Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Steve Sheppard. I Do Solemnly Swear: the Moral Obligations of Legal Officials. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
KF 306 S52 2009

"What should the people expect from their legal officials? This book asks whether officials can be moral and still follow the law, answering that the law requires them to do so. It revives the idea of the good official – the good lawyer, the good judge, the good president, the good legislator – that guided Cicero and Washington and that we seem to have forgotten. Based on stories and law cases from America’s founding to the present, this book examines what is good and right in law and why officials must care. This overview of official duties, from oaths to the law itself, explains how morals and law work together to create freedom and justice, and it provides useful maxims to argue for the right answer in hard cases. Important for scholars but useful for lawyers and readable by anybody, this book explains how American law ought to work."

Paul Butler. Let's Get Free: a Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. New York: New Press, 2009.
KF 9223 B88 2009

"Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who traded in his corporate law salary to fight the good fight. It was those years on the front lines that convinced him that the American criminal justice system is fundamentally broken--it's not making the streets safer, nor helping the people he'd hoped, as a prosecutor, to protect. In Let's Get Free, Butler, now an award-winning law professor, looks at several places where ordinary citizens interact with the justice system--as jurors, crime witnesses, and in encounters with the police--and explores what 'doing the right thing' means in a corrupt system. Butler's provocative proposals include jury nullification--voting 'not guilty' in certain non-violent cases as a form of protest, just saying 'no' when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the criminal justice system. And his groundbreaking 'hip-hop theory of justice' reveals an important analysis of crime and punishment found in pop culture. Chock full of great stories and cutting-edge analysis, this accessible and lively critique will change the way you think about crime and punishment in the United States."

Claudia Trupp. Hard Times & Nursery Rhymes: a Mother's Tales of Law and Disorder. New York: Rodale Press, 2009.
CT 275 T92 A3 2009

"What kind of woman leaves three young daughters at home every morning to spend her days representing convicted murderers and rapists? That is the question criminal defense attorney Claudia Trupp confronts in this sharp and riveting memoir as she seeks answers—for herself and, mostly, for her daughters. Every working mother faces the challenges of balancing work and home, but the nature of Trupp’s work makes her juggling act all the more precarious—and at times hilarious and bizarre. Trupp’s domestic anecdotes of life with her kids run parallel to narratives of her most memorable, and often unsettling, criminal cases, each providing a platform to explore broader issues such as faith, perspective, and charm. The navigation of radically different realms—the criminal courts and maximum security prisons where clients serve hard time, and the home front where children demand marshmallows for breakfast—provides thought-provoking and entertaining reading. While the working mother has been a popular subject of fiction and self-help guides, this may be the only book offering a woman’s deeply personal and unapologetic account of how embracing a challenging job while simultaneously guiding a family reaps unexpected benefits on both fronts."

Michelle Goldberg. The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
HQ 766.5 D44 G64 2009

"Women’s rights are often treated as mere appendages to great questions of war, peace, poverty, and economic development. But as networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women’s bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise, with the United States often supporting the most reactionary forces. In a work of incisive cultural analysis and deep reporting, Michelle Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the twenty-first century. Goldberg elucidates the economic, demographic, and health consequences of women’s oppression, which affect more than half the world’s population. Empowering women is the key to retarding the progress of AIDS, curbing overpopulation, and helping the third world climb out of poverty, but attempts to improve women’s status elicit fierce opposition from conservatives who see women’s submission as key to their own national or religious identity."