This collection contains books authored by Cardozo Law faculty, showcasing contributions to legal scholarship across a wide range of subjects.
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Just Interpretations : Law Between Ethics and Politics
Michel Rosenfeld
In pluralistic societies that lack common ethical, social, and political values, legal interpretation is constantly under siege. Just interpretations—that is, interpretations that reflect a shared vision of justice—may become just interpretations in the sense of mere interpretations, rooted in the orientations and interests of different groups. Confronting this crisis in legal interpretation, Just Interpretations offers a critical appraisal of the principal theoretical trends in contemporary American and European jurisprudence and proposes an alternative approach.
Michel Rosenfeld's critique focuses on neoformalism, pragmatism, discourse theory, and legal autopoiesis, and includes discussions of such authors as Habermas, Rorty, Posner, Luhmann, Dworkin, Fish, and Weinrib. To overcome the drawbacks of these theories, Rosenfeld elaborates a theory of "comprehensive pluralism," based on a substantive vision of pluralism. This approach, building on the insights of deconstruction, turns the fact of pluralism into a guiding normative imperative.
Just Interpretations will attract the attention of constitutional scholars, political scientists, and critical theorists, and will also address an interdisciplinary audience interested in texts, interpretations, and postmodern concerns with justice. -
The Vestal and the Fasces : Hegel, Lacan, Property, and the Feminine
Jeanne L. Schroeder
In this feminist exploration of the erotics of the marketplace, Hegel's notion of property and Lacan's idea of the phallus serve parallel functions in creating the subjectivity necessary for self-actualization. Subjectivity requires intersubjective relationships mediated through a regime of possessing, enjoying, and exchanging an object of desire. For Hegel, this regime is property; for Lacan, it is sexuality, symbolized by the Phallus, which we conflate with the male organ and the female body. Property law, in Jeanne Schroeder's account, is implicitly figured by similar anatomical metaphors for that which men wish to possess and that which women try to be and enjoy. This is reflected in imagery taken from ancient Rome—the axe and bundle of sticks known as the Fasces, and the virgin priestess called the Vestal. Schroeder traces the persistence of phallic metaphors in modern jurisprudence. Rejecting the dominant schools of legal feminism, she reconceptualizes property—the legal relationship as well as its not necessarily material object—as a necessary moment in the human struggle for love and recognition. The Feminine, for Schroeder, is the radical negativity at the heart of both Lacan's split subject and Hegel's concept of freedom. Feminine emancipation and private property are, therefore, equally necessary conditions for the actualization of the free individual and the just society. Feminist scholars, social theorists, political scientists, philosophers, and lawyers will find in Schroeder's analysis scintillating new perspectives on property theory and the feminine within the market and the law.
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The Logic of Subchapter K : a Conceptual Guide to the Taxation of Partnerships
Laura E. Cunningham and Noël B. Cunningham
The material avoids neither the hard questions nor the conceptual difficulties, leaving students with a firm understanding of partnership taxation. Each chapter begins with a basic explanation of the relevant provisions, and the roles that they play in the overall structure of Subchapter K. Includes an increasingly detailed discussion of the specific rules, including multiple illustrative examples. Each chapter builds on the earlier chapters, leading the student through Subchapter K's seamless web. For J.D. or graduate-level law school courses on partnership taxation.
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Law in the Courts of Love : Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences
Peter Goodrich
Law in the Courts of Love traces the literary history and diversity of past legal systems. These minor jurisprudences range from the spiritual laws of the courts of conscience to the code and judgements of love handed down by women's courts in medieval France. Peter Goodrich presents the 15th Century Courts of Love in Paris as one instance of an alternative jurisdiction drawn from the diversities of the legal and literary past. These studies trace certain boundaries of modern law and make up one of many forms of legal knowledge which escape today's vision of unitary law. Law in the Courts of Love shows how the historical diversity of forms and procedures of law can competently form the basis for critical revisions of contemporary legal doctrine and professional practice.
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The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case
David Rudenstine
This bold account provides an original perspective on one of the most significant legal struggles in American history: the Nixon administration's efforts to prohibit the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the 7,000-page, top-secret Pentagon Papers, which traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In his gripping account of this highly charged case, Rudenstine examines new evidence, raises difficult questions, and challenges conventional views of a historic moment.
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Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France
Richard H. Weisberg
The involvement of Vichy France with Nazi Germany's efforts to exterminate Europe's Jews has long been a source of debate and contention. At a time when France is taking more responsibility for its role in the deportation and murder of 75,000 of its Jewish citizens, Richard Weisberg here provides a comprehensive and devastating account of the French legal system's complicity with Hitler's genocidal campaign during the dark period known as Vichy. As in Germany, the exclusionary laws passed during the Vichy period formalized institutional anti-semitism. In Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, Weisberg pulls back the curtain on the ways in which the legal community responded to these laws. Private lawyers quickly absorbed the discourse of religious exclusion into the conventional legal framework, expanding the laws beyond their simple intentions, their literal sense, and even their German precedents. Anti-Jewish laws slipped easily and with little resistance into the legal canon and French lawyers often enlisted the laws as a means of career advancement. Examining the work of lawyers and judges, policy makers and administrators, prosecutors and defenders, reporters and academics, Weisberg reveals how legalized persecution actually operated on a practical level.
