Director Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics and Roy L Furman Professorship of Law Lawrence Lessig's Books

Republic

How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It

By: Director Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics and Roy L Furman Professorship of Law Lawrence Lessig

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Republic

How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It

By: Director Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics and Roy L Furman Professorship of Law Lawrence Lessig

A Harvard Law professor explains how being influenced by money overshadows the will of the people in the political arena regardless of party lines and offers strategies to take back the democracy from those with moneyed or corporate interests.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

238

Published Date

ISBN 10

1609417372

ISBN 13

9781609417376

Free Culture

How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity

By: Lawrence Lessig

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Free Culture

How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity

By: Lawrence Lessig

From "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), a landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind. Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation. All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten? Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can't do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom-freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

374

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1594200068

ISBN 13

9781594200069

Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict

By: Cass R. Sunstein Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Center on Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe University of Chicago

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict

By: Cass R. Sunstein Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Center on Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe University of Chicago

The most glamorous and even glorious moments in a legal system come when a high court recognizes an abstract principle involving, for example, human liberty or equality. Indeed, Americans, and not a few non-Americans, have been greatly stirred--and divided--by the opinions of the Supreme Court, especially in the area of race relations, where the Court has tried to revolutionize American society. But these stirring decisions are aberrations, says Cass R. Sunstein, and perhaps thankfully so. In Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, Sunstein, one of America's best known commentators on our legal system, offers a bold, new thesis about how the law should work in America, arguing that the courts best enable people to live together, despite their diversity, by resolving particular cases without taking sides in broader, more abstract conflicts. Sunstein offers a close analysis of the way the law can mediate disputes in a diverse society, examining how the law works in practical terms, and showing that, to arrive at workable, practical solutions, judges must avoid broad, abstract reasoning. Why? For one thing, critics and adversaries who would never agree on fundamental ideals are often willing to accept the concrete details of a particular decision. Likewise, a plea bargain for someone caught exceeding the speed limit need not--indeed, must not--delve into sweeping issues of government regulation and personal liberty. Thus judges purposely limit the scope of their decisions to avoid reopening large-scale controversies. Sunstein calls such actions incompletely theorized agreements. In identifying them as the core feature of legal reasoning--and as a central part of constitutional thinking in America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe-- he takes issue with advocates of comprehensive theories and systemization, from Robert Bork (who champions the original understanding of the Constitution) to Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Ronald Dworkin, who defends an ambitious role for courts in the elaboration of rights. Equally important, Sunstein goes on to argue that it is the living practice of the nation's citizens that truly makes law. For example, he cites Griswold v. Connecticut, a groundbreaking case in which the Supreme Court struck down Connecticut's restrictions on the use of contraceptives by married couples--a law that was no longer enforced by prosecutors. In overturning the legislation, the Court invoked the abstract right of privacy; the author asserts that the justices should have appealed to the narrower principle that citizens need not comply with laws that lack real enforcement. By avoiding large-scale issues and values, such a decision could have led to a different outcome in Bowers v. Hardwick, the decision that upheld Georgia's rarely prosecuted ban on sodomy. And by pointing to the need for flexibility over time and circumstances, Sunstein offers a novel understanding of the old ideal of the rule of law. Legal reasoning can seem impenetrable, mysterious, baroque. This book helps dissolve the mystery. Whether discussing the interpretation of the Constitution or the spell cast by the revolutionary Warren Court, Cass Sunstein writes with grace and power, offering a striking and original vision of the role of the law in a diverse society. In his flexible, practical approach to legal reasoning, he moves the debate over fundamental values and principles out of the courts and back to its rightful place in a democratic state: the legislatures elected by the people.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

238

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198026099

ISBN 13

9780198026099

Book's by Director Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics and Roy L Furman Professorship of Law Lawrence Lessig

Republic

Republic

Free Culture

Free Culture

Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict

Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email