LITMIR.BIZ

An introduction to the legal concept of unconstitutional bias. [b][/b]If a town council denies a zoning permit for a group home for intellectually disabled persons because residents don’t want “those kinds of people” in the neighborhood, the town’s decision is motivated by the public’s dislike of a particular group. Constitutional law calls this rationale “animus.” Over the last two decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly turned to the concept of animus to explain why some instances of discrimination are unconstitutional. However, the Court’s condemnation of animus fails to address some serious questions. How can animus on the part of people and institutions be uncovered? Does mere opposition to a particular group’s equality claims constitute animus? Does the concept of animus have roots in the Constitution? Animus engages these important questions, offering an original and provocative introduction to this type of unconstitutional bias. William Araiza analyzes some of the modern Supreme Court’s most important discrimination cases through the lens of animus, tracing the concept from nineteenth century legal doctrine to today’s landmark cases, including Obergefell vs. Hodges and United States v. Windsor, both related to the legal rights of same-sex couples. Animus humanizes what might otherwise be an abstract legal question, illustrating what constitutes animus, and why the prohibition against it matters more today than ever in our pluralistic society.

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The so-called vaccine court is a small special court in the United States Court of Federal Claims that handles controversial claims that a vaccine has harmed someone. While vaccines in general are extremely safe and effective, some people still suffer severe vaccine reactions and bring their claims to vaccine court. In this court, lawyers, activists, judges, doctors, and scientists come together, sometimes arguing bitterly, trying to figure out whether a vaccine really caused a person’s medical problem. In Vaccine Court, Anna Kirkland draws on the trials of the vaccine court to explore how legal institutions resolve complex scientific questions. What are vaccine injuries, and how do we come to recognize them? What does it mean to transform these questions into a legal problem and funnel them through a special national vaccine court, as we do in the U.S.? What does justice require for vaccine injury claims, and how can we deliver it? These are highly contested questions, and the terms in which they have been debated over the last forty years are highly revealing of deeper fissures in our society over motherhood, community, health, harm, and trust in authority. While many scholars argue that it’s foolish to let judges and lawyers decide medical claims about vaccines, Kirkland argues that our political and legal response to vaccine injury claims shows how well legal institutions can handle specialized scientific matters. Vaccine Court is an accessible and thorough account of what the vaccine court is, why we have it, and what it does.

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Answers the calls of grassroots communities pressing for integration and increased education funding with a complete rethinking of school discipline In the era of zero tolerance, we are flooded with stories about schools issuing draconian punishments for relatively innocent behavior. One student was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. Another was expelled for cursing on social media from home. Suspension and expulsion rates have doubled over the past three decades as zero tolerance policies have become the normal response to a host of minor infractions that extend well beyond just drugs and weapons. Students from all demographic groups have suffered, but minority and special needs students have suffered the most. On average, middle and high schools suspend one out of four African American students at least once a year. The effects of these policies are devastating. Just one suspension in the ninth grade doubles the likelihood that a student will drop out. Fifty percent of students who drop out are subsequently unemployed. Eighty percent of prisoners are high school drop outs. The risks associated with suspension and expulsion are so high that, as a practical matter, they amount to educational death penalties, not behavioral correction tools. Most important, punitive discipline policies undermine the quality of education that innocent bystanders receive as well—the exact opposite of what schools intend. Derek Black, a former attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, weaves stories about individual students, lessons from social science, and the outcomes of courts cases to unearth a shockingly irrational system of punishment. While schools and legislatures have proven unable and unwilling to amend their failing policies, Ending Zero Tolerance argues for constitutional protections to check abuses in school discipline and lays out theories by which courts should re-engage to enforce students’ rights and support broader reforms.

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A lively, up-to-date overview of the newest research in biosocial criminology What is the relationship between criminality and biology? Nineteenth-century phrenologists insisted that criminality was innate, inherent in the offender’s brain matter. While they were eventually repudiated as pseudo-scientists, today the pendulum has swung back. Both criminologists and biologists have begun to speak of a tantalizing but disturbing possibility: that criminality may be inherited as a set of genetic deficits that place one at risk to commit theft, violence, or acts of sexual deviance. But what do these new theories really assert? Are they as dangerous as their forerunners, which the Nazis and other eugenicists used to sterilize, incarcerate, and even execute thousands of supposed “born” criminals? How can we prepare for a future in which leaders may propose crime-control programs based on biology? In this second edition of The Criminal Brain, Nicole Rafter, Chad Posick, and Michael Rocque describe early biological theories of crime and provide a lively, up-to-date overview of the newest research in biosocial criminology. New chapters introduce the theories of the latter part of the 20th century; apply and critically assess current biosocial and evolutionary theories, the developments in neuro-imaging, and recent progressions in fields such as epigenetics; and finally, provide a vision for the future of criminology and crime policy from a biosocial perspective. The book is a careful, critical examination of each research approach and conclusion. Both compiling and analyzing the body of scholarship devoted to understanding the criminal brain, this volume serves as a condensed, accessible, and contemporary exploration of biological theories of crime and their everyday relevance.

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How the War on Drugs is maintained through racism,authority and public opinion. From the hit television series Breaking Bad, to daily news reports, anti-drug advertising campaigns and highly publicized world-wide hunts for “narcoterrorists” such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the drug, methamphetamine occupies a unique and important space in the public’s imagination. In Meth Wars, Travis Linnemann situates the «meth epidemic» within the broader culture and politics of drug control and mass incarceration. Linnemann draws together a range of examples and critical interdisciplinary scholarship to show how methamphetamine, and the drug war more generally, are part of a larger governing strategy that animates the politics of fear and insecurity and links seemingly unrelated concerns such as environmental dangers, the politics of immigration and national security, policing tactics, and terrorism. The author’s unique analysis presents a compelling case for how the supposed “meth epidemic” allows politicians, small town police and government counter-narcotics agents to engage in a singular policing project in service to the broader economic and geostrategic interests of the United States.

