• This Month’s Issue
• Legal Rights for Animals ^th
• Human Rights, Immigration Law, and the 104^th Congress
• Looking for Out-of-Print Law Books? ^th
• Forthcoming ^th

Jan A. Neiger leads off with his review of Hate Speech, Pornography, and the Radical Attack on Free Speech Doctrine by James Weinstein.  Jennifer Gerarda Brown follows with a review of A Woman’s Guide to Law School by Linda R. Hirshman, after which Hirshman replies.  Next, Calvin R. Massey discusses Linda Przybyszewski’s The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan. Finally Robert S. Chang’s Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law and the Nation-State is the focus of Margaret Y.K. Woo’s review. 

We invite your views, so talk back to us.  Also, be sure to check out our archives file to see the over 100 reviews we have published since 1997.  As for new books, check out the publications forthcoming early in 2000, listed in Book Notices.

News item: Last month, the Veterinary School at the University of Illinois suspended its practice of killing dogs, rabbits, and pigs for lab experimentation purposes.  The action came in response to protests from veterinary students and members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It is a sign of the times: what has long been permissible is now being judged as inhumane.

Enter Steven M. Wise, a lawyer and animal rights activist who teaches as an adjunct at various law schools (Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall).  Currently, he is offering a course on animal rights law at Harvard.  Also, he has just published Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Perseus Books, 2000) (ISBN: 0-738-20065-4). It is a book likely to draw much attention (and controversy) in the ongoing battle over animal rights.

Among other things, Wise argues that legal personhood status should be extended to chimpanzees.  Why?  So that the law might recognize certain basic protections for these animals – i.e., freedom from harm and abuse.  Such a shift in the law, he argues, is needed to prevent agribusiness, pharmaceutical industries, scientific researchers, hunters, live-animal traders, and others from treating chimpanzees and other animals inhumanely.  One of his core arguments centers on the claim that apes have some of the same mental capacities as persons; therefore they should be entitled to at least the same basic rights as persons.

Other books dealing with the subject of animal rights include Gary L. Francione’s Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Temple University Press, 1996) and his Animals, Property and the Law, with William M. Kunstler (Temple University Press, 1995).

Rattling the Cage is slated to be reviewed in the next issue of Books-on-Law.

In 1996, powerful anti-immigrant forces in Newt Gingrich’s 104th Congress worked hard to pass the most restrictive immigration law in decades.  The new law changed virtually every aspect of immigration policy, including the rules for political and religious refugees.

The law is not as harsh as the chairmen of the immigration committees would have wanted.  So argues Philip G. Schrag in his just-published A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America (Routledge, 2000).  This is the story of the legislative process and the author’s experiences as a public interest lobbyist.  In A Well-Founded Fear, Schrag describes how a coalition of human-rights organizations fought to preserve the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.

This book – a meditation on the relation between human rights and immigration policy – consists of some 15 chapters (including one entitled "Public Interest Advocacy in Congress") and six appendices (including one outlining the history of immigration bills presented to the 104^th Congress).  The author is the director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies (Georgetown Law) that, among other things, teaches students how to represent asylum applicants in the Immigration Court.

Professor Schrag also wrote Reflections on Clinical Education (1998), which was reviewed in our November 1998 issue.

Need a copy of The Curiosities and Law of Wills (1876)?  Or how about Roscoe Pound’s The Formation Era of American Law (1938)?  Better still, maybe what you’ve been longing for is Shakespeare and the Law (1929) by Dunbar Plunket Barton.  Or, perhaps, you just don’t know where to find the 3-volume set of Charles Warren’s History of the Harvard Law School & of Early Legal Conditions in America (1908).

Well, look no further. They’re all available (or were) at The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. in Union, New Jersey.  Lawbook Exchange buys and sells antiquarian and scholarly books on law and legal history.  They also stock a wide range of legal periodicals, federal and state reporters, reference works, digests, treatises, and books on tax law, labor law, trial practice, and international and foreign law.  Ordering is available by phone, fax, online, or e-mail; listings may be found online at their website or in their printed catalogues.

Of course, you can always go to Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and browse through the rows of works on law and related subjects.  Or you can check out their website.  Other sources for finding out-of-print books (lawbooks and everything else) include Abebooks.com and Bookfinder.com.

So catch up on the past – look for those lawbooks that moved lawyers decades or centuries ago.  Consider, for example, The Life of John Marshall (1916) by Albert J Beveridge. (Check out Theodore Roosevelt’s 1917 review of that biography, which we reprinted last October.)

In March, the following reviews are slated to appear, among others:

• Katharine Baker, reviewing Joan Williams, Unbending Gender (Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Henry Cohen, reviewing Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Perseus Books, 2000)
• Joel R. Reidenberg, reviewing Lawrence Lessig, Code ­­– and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999)
• Ron Slye, reviewing Howard Ball, Prosecuting War Crimes & Genocide (University of Kansas Press, 1999)
• Mary-Christine Sungaila, reviewing Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time (Dial Press, 1999)

Ronald K.L. Collins & David M. Skover, Editors, Books-on-Law

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JURIST: Books-on-Law™ is edited by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover of the Seattle University School of Law.

Board of Editorial Consultants: Raj Bhala, George Washington University Law School; Miriam Galston, George Washington University Law School; Kermit Hall, Ohio State University College of Law; Yale Kamisar, University of Michigan Law School; Lisa G. Lerman, Catholic University of America School of Law; David M. O’Brien, University of Virginia Department of Government and Foreign Affairs; Judith Resnik, Yale Law School; Edwin L. Rubin, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Steven H. Shriffrin, Cornell Law School; Nadine Strossen, New York Law School; David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School.

Administrative Assistant for Books-on-Law: Ms. Nancy Ammons
Technical Assistant for Books-on-Law: Steven Pacillio, Esq.

© Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, 2000.