Recent Books by UB Law Faculty Members
The UB Law bookshelf
Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine
By Associate Professor Irus Braverman
(Cambridge University Press)
The significance of trees – the pine forests of the Promised Land of Israel, and the olive trees that Palestinians identify as a symbol of their connection to the land – is at the heart of this exploration of law, landscape and ethnic conflict.
What is it, Braverman asks, that makes the acts of planting, cultivating and uprooting trees into acts of war? How does the polarization of the "natural" landscape reflect and reinforce hostility between Israelis and Palestinians? And what role does law play in this story?
The author, who holds Master of Arts and bachelor of laws degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, uses the techniques of ethnography in Planted Flags. She tells the story of trees through the narratives of military and government officials, architects, lawyers, Palestinian and Israeli farmers, and Jewish settlers.
Fault Lines: Tort Law and Cultural Practice
Edited by Professor David Engel (with Michael McCann)
(Stanford University Press)
Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation and obligation.
Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, Fault Lines compares tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe and Asia in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science and anthropology to offer an interdisciplinary look at a heretofore under examined area of tort law. Ultimately, the book demonstrates, tort law nests within a larger web of relationships and shared conventions that organize social life.
Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law
By Professor Charles Patrick Ewing
(Oxford University Press)
One of the nation's leading experts on the insanity defense, Ewing here conveys the psychological and legal drama of 10 landmark insanity cases. His case studies include "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz; John Gacy, who killed at least 30 boys and young men in Chicago; Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin; and Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in the family's bathtub.
The book also debunks myths of popular opinion regarding the insanity defense. "In those rare instances in which a defendant is actually found insane, the public is usually outraged," Ewing says. "In homicide cases especially, they believe that the defendant 'got away with murder.'" In reality, he says, "the defense is rarely raised, rarely applicable and even more rarely successful. And when it does succeed, the defendant usually loses his or her liberty for many years, sometimes for life."
What Are Campaigns For? The Role of Persuasion in Electoral Law and Politics
By Professor James Gardner, vice dean for academic affairs
(University of Chicago Press)
For citizens of a democracy, an election is a time to take stock – to re-examine our beliefs; to review our understanding of our own interests; to ponder the place of those interests in the larger social order; and to contemplate our understanding of how our commitments are best translated into governmental policy – or so we profess to believe. But theory and reality diverge, and the typical modern American election campaign seems crass, shallow and unengaging.
What Are Campaigns For? is a multidisciplinary work of legal scholarship that looks at how legal institutions help to create this disjunction between political ideal and reality. Gardner's book explores the contemporary American ideal of democratic citizenship in election campaigns by tracing it to its historical sources, documenting its thorough infiltration of legal norms, evaluating its feasibility in light of the findings of the social sciences, and testing it against the requirements of democratic theory.
Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession
Edited by Professor Lynn Mather (with Robert Granfield)
(Oxford University Press)
This collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field examines the history, conditions, organization and strategies of pro bono lawyering.
Private Lawyers and the Public Interest traces the rise and impact of the American Bar Association's campaign to hold lawyers accountable for a commitment to public service and to encourage public service within law schools. Combining empirical legal research with reflections by practitioners and theorists about the meaning and practice of pro bono legal work, these essays examine the public service ideals of the legal profession and place these ideals within a broader social, economic and ideological context.
These essays investigate the evolving role of pro bono in the legal profession and in law schools, the relationship between pro bono ideals and pro bono in practice, the way that pro bono is shaped by external forces beyond the individual practitioner, and the multifaceted nature of legal professionalism as expressed through pro bono practice.
Recent articles by UB Law faculty members
Associate Professor Mark Bartholomew, "Advertising and the Transformation of Trademark Law"(New Mexico Law Review, Vol. 38).
Looking at the formative era in American trademark law, Bartholomew finds that courts granted robust legal protection to trademark holders in the early 20th century because they accepted the benign view of advertising presented to them by advertisers, and that judges adopted a specific construction of the consumer mind in the early 1900s to reconcile the tension between legal protection for trademark goodwill and belief in free competition.