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Contemporary Halakhic Problem Volume 4
J. David Bleich
This series, an outstanding example of the traditional approach to the halakhah, deals with the application of Jewish law to contemporary social, political, technological and religious problems. Chapters in these volumes are devoted to questions of personal and social status, the State of Israel, the Sabbath and Holy Days, medical halakhah, education and business law. Major issues such as assisted procreation, abortion, fetal tissue research, the agunah problem, intermarriage, conversion, the role of the Bet Din, capital punishment, preemptive warfare and many, many more are analyzed in detail. Many of these topics have been matters of heated controversy within the Jewish community. The author, a distinguished talmudic scholar and halakhist, has culled relevant material from the vast responsa literature. He examines each question by carefully delineating the issues, showing the various positions taken by rabbinic scholars, clarifying areas of divergence and analyzing the reasons for disagreement. This work is an invaluable source book for all students of traditional Jewish law and practice.
This best-selling series has been universally acclaimed as a classic of its genre. A Jerusalem Post reviewer observed that it is "scholarly, lucid and good-tempered..Direct, comprehensive, realistic..enjoy this treasury of halakhic knowledge. -
Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law
Peter Goodrich
Oedipus Lex offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions—the poets, women, and outsiders—that legal science has left in its wake.
Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law. -
Elements of Law
Eva H. Hanks, Michael E. Herz, and Steven S. Nemerson
This casebook is ideal for any introduction to law or legal method course. It is designed to develop analytic, interpretive, and advocacy skills that will be helpful to students across the range of substantive courses, while also encouraging students to think critically about the judicial process and the role of judges in a democracy.
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Poethics, and Other Strategies of Law and Literature
Richard H. Weisberg
A pioneer of the the new law and literature movement narrates its central vision, which he calls poethics: the revival of jurisprudence through literary sources and techniques. He argues that lawyers, like novelists, must use language that is precise, passionate and real, in order to tell their stories clearly and persuasively.
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Cases and Materials on Civil Procedure
A. Leo Levin, Philip Shuchman, and Charles M. Yablon
This casebook covers major aspects of civil procedure. The author makes extensive use of empirical materials to illustrate the impact of procedural rules on actual cases. It is a broadly focused look at civil procedure including both state and federal practice.
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Affirmative Action and Justice : a Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry
Michel Rosenfeld
Affirmative action has been one of the most hotly debated issues in America. In the wake of numerous Supreme Court decisions on the subject, the ethical and constitutional controversy over affirmative action has recently intensified. The Court has neither clearly delineated the nature and scope of constitutionally permissible affirmative action plans nor articulated a coherent judicial philosophy to justify its seemingly incoherent decisions. Although philosophers and legal scholars have written extensively on affirmative action, where have been virtually no comprehensive attempts at interdisciplinary analysis. In this book Michel Rosenfeld provides such an analysis, critically examining the major existing philosophical and constitutional theories on affirmative action and elaborating a new theory that strongly defends the justice of affirmative action from the standpoint of both philosophy and constitutional law. Rosenfeld begins by discussing the treatment of affirmative action under each of the four major philosophical conceptions of equality consistent with the tenets of liberal political philosophy: libertarian, contractarian, utilitarian, and egalitarian. He then examines systematically the Supreme Court’s rulings on affirmative action in light of evolving conceptions of the constitutional right to equal protection. Finally, he presents his new theory. Drawing upon Kohlberg’s principle of justice as reversibility and upon Habermas’ theory of communicative ethics, Rosenfeld advocates adopting a principle that he calls “justice as reversible reciprocity” as the best means to integrate various relevant perspectives and to provide a unified philosophical and constitutional justification of affirmative action.
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Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks
Peter Goodrich
Languages of Law is an original and comprehensive study of the history, symbols and languages of the common law tradition. While the first part of this stimulating contribution to modern legal theory, 'Memory, Precedent and the Writing Systems of Law,' examines the technological, professional and polemical contexts of legal writing as a distinctive system of inscription and documentation, the second part of the text, 'Language, Image, Sign and Common Law' moves from historical to substantive analysis. The final chapters concentrate on the visual legitimacy and symbols of law, and advance an original theory of the acceptance of law as a question of the imagery and aesthetics of legal representation. This is a book for students of legal history, legal system and legal method, jurisprudence and sociology of law, and for students of the history of language.
