Books in the The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities series

This book focuses on the Biafran humanitarian crisis of 19671970 which generated a surge of human rights anxieties and attracted the attention of world humanitarian organizations. For the first time in recent history, different church groups and humanitarian activists around the world came together for the sole purpose of alleviating human suffering and saving lives regardless of theological differences, race, ethnic affiliation, nationality, and geographical distance. Despite their role in shaping the course and outcome of the conflict, most scholars of the Nigeria-Biafra War treat the humanitarian aspect of the war as a footnote, making it appear less important among other issues of interest in the conflict. Notable exceptions, however, include Joseph Thomson's American Policy and African Famine, which focuses on American policy on the humanitarian aid, and Reverend Tony Byrne's Airlift to Biafra. This study underlines that the international humanitarian aid largely contributed to the internationalization of the war. The efforts of the churches from thirty-three countries which remain virtually unexplored was not just the first of its kind in the developing world but also the largest civilian airlift in history. While the paucity of scholarship on the humanitarian aspect of the Biafra war could be attributed to the newness of this field of enquiry, the increase in conflicts in different parts of the world has just opened humanitarian aid studies as a new frontier in academic study. This book is a masterful example of scholarship in this newly emergent field.

In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of lawlaw simply because so orderedas something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful.To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.

The Legal Exhibitionist explores Morris Ernst's use of "exhibitionism" to transform himself from insecure youth into America's most popular lawyer. Though Ernst later abandoned his progressive values to defend the FBI and a Dominican dictator and is today largely unknown, his story presaged the phenomenon of the modern celebrity attorney.

David Fincher's Zodiac, the first book-length study of the critically acclaimed 2007 release, offers various critical approaches to the film ranging from early influences, studies in genre and narrative, and media analysis including cinema history, game theory, musicology, and extensions in television studies.

Enter the Undead Author explores the points of tension between the idea of authorship and the realities of theatrical production and other performance practices from the 1960s to the present with special focus on those moments when authorship helps to reappropriate revolutionary practices into traditional modes of production.

Monsters, Law, Crime, an edited collection composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Film, constitutes a rigorous attempt to explore fertile interdisciplinary inquiries into ΓÇ£monstersΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£monster-talk,ΓÇ¥ and law and crime. ΓÇ£MonstersΓÇ¥ may refer to allegorical or symbolic fantastic beings (as in literature, film, legends, myths, etc.), or actual or real life monsters, as well as the interplay/ambiguity between the two general types of ΓÇ£monsters.ΓÇ¥ This edited collection thus explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving fronts of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime, and may be seen as extensions of a Gothic Criminology, generally construed. Gothic Criminology refers to a theoretical framework initially developed by Caroline Joan ΓÇ£KayΓÇ¥ S. Picart, a Philosophy and Film professor turned Attorney and Law professor, and Cecil Greek, a Sociologist (Picart and Greek 2008). Succinctly paraphrased, noting the proliferation of Gothic modes of narration and visualization in American popular culture, academia and even public policy, Picart and Greek proposed a framework, which they described as a ΓÇ£Gothic CriminologyΓÇ¥ to attempt to analyze the fertile lacunae connecting the ΓÇ£realΓÇ¥ and the ΓÇ£reelΓÇ¥ in the flow of Gothic metaphors and narratives that abound around criminological phenomena that populate not only popular culture but also academic and public policy discourses.

Shaped by politics and policy, Gender Justice and the Law presents a collection of essays that contribute to understanding how theoretical practices of intersectionality relate to structures of inequality and relations formed as a result of their interaction.

Betraying Dignity claims that contemporary distress causes individuals and nations around the world to abandon the dignity-based culture of human rights, and embrace new manifestations of honor-based cultures, like extreme nationalism, Jihad, and shaming. This book distinguishes dignity as a way of fortifying the culture of human rights.

Representing Ebola addresses the legal and cultural facets of the latest West African Ebola outbreak for both an academic and general audience.

This book details Richard Nixon's years as a lawyer on Wall Street as a time of rebirth and reinvention, and how his firm served as a springboard to his successful comeback in 1968.

This book provides readers with a critical study of the challenges that confronted Namibian activists who tried to sue Germany for genocidal acts that were committed during the German South West Africa (GSWA) years.

This book places prison witness at the center of discussions of the human experience of law and order, and of the nature of the rights-bearing person. Readings of canonical and contemporary writers facing incarceration yield abiding literary tropes that chart the path from institutional abjection toward the minimal threshold of personhood.

