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Terminal city: a novel
No full textWhen the body of a young woman is found in the tower suite of the Waldorf Astoria--one of the most prestigious hotels in Manhattan--Assistant DA Alex Cooper and Detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace find themselves hunting for an elusive killer whose only signature is carving a carefully drawn symbol into his victims\u27 bodies, a symbol that bears a striking resemblance to train tracks. When a second body bearing the same bloody symbol is discovered in a deserted alleyway right next to the Grand Central terminal building, all attention shifts to the iconic transportation hub, where the potential for a bigger attack weighs heavily on everyone\u27s minds --from publisher\u27s descriptionhttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2015/1007/thumbnail.jp
Law, Religion, and Kissing Your Sister
No full textThere is an enormous scholarly literature on law\u27s treatment of religion. Most scholars now recognize that although the U.S. Supreme Court has not offered a consistent interpretation of what “non-establishment” or religious freedom means, as a general matter it can be said that the First Amendment requires that government not give preference to one religion over another or, although this is more controversial, to religion over non-belief. But these rules raise questions that will be addressed in Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Namely, what practices constitute a “religious activity” such that it cannot be supported or funded by government? And what is a religion, anyway? How should law understand matters of faith and accommodate religious practices?https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_bookchapter/1046/thumbnail.jp
Comment on Chapter 4: Anonymity, Signaling, and Silence as Speech
No full textRather than abstract philosophical discussion or yet another analysis of legal doctrine, Speech and Silence in American Law seeks to situate speech and silence, locating them in particular circumstances and contexts and asking how context matters in facilitating speech or demanding silence. To understand speech and silence we have to inquire into their social life and examine the occasions and practices that call them forth and that give them meaning. Among the questions addressed in this book are, Who is authorized to speak? And what are the conditions that should be attached to the speaking subject? Are there occasions that call for speech and others that demand silence? What is the relationship between the speech act and the speaker? Taking these questions into account helps readers understand what compels speakers and what problems accompany speech without a known speaker, allowing us to assess how silence speaks and how speech renders the silent more knowable.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_bookchapter/1041/thumbnail.jp
Commentary: A Record but No Truth? Recording and Re-recording Trauma in the Real-Life Struggle for Civil Rights
No full textIn Knowing the Suffering of Others, legal scholar Austin Sarat brings together essays that address suffering as it relates to the law, highlighting the ways law imagines suffering and how pain and suffering become jurisprudential facts.From fetal imaging to end-of-life decisions, torts to international human rights, domestic violence to torture, and the law of war to victim impact statements, the law is awash in epistemological and ethical problems associated with knowing and imagining suffering. In each of these domains we might ask: How well do legal actors perceive and understand suffering in such varied domains of legal life? What problems of representation and interpretation bedevil efforts to grasp the suffering of others? What historical, political, literary, cultural, and/or theological resources can legal actors and citizens draw on to understand the suffering of others?In Knowing the Suffering of Others, Austin Sarat presents legal scholarship that explores these questions and puts the problem of suffering at the center of thinking about law. The contributors to this volume do not regard pain and suffering as objective facts of a universe remote from law; rather they examine how both are discursively constructed in and by law. They examine how pain and suffering help construct and give meaning to the law as we know it. The authors attend to the various ways suffering appears in law as well as the different forms of suffering that require the law’s attention.Throughout this book law is regarded as a domain in which the meanings of pain and suffering are contested, and constituted, as well as an instrument for inflicting suffering or for providing or refusing its relief. It challenges scholars, lawyers, students, and policymakers to ask how various legal actors and audiences understand the suffering of others.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_bookchapter/1049/thumbnail.jp
Hate Speech in Cyberspace
Get PDFCoauthored with Jean Stefancic Hate Speech in Cyberspace analyzes why hate speech and other expressions of contempt are so ubiquitous on the Internet Building on our previous work on hate speech we identify features of cyberspace that predispose users to communicate in this fashion and suggest a number of remedie
The Unitary Executive and the Plural Judiciary: On the Potential Virtues of Decentralized Judicial Power
Get PDFThe federal judiciary features a highly decentralized system of courts. The Supreme Court of the United States reviews only a few dozen cases each year. Meanwhile, regional U.S. courts of appeals operate independently of each other; district courts further divide and separate the exercise of federal judicial power. The role of the state courts in enforcing federal law further subdivides responsibility for the adjudication of federal law claims. Indeed, the Office of Chief Justice itself incorporates and reflects this vesting of the judicial power of the United States exclusively in collegial institutions-literally in a multiplicity of hands-effectively precluding its unilateral or precipitate exercise by a single person. The standard narrative posits that the radically decentralized nature of federal judicial power is a vice, rather than a virtue, because it renders federal law, including constitutional law, non-uniform based solely on the accident of geography.
