"Honorable Mention for the 2000 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Government and Political Science, Association of American Publishers" Gary Jonathan Bass is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He worked as a Washington reporter and West Coast correspondent for The Economist, for which he wrote extensively on the former Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal. Bass has also written for The New York...

"In The Line Through the Heart, popular philosopher J. Budziszewski threads a path between these various abysses. Among his questions are how the knowledge of good is related to the knowledge of God, how things that seem to run against the grain of human nature can become "second nature", and whether natural law can be reconciled with Darwinian evolution. Turning to politics, he takes up such topics as who counts as a human person, whether human dignity...

Previous editions : 1988 (3rd) ; and 1994 (4th).

From "the most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years" (Bill Moyers), a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of justice that has emerged in America From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of...

"There are few intellectual movements in American political history more successful than the Federalist Society. Created in 1982 to counterbalance what its founders considered a liberal legal establishment, the organization has now become the conservative legal establishment, and membership is all but required for any conservative lawyer who hopes to enter politics or the judiciary. It can claim 40,000 members, including four Supreme Court Justices,...

"Drawing from extensive research into the writings of judges and scholar, Brian Tamanaha shows how, over the past century and a half, jurists have regularly expressed a balanced view of judging that acknowledges the limitations of law and of judges, yet recognizes that judges can and do render rule-bound decisions. He reveals how the story about the formalist age was an invention of politically motivated critics of the courts, and how it has led to...

Over the last thirty years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the...

"[This guide] offers a penetrating and irreverent account of the justices--ideologues and cowards, geniuses and mediocrities, all of them thoroughly human--and a fascinating analysis of a Court that has swung like a pendulum from preserving the Republic to undermining government by the people and back to defending the Constitution. Sprightly, informative, and powerfully argued, this book is guaranteed to give the reader a deeper understanding of America's...

Judge Posner surveys the history and theory of American electoral law and practice, analyzes which Presidential candidate "really" won the popular vote in Florida, surveys the litigation that ensued, evaluates the courts, the lawyers, and the commentators, and ends with a blueprint for reforming our Presidential electoral practices.

"Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of Sao Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence. James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states - one that is universally inclusive in national membership and...