With contributions by many of the most prominent scholars in law, sociology, criminology, and film, Framing Law and Crime offers a critical survey of a variety of genres and media, integrating descriptions of technique with critical analyses.

India was the first among a trail of "pop up" third-party reproductive destinations including Thailand, Nepal, Mexico, and now Cambodia. Alongside the detailed ethnographic account of the experiences of parents and surrogate mothers the author offers a careful analysis of regulatory systems governing surrogacy and embryo use in Australia and India.

On the basis of institutional and poetological analyses of legal trials concerning literature held in South Africa during the period 1910-2010, this study describes how the battles fought in and around the courts between literary, judicial, and executive elites eventually led to a constitutional exceptio artis (artistic freedom) for literature.

Two narratives are used in telling the story of indigenous peoples and minorities in relation to globalization and intellectual property rights. This book steers a careful path between Optimism and Fear, exploring how law functions in and as culture as it contours the landscape of intellectual property rights, as experienced by minorities.

This book traces the emergence of dedicated spaces for the administration of justice in Scotland. It examines the evolution of the architectural forms of the Scottish court, and the extent to which both changes in technology and commitment to cost reduction appear to have replaced civic pride as a driver in design.

Judges in Street Clothes provides an historical, theoretical, and practical analysis of the ethical restrictions placed on the public lives of judges. The State's interest in maintaining an independent and impartial judiciary is considered against a judge's right to engage in educational, religious, charitable, civic, and professional activities.

The book is a work of non-fiction. The book is a historical analysis of the evolution of a uniquely American constitutionalism that began with the original English royal charters for the exploration and exploitation of North America. When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, the accepted conception of a constitution was that of the British constitution, upon which the colonists had relied in asserting their rights with respect to the imperium, comprised of ancient documents, parliamentary enactments, administrative regulations, judicial pronouncements, and established custom. Of equal significance, the laws comprising the constitution did not differ from other statutes and as a consequence, there was no law endowed with greater sanctity than other legislative enactments.In framing the revolutionary state constitutions following the retreat of the crown governments in the colonies, as well as the later federal Constitution, the Revolutionaries fundamentally reconceived a constitution as being the single authoritative source of fundamental law that was superior to all other statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions, that was ratified by the states and that was subject to revision only through a formal amendment process. This new constitutional conception has been hailed as the great innovation of the revolutionary period, and deservedly so.This American constitutionalism had its origins in the now largely overlooked royal charters for the exploration of North America beginning with the charter granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert by Elizabeth I in 1578. The book follows the development of this constitutional tradition from the early charters of the Virginia Companies and the covenants entered of the New England colonies, through the proprietary charters of the Middle Atlantic colonies. On the basis of those foundational documents, the colonists fashioned governments that came to be comprised not only of an executive, but an elected legislature and a judiciary. In those foundational documents and in the acts of the colonial legislatures, the settlers sought to harmonize their aspirations for just institutions and individual rights with the exigencies and imperatives of an alien and often hostile environment. When the colonies faced the withdrawal of the crown governments in 1775, they drew on their experience, which they formalized in written constitutions. This uniquely American constitutional tradition of the charters, covenants and state constitutions was the foundation of the federal Constitution and of the process by which the Constitution was written and ratified a decade later.

Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams's work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period. Several of these studies have positioned Williams and his work amid the public tensions in American life over roughly four decades, from 19401980, as notions of equality and freedom of choice challenged prejudice and repression in law and in society. To date, however, neither Williams's homosexuality nor his persistent representations of sexual transgressions have been examined as legal matters that challenged the rule of law.Directed by legal history and informed by multiple strands of Williams's studies criticism, textual, and cultural, this book explores the interplay of select topics defined and debated in law's texts with those same topics in Williams's personal and imaginative texts. By tracing the obscure and the transparent representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, through selected stories and plays, the book charts the intersections between Williams's literature and the laws that governed the period. His imaginative works, backlit by his personal documents and historical and legal records from the period, underscore his preoccupation with depictions of diverse sexualities throughout his career. His use of legal language and its varied effects on his texts demonstrate his work's multiple and complex intersection with major twentieth-century concerns, including significant legal and cultural dialogues about identity formation, intimacy, privacy, and difference.

This book uses a Kafkaesque lens to study the public and legal features of the coverage of the Nisour Square shootings of 2007. It illustrates how most American communities were much more interested in regulating private security firms than they were in having legal discussions of potential war crimes.

With contributions by many of the most prominent scholars in law, sociology, criminology, and film, Framing Law and Crime offers a critical survey of a variety of genres and media, integrating descriptions of technique with critical analyses.