of the Progressives to regulate the nation's industrialized economy between the post-Civil War era and the New Deal. A reading on the Nuremberg Trials introduces the theme of international human rights, while post-war readings trace the nation's legal confrontations over civil liberties, civil rights, the rights of women, the protection of the environment, and legal protections for those accused of crimes. Dramatic highlights include the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, the trial of the ?Chicago Eight? during the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. Leading personalities include Sirs Edward Coke and William Blackstone in England, Chief Justices John Marshall and Earl Warren, Justices Stephen J. Field, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis D. Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, and Judge Learned Hand. Readings on the future of American law explore the impact of alternative dispute resolution, science and technology, globalization, and space exploration, as well as trends in the legal profession and in legal philosophy.

In considering diffusion from a global perspective, this book provides timely new insights into its application in a variety of fields and at many levels of both legal and non-legal orderings. This collection contributes to the wider theoretical debate concerning the movement of law and legal norms by engaging with concrete examples of legal diffusion, in jurisdictions as diverse as Albania, the Czech Republic, Poland and Kuwait. These examples, taken together, provide a comprehensive illustration of the theoretical debates concerning the diffusion of laws and norms in terms of both process and form. This international, multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological volume brings together scholars from law and social science with experience in mixed and hybrid jurisdictions, and advances the conversation about legal and normative diffusion across the academy. It represents a robust challenge to many preconceived ideas about legal movement and, as such, will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of Law, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Legal Education and comparative method.

This book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 – 2011 at Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as “sign”, “symbol” or “legal language,” demonstrate how a lawyer’s professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can “say the law,” or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.