Through extensive neighborhood interviews and a compelling assessment of the problems of unraveling communities in urban America, Harold McDougall reveals how, in sections of Baltimore, a "New Community" is developing. Relying more on vernacular culture, personal networking, and mutual support than on private wealth or public subsidy, the communities of black Baltimore provide an example of self-help and civic action that could and should be occurring in other inner-city areas. In this political history of Old West Baltimore, McDougall describes how "base communities"—small peer groups that share similar views, circumstances, and objectives—have helped neighborhoods respond to the failure of both government and the market to create conditions for a decent quality of life for all. Arguing for the primacy of church leadership within the black community, the author describes how these small, flexible groups are creating the foundation of what he calls a New Community, where community-spirited organizers, clergy, public interest advocates, business people, and government workers interact and build relationships through which Baltimore's urban agenda is being developed.
AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA: A HISTORY AND A HANDBOOK, by Prof. Harold McDougall of the Howard University School of Law is a look at some of the remaining trouble spots in black-white relations in the United States today, with the benefit of the Obama Administration's first year in office as a backdrop. The book begins with racial profiling, a topic particularly charged as a consequence of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates' arrest in his own home, for disorderly conduct, by Cambridge, Massachusetts police. Other trouble spots include hate crimes, discrimination against consumers, employment discrimination, voting rights, housing discrimination and discrimination in public education.
Jurisprudence For a Free Society" is a remarkable contribution to legal theory. In its comprehensiveness and systematic elaboration, it stands among the major theories. It is also the most important jurisprudential statement to emerge in the post-war period. The pioneering work of Lasswell and McDougal on law and policy is already legendary. Most of the work produced by these scholars together and in collaboration with their students represent applications of their basic theory to a wide assortment of international and national legal and policy problems. Now, for the first time, the authoritative statement of their legal philosophy appears as a single volume. In Part I the authors develop their fundamental criteria for a theory about law, including the requirements of clarifying observational standpoint, focus of inquiry and the pertinent intellectual tasks incumbent on the scholar and decisionmaker for determining and achieving common interests. Trends in theories about law, including Natural Law, the Historical School, Positivism, the Sociological Study of Law, American Legal Realism and other contemporary theories, are explored for what they might contribute to the achievement to the authors' conception of an adequate jurisprudence. In Part II, the social process as a whole and the particular value-institutional processes that comprise it are described and analyzed. Because people establish, maintain and change institutions, the dynamics of personality and personality's relation to law is delineated. Part III explores the intellectual tasks of policy thinking, from clarification of values, through description of trend, the scientific examination of conditions, projection of futuredevelopments and the invention of alternatives. Part IV examines the structure of decision in a free society, a society in which the achievement of human dignity is confirmed in both word and deed. Six appendices bring together monographs by the authors over a period of forty years which deal, in more detail, with particular matters treated in the body of the book.
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