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Contemporary Halakhic Problem Volume 3
J. David Bleich
This series, an outstanding example of the traditional approach to the halakhah, deals with the application of Jewish law to contemporary social, political, technological and religious problems. Chapters in these volumes are devoted to questions of personal and social status, the State of Israel, the Sabbath and Holy Days, medical halakhah, education and business law. Major issues such as assisted procreation, abortion, fetal tissue research, the agunah problem, intermarriage, conversion, the role of the Bet Din, capital punishment, preemptive warfare and many, many more are analyzed in detail. Many of these topics have been matters of heated controversy within the Jewish community. The author, a distinguished talmudic scholar and halakhist, has culled relevant material from the vast responsa literature. He examines each question by carefully delineating the issues, showing the various positions taken by rabbinic scholars, clarifying areas of divergence and analyzing the reasons for disagreement. This work is an invaluable source book for all students of traditional Jewish law and practice.
This best-selling series has been universally acclaimed as a classic of its genre. A Jerusalem Post reviewer observed that it is scholarly, lucid and good-tempered.....Direct, comprehensive, realistic.....enjoy this treasury of halakhic knowledge. -
Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Peter Goodrich
Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sign are examined and assessed. In the second part the contemporary disciples of linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies are brought to bear upon the task of constructing a theory of legal discourse as a linguistics of legal power.
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Women's Legal Rights : International Covenants an Alternative to ERA?
Malvina Halberstam and Elizabeth F. DeFeis
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Reading the Law : a Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Techniques
Peter Goodrich
"Reading the Law" is a contemporary interdisciplinary introduction to the study of law. Drawing on historical, lingusitic, sociological and philosphical materials, it provides the tools for a literary criticism of the subject. Moreover, in addressing the question of how lawyers and students read the texts of the legal tradition, it provides a general and critical introduction to the law and to the significance of the legal discipline.
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The Failure of the Word : the Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction
Richard H. Weisberg
The cruel power of misdirected words, artfully structured but spiritually empty and bearing the stamp of law or legalistic reasoning, is a persistent theme in the modern novel. Richard Weisberg, who has written extensively on both literature and law, explores the role of legalism and its abuses in eight major novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with Dostoevski and moving by way of trenchant analyses of Flaubert and Camus, Weisberg culminates his argument in a brilliantly revisionist reading of Melville’s Billy Budd. In each of the novels treated, Weisberg sees a verbally gifted central character relying on wordiness to avoid or distort previously revealed truths. He argues that the malaise Nietzsche called ressentiment goads these characters to verbalizations that do violence to others and, ironically, indict their very creators. He identifies the legalistic theme as the major mode of iconoclasm in modern fiction and the source of its holocaustic vision. Writers, he reflects, viewed with profound skepticism their culture’s tendency to substitute complex narrative formalism for earlier, absolute approaches to justice. In this, Weisberg concludes, their works anticipated the jurisprudential discourse of today.
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Contemporary Halakhic Problem Volume 2
J. David Bleich
This series, an outstanding example of the traditional approach to the halakhah, deals with the application of Jewish law to contemporary social, political, technological and religious problems. Chapters in these volumes are devoted to questions of personal and social status, the State of Israel, the Sabbath and Holy Days, medical halakhah, education and business law. Major issues such as assisted procreation, abortion, fetal tissue research, the agunah problem, intermarriage, conversion, the role of the Bet Din, capital punishment, preemptive warfare and many, many more are analyzed in detail. Many of these topics have been matters of heated controversy within the Jewish community. The author, a distinguished talmudic scholar and halakhist, has culled relevant material from the vast responsa literature. He examines each question by carefully delineating the issues, showing the various positions taken by rabbinic scholars, clarifying areas of divergence and analyzing the reasons for disagreement. This work is an invaluable source book for all students of traditional Jewish law and practice. This best-selling series has been universally acclaimed as a classic of its genre. A Jerusalem Post reviewer observed that it is scholarly, lucid and good-tempered.....Direct, comprehensive, realistic.....enjoy this treasury of halakhic knowledge.
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Bircas Hachammah : Blessing of the Sun-Renewal of Creation
J. David Bleich
Every twenty-eight years, for a few hours on a Wednesday morning in April, throngs of Jews fill streets, sidewalks, rooftops and parks for the most infrequent ritual in Judaism the Blessing of the Sun. The ancient rite marks the return of the sun to the exact place it occupied on the fourth day of Creation on the same day and at the same hour that the sun began to shine in the primordial heavens.
Questions about Bircas HaChammah abound. How is the 28-year cycle, which is not at all discernible to the naked eye, calculated? Was it known to the ancients? How do Jews reconcile the solar and lunar calendars? What are the appropriate prayers for this rare event, and what do they mean? What is the underlying spiritual message of the practice?
Bircas HaChammah: Blessing of the Sun-Renewal of Creation tackles these questions and more. The book also features the complete prayer service for the Blessing of the Sun, along with translation and commentary.
Author and renowned scholar Rabbi J. David Bleich brings to the book his boundless knowledge of the subject matter and his familiarity with the entire corpus of rabbinic literature -- including many rare works that have long been out of print related to the topic.
The result is a masterful treatment of a little-known ritual that nonetheless bears profound significance for the many who believe that there is a Creator who preserves and renews His universe.
