"Law in Our Lives is a survey text intended primarily for courses in law and society that are taught from a more sociological perspective. It treats law as a complex, evolving, interdisciplinary field, which also makes it suitable for courses in legal history and philosophy. The book is known for its lucid writing style as well as its comprehensiveness--which is viewed as a benefit by some and a drawback by others. It combines detailed theoretical discussions with real-world examples to provide a broad analysis of the nature of law in contemporary society. It includes a wide array of pedagogical material, including boldfaced key terms and discussion questions, as well as appendices on case briefing, law in films, and websites of interest"--

“Mine” is one of the first words babies learn, and by the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether we are buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you, reclining, or the squished laptop user behind you? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it’s okay to knock off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, while in New York you lose both the space and the chair? In Mine!, Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading authorities on ownership, explain these puzzles and many more. Remarkably, they reveal, there are just six simple rules that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the rule that steers us to do what they want. But we can pick differently. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. Mine! draws on mind-bending, often infuriating, and always fascinating accounts from business, history, courtrooms, and everyday life to reveal how the rules of ownership control our lives and shape our world.

According to Judith Baer, feminist legal scholarship today does not effectively address the harsh realities of women's lives. Feminists have marginalized themselves, she argues, by withdrawing from mainstream intellectual discourse. In Our Lives Before the Law, Baer thus presents the framework for a new feminist jurisprudence--one that would return feminism to relevance by connecting it in fresh and creative ways with liberalism. Baer starts from the traditional feminist premise that the legal system has a male bias and must do more to help women combat violence and overcome political, economic, and social disadvantages. She argues, however, that feminist scholarship has over-corrected for this bias. By emphasizing the ways in which the system fails women, feminists have lost sight of how it can be used to promote women's interests and have made it easy for conventional scholars to ignore legitimate feminist concerns. In particular, feminists have wrongly linked the genuine flaws of conventional legal theory to its basis in liberalism, arguing that liberalism focuses too heavily on individual freedom and not enough on individual responsibility. In fact, Baer contends, liberalism rests on a presumption of personal responsibility and can be used as a powerful intellectual foundation for holding men and male institutions more accountable for their actions. The traditional feminist approach, Baer writes, has led to endless debates about such abstract matters as character differences between men and women, and has failed to deal sufficiently with concrete problems with the legal system. She thus constructs a new feminist interpretation of three central components of conventional theory--equality, rights, and responsibility--through analysis of such pressing legal issues as constitutional interpretation, reproductive choice, and fetal protection. Baer concludes by presenting the outline of what she calls "feminist post-liberalism": an approach to jurisprudence that not only values individual freedoms but also recognizes our responsibility for addressing individuals' needs, however different those may be for men and women. Powerfully and passionately written, Our Lives Before the Law will have a major impact on the future course of feminist legal scholarship.

Knight outlines how some of the main contours of American law came to be as he recounts 21 stories beginning with Alfred the Great in the late 19th century and ending with the Rodney King trials in 1993.

The author "describes the unique stresses lawyers face, the increasing demands of the legal marketplace, the "moral neutering" imposed by a lawyers' ethical duty of advocacy, some blunt truths about clients, and the deep tensions between lawyers' professional and personal lives."

Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short history of the complexities of family law and family life--including the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing.