New Books

From 2019, various surveys have shown a sustained increase in gun ownership in the United States. Estimates of new, first time gun owners range from 7.5 million to about 15 million; almost 5% of the U.S. population. There is an immediate need for each of these new gun owners to be educated on the issues of proper storage, the need for training to become proficient with the weapon, and a clear understanding of the legal and ethical issues surrounding self defense.

The book analyzes the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings in cases concerning surveillance, both domestic and foreign intelligence, focusing on how judicial activism or judicial restraint has legitimized the almost uncontrolled surveillance of American citizens by government agencies. The purpose of the research is to examine the judiciary's impact on the scope of government surveillance and, more broadly, on the state of American democracy and the rule of law. By reviewing the most important SCOTUS opinions on surveillance and applying the famous "legitimate end" approach from McCulloch v. Maryland, the author determines which values have prevailed in the judicial interpretation of the Constitution: security or freedom. Furthermore, the book evaluates the legal and political arguments used by the Court to justify broad surveillance measures, including the national security paradigm and secrecy, which have strengthened the executive branch's position in the U.S. governmental system.

As researchers tried to prompt his mother to say that her ancestors lived in wigwams or teepees, Matthew L. M. Fletcher's mother insisted her ancestors lived in stick houses. From the opening lines of Fletcher's story collection, he sets the scene to disrupt narrative stereotypes and expectations about how Indigenous people are perceived. He provides insight into the complex world in which Anishinaabe people live, stripped of the ownership of much of their homeland. In Stick Houses, Fletcher explores what this loss of place has meant to the Anishinaabe people of Michigan. It explores how they must leave and come back. There is dispossession and separation, but there is also reunion and restoration.  These stories explore themes of home and belonging, and how Native people are not just one thing; they are both Native and non-Native blood. Some are deeply connected to their Anishinaabe heritage, while others have suffered a complete loss of their culture. Many Native people are conflicted about their background and suffer intergenerational trauma. These stories originate in dynamic environments and situations such as airports, college, Indian lawyering, and high school baseball games.

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies."--The Wall Street Journal From the Palantir co-founder, one of tech's boldest thinkers and The Economist's "best CEO of 2024," and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology's potential in Silicon Valley have made the U.S. vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats. "Not since Allan Bloom's astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind--more than one million copies sold--has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp's."--George F. Will, The Washington Post Silicon Valley has lost its way. Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West's dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions. Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling. In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge--and preserve the freedoms we take for granted--the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley's success. Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance. At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.

This clearly written treatise is designed to make the complex subject of corporate taxation very accessible. It uses straightforward language, charts, checklists, diagrams, and numerous examples to aid readers' comprehension and retention of the material. Understanding Corporate Taxation also includes discussion of relevant cases. It is designed to supplement any corporate tax casebook or to be used on its own. This fifth edition is fully updated for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022's excise tax on stock buybacks and the new corporate alternative minimum tax (the "CAMT") contained in the Act. This edition also contains additional diagrams. The book starts with an introductory chapter that discusses the choice of business form; details the idea that corporate profits generally are subject to double taxation (once at the corporate level and again at the shareholder level); introduces the Qualified Business Income deduction; and discusses the basics of anti-abuse rules, such as the step-transaction doctrine. Those anti-abuse rules are explored in more detail in a later chapter, as are proposals to partially or fully eliminate double taxation. In addition, a chapter addresses the taxation of S corporations, which are taxed under a single-tax paradigm. That chapter also discusses the Qualified Business Income deduction, including numerous examples. Similar to most corporate tax casebooks, the bulk of the book is organized using a cradle-to-grave approach that traces the life cycle of a corporation, beginning with formation and capitalization and ending with liquidation of the corporation. Between those chapters, the book discusses operational issues, including the capital structure of a corporation, distributions of cash or property, stock redemptions, and stock dividends. After corporate liquidations, the book explores more advanced topics, such as taxable stock or asset acquisitions; non-taxable corporate reorganizations and divisions; the carryover of tax attributes (such as net operating losses) following certain non-recognition transactions; and the treatment of corporate tax shelters. Throughout, the book uses specific examples, diagrams of transactions, summary charts, and checklists to clarify and distill key points.

Understanding Constitutional Law is a succinct but comprehensive treatment of constitutional law topics typically encountered in a first-year constitutional law class. The book provides the current black letter law doctrines alongside the historical background needed to understand them and the major lines of dissenting thought. It explains the methodological approaches the Court has taken to the topics it covers and is interspersed with commentary to help readers understand both those approaches and the rules they generate. Thus, the book is ideal for both students beginning their education in constitutional law and those seeking a deeper understanding. It's also suitable for practitioners seeking a sourcebook to help them analyze the constitutional law issues confronting them. The sixth edition features extensive treatment of all the significant changes in constitutional law that have occurred over the last several years, in areas including but not limited to Congress's power to create causes of action satisfying Article III's standing requirement, the President's immunity from criminal prosecution, the evolving status of the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, the overruling of the due process right to abortion, the current status of race-based affirmative action in university admissions, the expansion of Free Exercise Clause protections, and the Court's first extended statement about the free speech rights of social media platforms. For ease of use, the new edition has eliminated coverage of some cases that have been overruled or have faded in importance while retaining slimmed down discussions of older cases that remain influential even in the face of new doctrine announced by the Court.