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Immigration and health care are hotly debated and contentious issues. Policies that relate to both issues—to the health of newcomers—often reflect misimpressions about immigrants, and their impact on health care systems. Despite the fact that immigrants are typically younger and healthier than natives, and that many immigrants play a vital role as care-givers in their new lands, native citizens are often reluctant to extend basic health care to immigrants, choosing instead to let them suffer, to let them die prematurely, or to expedite their return to their home lands. Likewise, many nations turn against immigrants when epidemics such as Ebola strike, under the false belief that native populations can be kept well only if immigrants are kept out. In The Health of Newcomers, Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet demonstrate how shortsighted and dangerous it is to craft health policy on the basis of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. Because health is a global public good and people benefit from the health of neighbor and stranger alike, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure the health of all. Drawing on rigorous legal and ethical arguments and empirical studies, as well as deeply personal stories of immigrant struggles, Illingworth and Parmet make the compelling case that global phenomena such as poverty, the medical brain drain, organ tourism, and climate change ought to inform the health policy we craft for newcomers and natives alike.Immigration and health care are hotly debated and contentious issues. Policies that relate to both issues—to the health of newcomers—often reflect misimpressions about immigrants, and their impact on health care systems. Despite the fact that immigrants are typically younger and healthier than natives, and that many immigrants play a vital role as care-givers in their new lands, native citizens are often reluctant to extend basic health care to immigrants, choosing instead to let them suffer, to let them die prematurely, or to expedite their return to their home lands. Likewise, many nations turn against immigrants when epidemics such as Ebola strike, under the false belief that native populations can be kept well only if immigrants are kept out. In The Health of Newcomers, Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet demonstrate how shortsighted and dangerous it is to craft health policy on the basis of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. Because health is a global public good and people benefit from the health of neighbor and stranger alike, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure the health of all. Drawing on rigorous legal and ethical arguments and empirical studies, as well as deeply personal stories of immigrant struggles, Illingworth and Parmet make the compelling case that global phenomena such as poverty, the medical brain drain, organ tourism, and climate change ought to inform the health policy we craft for newcomers and natives alike.

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The topic of American conservatism is especially timely—and perhaps volatile. Is there what might be termed an “exceptional” form of conservatism that is characteristically American, in contrast to conservatisms found in other countries? Are views that are identified in the United States as conservative necessarily congruent with what political theorists might classify under that label? Or does much American conservatism almost necessarily reflect the distinctly liberal background of American political thought? In American Conservatism, a distinguished group of American political and legal scholars reflect on these crucial questions, unpacking the very nature and development of American conservative thought. They examine both the historical and contemporary realities of arguments offered by self-conscious conservatives in the United States, offering a well-rounded view of the state of this field. In addition to synoptic overviews of the various dimensions of American conservative thought, specific attention is paid to such topics as American constitutionalism, the role of religion and religious institutions, and the particular impact of the late Leo Strauss on American thought and thinkers. Just as American conservatism includes a wide, and sometimes conflicting, group of thinkers, the essays in this volume themselves reflect differing and sometimes controversial assessments of the theorists under discussion.

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The U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay has become the symbol of an unprecedented detention system of global reach and immense power. Since the 9/11 attacks, the news has on an almost daily basis headlined stories of prisoners held indefinitely at Guantánamo without charge or trial, many of whom have been interrogated in violation of restrictions on torture and other abuse. These individuals, once labeled “enemy combatants” to eliminate legal restrictions on their treatment, have in numerous instances been subject to lawless renditions between prisons around the world. The lines between law enforcement and military action; crime and war; and the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of power have become dangerously blurred, and it is time to unpack the evolution and trajectory of these detentions to devise policies that restore the rule of law and due process. Obama’s Guantánamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison describes President Obama’s failure to close America’s enduring offshore detention center, as he had promised to do within his first year in office, and the costs of that failure for those imprisoned there. Like its predecessor, Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law, Obama’s Guantánamo consists of accounts from lawyers who have not only represented detainees, but also served as their main connection to the outside world. Their stories provide us with an accessible explanation of the forces at work in the detentions and place detainees’ stories in the larger context of America’s submission to fearmongering. These stories demonstrate all that is wrong with the prison and the importance of maintaining a commitment to human rights even in times of insecurity.

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South Los Angeles is often seen as ground zero for inter-racial conflict and violence in the United States. Since the 1940s, South LA has been predominantly a low-income African American neighborhood, and yet since the early 1990s Latino immigrants—mostly from Mexico and many undocumented—have moved in record numbers to the area. Given that more than a quarter million people live in South LA and that poverty rates exceed 30 percent, inter-racial conflict and violence surprises no one. The real question is: why hasn't there been more? Through vivid stories and interviews, The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules provides an answer to this question. Based on in-depth ethnographic field work collected when the author, Cid Martinez, lived and worked in schools in South Central, this study reveals the day-to-day ways in which vibrant social institutions in South LA— its churches, its local politicians, and even its gangs—have reduced conflict and kept violence to a level that is manageable for its residents. Martinez argues that inter-racial conflict has not been managed through any coalition between different groups, but rather that these institutions have allowed established African Americans and newcomer Latinos to co-exist through avoidance—an under-appreciated strategy for managing conflict that plays a crucial role in America's low-income communities. Ultimately, this book proposes a different understanding of how neighborhood institutions are able to mitigate conflict and violence through several community dimensions of informal social controls.

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