history law

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 303 pages. Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise like new.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 223 pages. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake's reputation has only grown, with fans continuing to marvel at his tightly constructed plots, no-nonsense prose, and keen, even unsettling, insights into human behavior. With The Getaway Car, we get our first glimpse of another side of Westlake the writer: what he did when he wasn't busy making stuff up. And it's fascinating. Setting previously published pieces, many little seen, alongside never-before-published material found in Westlake's working files, the book offers a clear picture of the man behind the books-including his thoughts on his own work and that of his peers, mentors, and influences. The book opens with revealing (and funny) fragments from an unpublished autobiography, then goes on to offer an extended history of private eye fiction, a conversation among Westlake's numerous pen names, letters to friends and colleagues, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, and much, much more. There's even a recipe for Sloth a la Dortmunder. Really. Rounded out with a foreword by Westlake's longtime friend Lawrence Block, The Getaway Car is a fitting capstone to a storied career and a wonderful opportunity to revel anew in the voice and sensibility of a master craftsman.

NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 609 pages, b&w illustrations. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

Hardcover. Birmingham, AL, Legal Classic Library, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 691/687 pages. 2 volumes. Hardcovers with gilded decoration, edges and leather bound covers. Clean, tight copy. Marbled end papers. Ribbon marker. Previous owner's bookplate on front end paper.

Hardcover. London, Stevens and Sons, 1835, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. 575 pages. Volume Two. Front corners bumped. Some soiling to covers. Light rubbing to spine and corners.

Hardcover. Birmingham AL, The Legal Classics Library, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 72 pages. Quarto [30.5 cm] Maroon leather with raised bands, a gilt stamped title on the spine, and decorative gilt stamped designs on the spine and covers. All edges gilt. Marbled endsheets. Very good. There is a former owner's bookplate on the inside of front cover. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts is one of the seminal documents in the development of the American legal system. It is believed to be the precursor to the General Laws of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Constitution. An influence on the U.S. Constitution, it contains provisions that were incorporated in the Bill of Rights.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in lightly worn dust jacket with sunning to spine, 368 pages. There has never been a phenomenon in American life to equal the invasion of Washington by the young New Dealers, hundreds of men and women still in their twenties and thirties, brilliant and dedicated, trained in the law, economics, public administration, technology, pouring into public life to do nothing less than restructure American society. They proposed new programs, drafted legislation, staffed the new agencies. They were active in the Administration, the Congress, the courts, the news media. They fanned out all over America to discover the facts, plan ways of easing the pain of their foundering country, and report on the results. Many of them went on to be rich, famous, and powerful, but their early experience in Washington was perhaps the most inspiriting of their lives. Katie Louchheim was among those who arrived in Washington in the 1930s, and being a keen writer as well as the wife of a member of the SEC, she had a front-row seat for the spectacle of social progress. Now, a half-century later, she has gathered reminiscences from her old friends and colleagues, interviewed others, and woven them together into a lively, informal word-picture of that exciting time. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Company, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket. 394 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1941, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, soiled dust jacket. Bright blue cloth covers with spine label. 257 pages. Frontispiece, 9 black and white illustrations. The Mysterious Science of Law was based on Boorstin's Yale SJD thesis. (He also held an Oxford BCL and was admitted to the Inner Temple.). It was the first of many important books by Boorstin, who went on to became a prominent historian and, from 1975 to 1987, Librarian of Congress. Appears to se SIGNED on the inside cover and dated Dec., 1941. Otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 362 pages. Hitler, Koonz says, understood the German people's need for a sense of coherence in the wake of what many saw as the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic--and 'he promised to rescue old-fashioned values of honor and dignity' by offering a secular faith to replace lost religious certainties. Koonz explores the promotion of these beliefs in German culture and law, and how they led to the catastrophe of the Holocaust, adding much to our understanding of how a civilized society could reach such infamous levels of violence. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pegasus Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. In 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years between, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors - notably English, Russian and American - attracted the talented, rich and famous as well as those who wanted to be. For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 368 pages. Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933) was an important and fascinating figure in German philosophy in the early twentieth century, founding the well-known journal Kantstudien. Yet he was overshadowed by the burgeoning movements of phenomenology and analytical philosophy, as well as hostility towards his work because of his defense of Jewish scholars in a Germany controlled by Nazism. However, it is widely acknowledged today that The Philosophy of 'As If' is a philosophical masterwork. Vaihinger argues that in face of an overwhelmingly complex world, we produce a simpler set of ideas, or idealizations, that help us negotiate it. When cast as fictions, such ideas provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects, from mathematics and physics to law and morality, than would the truth in all its complexity. Even in science, he wrote, we must proceed "as if" a material world exists independently of perceiving subjects; in behavior, we must act "as if" ethical certainty were possible; in religion, we must believe "as if" there were a God. He also explores the role of fictions in the history of philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks and the work of Leibniz, Adam Smith and Bentham. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1892, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers. Vol. 1: 586 pages. Vol. 2: 625 pages. Bright blue cloth covers with gilt lettering. An important historical work, including chapters on the Middlesex elections of 1768-69 (the first great platform campaign), the economy agitation, the legal position of the platform, the French Revolution agitation, Roman Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill, Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, accounts of notable libel and sedition trials, etc. Clean copies with light shelf wear.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st pbk., 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 265 pages. Drawing on hundreds of political economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline. In their view, France's moral, political, and economic power depended not simply on expanding the national wealth but also on reviving civic spirit. The "political economy of virtue" held that luxury was the cause of the nation's economic and moral degeneration. When the monarchy failed to reform its political economic structures in the 1760s and 1770s, mid-level elites sought to eliminate the stranglehold of the plutocracy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brick-red cloth, 477 pages, b&w illustrations. Offers an illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens. This work examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus. It demonstrates that classical Athens was more sexually polarized and repressive of women than any other culture in Western history. The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy. This is the first book to draw together all the elements that made up the "reign of the phallus"--Men's blatant claim to general dominance, the myths of rape and conquest of women, and the reduction of sex to a game of dominance and submission, both of women by men and of men by men. In her elegant and lucid text Eva Keuls not only examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus, but also uncovers an intense counter-movement--the earliest expressions of feminism and antimilitarism. Clean, bright copy, lacks dust jacket.

