The dramatic true story of how a journalist, a professor, and three students solved a murder and helped free four wrongly convicted men after 18 years in prison.

Malcolm Feeley's classic scholarship on courts, criminal justice, legal reform, and the legal complex, examined by law and society scholars.

Are we environmentally victimizing, perhaps even poisoning, our minority and low-income citizens? Proponents of "environmental justice" assert that environmental decisionmaking pays insufficient heed to the interests of those citizens, disproportionately burdens their neighborhoods with hazardous toxins, and perpetuates an insidious "environmental racism." In the first book-length critique of environmental justice advocacy, Christopher Foreman argues that it has cleared significant political hurdles but displays substantial limitations and drawbacks. Activism has yielded a presidential executive order, management reforms at the Environmental Protection Agency, and numerous local political victories. Yet the environmental justice movement is structurally and ideologically unable to generate a focused policy agenda. The movement refuses to confront the need for environmental priorities and trade-offs, politically inconvenient facts about environmental health risks, and the limits of an environmental approach to social justice. Ironically, environmental justice advocacy may also threaten the very constituencies it aspires to serve--distracting attention from the many significant health hazards challenging minority and disadvantaged populations. Foreman recommends specific institutional reforms intended to recast the national dialogue about the stakes of these populations in environmental protection.

Malcolm Feeley, one of the founding giants of the law and society field, is also one of its most exciting, diverse, and contemporary scholars. His works have examined criminal courts, prison reform, the legal profession, legal professionalism, and a variety of other important topics of enduring theoretical interest with a keen eye for the practical implications. In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of contemporary law and society scholars offer fresh and original analyzes of his work. They asses the legacy of Feeley's theoretical innovations, put his findings to the test of time, and provide provocative historical and international perspectives for his insights. This collection of original essays not only draws attention to Professor Feeley's seminal writings but also to the theories and ideas of others who, inspired by Feeley, have explored how courts and the legal process really work to provide a promise of justice.

A blueprint for criminal justice reform that lays the foundation for how model public defense programs should work to end mass incarceration. Combining wisdom drawn from over a dozen years as a public defender and cutting-edge research in the fields of organizational and cultural psychology, Jonathan Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society. Public defenders represent over 80% of those who interact with the court system, a disproportionate number of whom are poor, non-white citizens who rely on them to navigate the law on their behalf. More often than not, even the most well-meaning of those defenders are over-worked, under-funded, and incentivized to put the interests of judges and politicians above those of their clients in a culture that beats the passion out of talented, driven advocates, and has led to an embarrassingly low standard of justice for those who depend on the promises of Gideon v. Wainwright. However, rather than arguing for a change in rules that govern the actions of lawyers, judges, and other advocates, Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment and training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society. Through the story of founding Gideon’s Promise and anecdotes of his time as a defender and teacher, Rapping reanimates the possibility of public defenders serving as a radical bulwark against government oppression and a megaphone to amplify the voices of those they serve.

There has been much important work done in the past two decades in America on issues of under representation based on social differences such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and age. While this scholarship has examined the ways in which women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities suffer disproportionately on measures of full citizenship, social class and culture have received relatively little attention. This new study addresses various manifestations of social class and cultural difference as well as their implications for political representation. The analysis demonstrates how three of the most influential feminist theorists who write about political representation conceive of group representation, identify the problems that group representation claims to remedy, and assess the strengths and weaknesses associated with these models. Using theoretical argument, the volume suggests practical electoral reform in order to encourage new and emancipating forms of political engagement. It will be of value to those interested in public policy and governance, political theory, gender studies and law and society in general.

The 30th Anniversary Special Edition of The Promise of World Peace, prepared for publication by the Baha'i Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park, compiles the original 1985 message from the Universal House of Justice to the peoples of the world in ten languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili. The statement calls attention to the value of establishing agreement on principles from which people of goodwill can devise practical solutions to the barriers to peace."