The boundaries between the history of law and the history of everything else are quite blurry nowadays. Whether one is asking questions about the origins of the carceral state, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the history of migration flows and empires, the longer story of human rights, the building of the straight state, the role of religion in public life, or many others, there is a shared belief that law and its history matters. In fact, legal historians began to focus on the blurring of boundaries such as those between markets and politics, between identity and state power, as well as between national borders and the flows of people, capital and ideas around the world. Legal history, broadly conceived, seems to mark much of the most exciting work that is redrawing the boundaries of historical scholarship in many areas of study. In Between and Across: Legal History without Boundaries gathers some of the newest and freshest work by both younger and established scholars who are carrying forward that project and extending it into new areas of historical inquiry. It captures the best of the new and innovative tools and questions that have made law a central plane of inquiry, charts novel directions for the field, and poses broader questions concerning the past, present, and future.Crossing a wide variety of geographic areas (from British-ruled Australia to colonial India and Malaysia, to the United States), the authors sketch new boundaries for the field to cross - boundaries of time, geography, and method - and claim that legal history provides the language to talk across national borders.

This book explores the intersection of law and technology, focusing on online speech regulations and their complex interplay with free speech in the digital age. It identifies three primary regulatory models - self-regulation, external regulation, and co-regulation - and examines how each model presents recurring challenges in both content moderation and the protection of free speech. The study delves into the regulation of harmful speech, including defamation, violence, misinformation, and propaganda, highlighting the tensions between regulating prohibited content and preserving free speech online. Additionally, the book addresses digital authoritarianism and its manifestation in regulatory approaches, particularly the Chinese model of content regulation. It also scrutinizes platform-driven regulation, assessing the challenges posed by both human and AI-driven content moderation. Through a comparative analysis of legal frameworks across key jurisdictions - including the United States (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), Germany (the Network Enforcement Act), India (the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021), and Sri Lanka (the Online Safety Act, 2024) - the book examines how these frameworks navigate the balance between free speech rights and platform responsibilities, in these jurisdictions with the distinct context, power asymmetry of authorities with the platforms, political and cultural landscape, and social media market. It further explores how these evolving models reflect significant differences in the roles of governments, platforms, regulatory authorities, standards, and compliance mechanisms. By engaging in a scholarly discussion on these issues from a legal and regulatory perspective, this book seeks to strike a balance between online free speech and legitimate restrictions. It provides a comparative lens on Western jurisprudence and the Majority World, linking common themes across jurisdictions to shed light on the intricate challenges of regulating online speech. In doing so, the book addresses a gap in the existing literature, offering a much-needed foundation for developing and updating both internal and external regulatory frameworks.  

Establishing liability for damages caused by AI used to be rather straightforward when only one or few stakeholders are involved, or when the AI could only take a limited range of pre-defined decisions in accordance with specific parameters defined by a human programmer. However, AI usually involves several stakeholders and components (e.g. sensors and hardware, softwares and applications, data itself and data services, connectivity features) and recent forms of AI are increasingly able to learn without human supervision which makes it difficult to allocate liability between all stakeholders. This contributions maps various possibilities, identify their challenges and explore lines of thought to develop new solutions or close the gaps, the whole from a global perspective. Existing liability regimes already offer basic protection of victims, to the extent that specific characteristics of emerging technologies are taken into account. Consequently, instead of considering new liability principles (solutions that require certain amendments of the current liability regimes), one should consider simply adapting current fault-based liability regimes with enhanced duties of care and precisions regarding shared liability and solidarity between tortfeasors, which could potentially be done through case-law in most jurisdictions. When it comes to the calculation of damages, given the difficulties in calculating the damage and to take into account the specificities of IPR or privacy rights, economic methods may be considered to calculate the damages in general, such as the Discounted Cash Flow Method (DCF) and the Financial Indicative Running Royalty Model (FIRRM), as well as the Royalty Rate Method and case-law about Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory license terms (FRAND). This path will lead to a certain "flat-rating"damages ("barémisation" or "forfaitisation"), at least when IPR and personal data are illegally used by AI-tools and mostly not visible, hence barely quantifiable in terms of damages.

Exploring the evolution and resilience of systems for the separation of powers, this prescient book rethinks how different architectures can defend democracies against adverse shocks and help them adapt to change. Frank Vibert cuts across many fields of study to address the central problem in modern government of how to balance the reasoning of experts with that of electoral politics. Beginning from the original separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, Vibert explores modern alternatives to this system. In particular, he discusses consociationalism, based on the need for political consensus for major decisions, as well as rights-based approaches. Looking to the future, he identifies important areas for improvement in these systems, such as better defences against corruption and stronger representation for the marginalised as well as the need to address income and wealth differences. Ultimately, he shows that the separation of powers is a learning system that can adapt to the tasks of modern government, especially by combining the reasoning of experts with political strategy without reverting to technocracy. Rethinking the Separation of Powersis an essential read for students and scholars of political science, law, behavioural science, social psychology and philosophy. Addressing central problems in modern government, it will also be vital for researchers interested in strategies for effective policy-making.

This comprehensive Understanding treatise can be used as the primary course text or as a supplement to any insurance law casebook. Understanding Insurance Law is designed to make the substance of insurance law accessible to students and general practitioners who are unfamiliar with the subject. For nearly forty years, the previous editions have been widely quoted and cited as authoritative by both federal and state courts. The book organizes insurance law under four major headings. Part A, which considers the question, "What is insurance law?," examines the nature of insurance policies, the industry that sells them, and how legislatures, courts, and agencies regulate them. Part B examines the law relevant to the establishment of the contractual relationship between insurer and insured and the scope of the obligations created. Part C considers issues relevant to the performance of the various duties and obligations in insurance contracts, including issues related to claim presentation in all lines of coverage plus the special obligations and issues that arise in liability insurance. Finally, Part D collects and examines some remaining topics of importance, including group insurance, special issues in automobile insurance, reinsurance, and excess and umbrella coverage.