This Article challenges the received wisdom, contending that the radical division of judicial authority makes perfect sense. Consensus among the disparate federal courts serves as a highly valuable means of legitimating the exercise of judicial review (notwithstanding the lack of a democratic mandate). The creation and maintenance of a highly decentralized system of federal and state courts exists by design, not accident. Greater centralization of judicial power easily could be achieved, yet we should think twice before abandoning our present system precisely because decentralized judicial deliberation improves and enhances the process of resolving difficult questions of fundamental importance. We should not reflexively accede to the suzerainty of uniformity as the paramount value in judicial decision making; instead, we must carefully consider the potential benefits associated with decentralizing judicial power by denying any one person-or juridical body-the exclusive power to exercise [t]he judicial Power of the United States
Two Models of Unpatentable Subject Matter
Get PDFPatentable subject matter has become one of the most controversial areas of patent law Efforts to articulate a lucid and productive theory of patentable subject matter must acknowledge that there are two competing models of unpatentable subject matter One posits that natural laws natural phenomena and abstract ideas are themselves ineligible for patenting and that each example of a natural law natural phenomenon or abstract idea further defines a class of inventions that cannot be patented because they lack an additional element of ingenuity ” or inventive concept ” that sufficiently distinguishes those inventions from their natural counterparts This penumbral model of unpatentable subject matter mirrors the statutory structure of anticipation and obviousness The competing binary model of unpatentable subject matter posits that one must only apply a natural law natural phenomenon or abstract idea in a useful manner in order to have a patenteligible invention Potential versus application is an eitheror proposition Recent attempts to achieve synthesis have adopted the penumbral model However the shadows and degrees of the penumbral model are an uncomfortable fit for the subjectmatter inquiry Particularly in the case of natural laws treating newly discovered principles as a given or as a baseline to which one must add a further inventive concept threatens to overlook the true nature of invention as well as valuable contributions to the technological arts Here at least the binary model is in need of revival and reaffirmatio
The keeper: a novel
No full textOn the evening before Thanksgiving, Hal Chase, a guard in the San Francisco County Jail, drives to the airport to pick up his step-brother for the weekend. When they return, Hal\u27s wife, Katie, has disappeared without a clue. By the time Dismas Hardy hears about this, Katie has been missing for five days. The case strikes close to home because Katie had been seeing Hardy\u27s wife, a marriage counselor. By this time, the original Missing Persons case has become a suspected homicide, and Hal is the prime suspect. And the lawyer he wants for his defense is none other than Hardy himself. Hardy calls on his friend, former homicide detective Abe Glitsky, to look into the case. At first it seems like the police might have it right the Chases\u27 marriage was fraught with problems Hal\u27s alibi is suspect the life insurance policy on Katie was huge. But Glitsky\u27s mission is to identify other possible suspects, and there proves to be no shortage of them: Patti Orosco--rich, beautiful, dangerous, and Hal\u27s former lover the still unknown person who had a recent affair with Katie even Hal\u27s own step-mother Ruth, resentful of Katie\u27s gatekeeping against her grandchildren. And as Glitsky probes further, he learns of an incident at the San Francisco jail, where Hal works--only one of many questionable inmate deaths that have taken place there. Then, when Katie\u27s body is found not three blocks from the Chase home, Homicide arrests Hal and he finds himself an inmate in the very jail where he used to work, a place full of secrets he knows all too well. Against this backdrop of conspiracy and corruption, ambiguous motives and suspicious alibis, an obsessed Glitsky closes in on the elusive truth. As other deaths begin to pile up he realizes, perhaps too late, that the next victim might be himself -- from publisher\u27s web sitehttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2015/1011/thumbnail.jp
My sister\u27s grave
No full textSeattle police officer Tracy Crosswhite lost her sister Sarah over 20 years ago, and she has never forgiven herself. With no corpse discovered, there was still enough evidence to convict the man thought responsible for Sarah\u27s disappearance. Now a body has been found and Tracy learns the remains are of her sister. Tracy has had her doubts about the guilt of the man behind bars, and she\u27s absolutely sure there is a murderer still loosehttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2015/1005/thumbnail.jp