Hardcover. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 321pages, b&w illustrations. The Sharpeville Six were six South African protesters convicted of the murder of Deputy Mayor of Sharpeville, Kuzwayo Jacob Dlamini, and sentenced to death. On September 3, 1984, a protest march in Sharpeville turned violent (some of the crowd threw stones at Dlamimi's house, he responded by firing a gun and a riot ensued and the Deputy Mayor was murdered. Mojalefa Sefatsa, Theresa Ramashamola, Reid Mokoena, Oupa Diniso, Duma Khumalo and Francis Don Mokhesi were arrested in the following months, found guilty of murder under the "Common purpose" doctrine and sentenced to death by hanging on December 12, 1985. Christian Mokubung and Gideon Mokone were also sentenced to eight years in prison. All were represented by lawyer Prakash Diar, the author of this book.

Hardcover. Birmingham AL, The Legal Classics Library , reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, handsomely bound in black leather lettered and decorated in gilt, blind stamping, raised spine bands, all edges gilt, attached ribbon bookmarks, marbled endpapers. A compilation Pound's most influential works: The Spirit of the Common Law (1921), Law and Morals (1924), Interpretations of Legal History (1923) and "The Call For a Realist Jurisprudence" (1931). Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 5th pr., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 432 pages. INSCRIBED BY BORK on the title page, wishing someone success in his law career. A nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Bork writes about his social and legal philosophy in what is described on the front flap as "the definitive formulation of the wisdom and necessity of interpreting the Constitution according to the "original understanding" of the framers and the people for whom it was written." A brilliant argument for the wisdom and necessity of interpreting the Constitution according to the "original Understanding" of the Framers and the people for whom it was written. Illuminates the history of the Supreme Court and the underlying meaning of constitutional controversy. Relational between values and the law, concludes with a personal account of Judge Bork's chillingly emblematic experiences during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on his Supreme Court nomination. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Secker & Warburg, reprint, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a very worn, chipped dust jacket, 255 pages, fold-out chart in rear. A blow by blow account of the Mau Mau leader's trial that lasted for over 100 days, "one of the most dramatic and important this century". In 1952, Kenyatta was arrested in Kenya by the British colonial authorities and charged with masterminding the anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising. Although protesting his innocence, a view shared by later historians, he was convicted. He remained imprisoned at Lokitaung until 1959 and was then exiled to Lodwar until 1961. Appears to be a book club edition. Overall clean copy but cheap paper is tanning.

Hardcover. NY, Wiley, 2nd pr., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The long-awaited, untold, inside story of the rise of the legendary actor, singer, scholar, and activist. The first volume of this major biography breaks new ground. The greatest scholar-athlete-performing artist in U.S. history, Paul Robeson was one of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century.Now his son, Paul Robeson Jr., traces the dramatic arc of his rise to fame, painting a definitive picture of Paul Robeson's formative years. His father was an escaped slave; his mother, a descendent of freedmen; and his wife, the brilliant and ambitious Eslanda Cardozo Goode. With a law degree from Columbia University; a professional football career; title roles in Eugene O'Neill's plays and in Shakespeare's Othello; and a concert career in America and Europe, Robeson dominated his era. 383 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dow Jones & Co., 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 172 pages. Illustrated with 175 b/w cartoons. 'The Wall Street Journal Book of Business Cartoons is a collection of the funniest cartoons published in the nation's premier business and financial daily over the past 50 years. Along the way it's also a hilarious history of American business foibles during the past half century. It skewers everyone you've ever worked with -- your broker, accountant, banker, lawyer, doctor and secretary. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren was the most revolutionary and controversial Supreme Court in American history. But in what sense? Challenging the reigning consensus that the Warren Court, fundamentally, was protecting minorities, Lucas Powe revives the valuable tradition of looking at the Supreme Court in the wide political environment to find the Warren Court a functioning partner in Kennedy-Johnson liberalism. Thus the Court helped to impose national liberal-elite values on groups that were outliers to that tradition--the white South, rural America, and areas of Roman Catholic dominance. In a learned and lively narrative, Powe discusses over 200 significant rulings: the explosive Brown decision, which fundamentally challenged the Southern way of life; reapportionment (one person, one vote), which changed the political balance of American legislatures; the gradual elimination of anti-Communist domestic security programs; the reform of criminal procedures (Mapp, Gideon, Miranda); the ban on school-sponsored prayer; and a new law on pornography. Most of these decisions date from 1962, when those who shaped the dominant ideology of the Warren Court of storied fame gained a fifth secure liberal vote. The Justices of the majority were prominent individuals, brimming with confidence, willing to help shape a revolution and see if it would last. Clean copy.