UB Distinguished Professor Guyora Binder, "The Culpability of Felony Murder"(Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 83).
Binder defends the much-maligned felony murder doctrine, saying that the theory of culpability assesses blame for harm on the basis of the actor's expectation of causing harm, and the moral worth of the ends for which the actor imposes this risk.
Associate Professor Irus Braverman, "Planting the Promised Landscape" (Natural Resources Journal, Spring 2009).
Braverman analyzes the use of natural resource laws and policies to simultaneously conduct and mask political conflict, with particular focus on the battle over pine versus olive forests in Israel/Palestine.
Joseph Belluck and Laura Aswad Professor of Civil Justice and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs James A. Gardner, "In Search of Sub- National Constitutionalism" (4 European Constitutional Law Review).
Gardner examines such issues as federalism as a consequence of local/cultural self determination; the degree of autonomous human rights protection on a subnational level; and how the rise of international human rights protection makes subnational human rights protection less important.
Distinguished Professor Alfred S. Konefsky, "The Legal Profession: From the Revolution to the Civil War" in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. 2.
As part of "the most comprehensive and authoritative account possible of the history of American law, "Konefsky writes a history of the legal profession in the nation's formative years.
Professor and Vice Dean for Research and Faculty Development Errol Meidinger, "Competitive Supragovernmental Regulation: How Could It Be Democratic?"(Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 8).
Meidinger says an emerging mode of transnational governance may also be generating a novel form of democracy, in which competing regulatory programs aim to anticipate emergent public values and institute regulatory mechanisms to implement them, thereby advancing their own authority.
Professor Athena D. Mutua, "Restoring Justice to Civil Rights Movement Activists?: New Historiography and the 'Long Civil Rights Era'" (Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 2008-12).
Mutua asks, What do participants in the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project mean when they talk about the civil rights era? and argues for a richer and more diverse story of the civil rights movement in America.
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Dean Makau W. Mutua, "Human Rights and Powerlessness: Pathologies of Choice and Substance"(56 Buffalo Law Review).
Mutua argues for a wider vision of human rights law and the role of the state in advancing such law, saying, "The human rights regime appears to be more concerned with certain forms of human powerlessness, and not others."
Professor Robert I. Reis, "Rights and Remedies Post eBay v. MercExchange – Deep Waters Stirred"(Akron Intellectual Property Journal, Vol. 2).
Analyzing the 2006 Supreme Court decision on patent infringement, Reis asks why the court distinguished between rights and remedies in this case and asks, "Is this potentially a line in the sand drawn by the court based on their constitutional obligations under separation of powers?"
Associate Professor Rick Su, "A Localist Reading of Local Immigration Regulations"(North Carolina Law Review, Vol. 86).
Su debunks the idea that immigration restrictions at the local level are a new development, saying that local immigration regulations "reflect a natural extension of how we've traditionally used legal rules to organize our local communities to deal with demographic and socioeconomic diversity and change."
Associate Professor Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, "Religion Naturalized:The New Establishment"in Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen, eds., After Pluralism (Columbia).
Sullivan's book chapter explores the idea that a new naturalization of religion is present in U. S. legal contexts. Moving beyond church-state separation, she writes, "There are no churches left to establish or to disestablish. In their place, the human, every human, is now imagined by law as being in need of spiritual care."
Associate Professor Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, "Outsourcing Sacrifice: The Labor of Private Military Contractors"(New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy).
Taussig-Rubbo notes the tenuous legal position of armed private military contractors, and argues that the emergence of the contractor is an effort by U. S. officials to avoid the political liability entailed in calling a loss a sacrifice.
Associate Professor Ruqaiijah Yearby, "Striving for Equality, But Settling for the Status Quo in Health Care: Is Title VI More Illusory Than Real?"(Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 59).
Title VI, part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs receiving federal financial assistance. But Yearby finds evidence of unequal treatment in such measures as delay of transfer from hospitals to nursing homes, denials of admission to nursing homes, and disproportionate populations of African- Americans in nursing homes providing substandard care.