This book offers a unique opportunity to sit down with a diverse gathering of lawyers to share their perspectives on being a lawyer. In this compelling collection of essays, the contributors write about the values of the profession, a lawyers responsibility to their communities, their duty of service to clients, and to the public and to each other. This book can provide the guidance you need should you ever feel that you are losing your way.
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.
Albie Sachs gives an intimate account of his extraordinary life and work as a judge in South Africa. Mixing autobiography with reflections on his major cases and the role of law in achieving social justice, Sachs offers a rare glimpse into the workings of the judicial mind and a unique perspective on modern South African history.
This book is based on the assumption that the world is governed by a widespread field of interconnected laws. In this field man-made laws – legal laws - have to coexist with the laws of nature, the laws of science and the laws of logic. They have to find their place in relation to a certain society. They have to relate to the demands of morality, ethics, custom and trust. They have to follow the laws of language. They have to deal with a variety of professional and esthetic rules. They have to defend their position between art and craft. Finally, and significantly, they have to cope with a host of different ideas about truth. This book approaches law as a human construct meant to strengthen society as it develops through the ages. Knowledge of the law – legal knowledge – is of doubtful value if it ignores the demands and ideals of society. The same goes for the thinking leading to legal knowledge. This book focuses on a basic concept. That concept is met if the legal thinking, leading to legal knowledge, reaches the level of an independent, law and society oriented, contemplative discipline. A discipline which is in that sense and to that extent in touch with - cherished or less cherished - parts of given law.
Written by Harvard-trained ex-law firm partner Liz Brown, Life After Law: Finding Work You Love with the J.D. You Have provides specific, realistic, and honest advice on alternative careers for lawyers. Unlike generic career guides, Life After Law shows lawyers how to reframe their legal experience to their competitive advantage, no matter how long they have been in or out of practice, to find work they truly love. Brown herself moved from a high-powered partnership into an alternative career and draws from this experience, as well as that of dozens of former practicing attorneys, in the book. She acknowledges that changing careers is hard much harder than it was for most lawyers to get their first legal job after law school but it can ultimately be more fulfilling for many than a life in law. Life After Law offers an alternative framework and valuable analytic tools for potential careers to help launch lawyers into new fields and make them attractive hires for non-legal employers.
Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Evolving an Ethnography of Law: A Personal Document 2 Lawyers and Anthropologists 3 Hegemonic Processes in Law: Colonial to Contemporary 4 The Plaintiff: A User Theory Epilogue Bibliography Index.
There is a saying about law school that they scare you to death the first year, work you to death the second, and bore you to death the third. Law students today have a pretty good idea what to expect from the initial plunge into the law. Scott Turow's One L, describing his first year at Harvard, has become almost mandatory reading for anyone contemplating law school. And because that level of intensity is what so many expect, that is how the first year usually plays out, complete with ulcers, outlines, and relentless work. But the education does not end after the first year. Law school is a three-year course of study, and the first year often bears little resemblance to the final two. Facing two more years of grueling class work, mounting student loans, increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd, and the never-ending search for the perfect job, upper-class students come to realize that surviving the fall into the deep end is no guarantee they will learn to swim. Letters from Law School is about the second year of law school, after the cold shock of the plunge. This book describes the struggle to come up for air.
Are you alive? What makes you so sure? Most people believe this question has a clear answer—that some law defines our status as living (or not) for all purposes. But they are dead wrong. In this pioneering study, Elizabeth Price Foley examines the many, and surprisingly ambiguous, legal definitions of what counts as human life and death. Foley reveals that “not being dead” is not necessarily the same as being alive, in the eyes of the law. People, pre-viable fetuses, and post-viable fetuses have different sets of legal rights, which explains the law's seemingly inconsistent approach to stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, frozen embryos, in utero embryos, contraception, abortion, homicide, and wrongful death. In a detailed analysis that is sure to be controversial, Foley shows how the need for more organ transplants and the need to conserve health care resources are exerting steady pressure to expand the legal definition of death. As a result, death is being declared faster than ever before. The "right to die," Foley worries, may be morphing slowly into an obligation to die. Foley’s balanced, accessible chapters explore the most contentious legal issues of our time—including cryogenics, feticide, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, brain death, vegetative and minimally conscious states, informed consent, and advance directives—across constitutional, contract, tort, property, and criminal law. Ultimately, she suggests, the inconsistencies and ambiguities in U.S. laws governing life and death may be culturally, and perhaps even psychologically, necessary for an enormous and diverse country like ours.
