Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Guy L. Clifton. Flatlined: Resuscitating American Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
RA 395 A3 C618 2009

"Flatlined lifts the veil of secrecy on twenty-first century health care and delves into the realities of good people caught in a bad medical system. Dr. Guy L. Clifton, a practitioner as well as a policy advocate, reveals first-hand accounts of needless tragedy, such as the young man who died after a car wreck for lack of a bed in a qualified hospital and the surgeon who was dejected by the scarcity of resources needed to enable him to perform heart surgery on an uninsured man. Arguing that a lack of coordinated care and quality medical practice benchmarks result in high levels of redundancy and ineffectiveness, Clifton proposes that the key to reducing health care costs, improving quality, and financially protecting the uninsured, is to reduce wastefulness, and offers a solution for achieving success. Flatlined sounds the warning call: By 2018 Medicare and Medicaid will consume about one-third of the federal budget. American businesses now pay three times as much of their payroll for health care as global competitors, expected to worsen as health care grows at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. Based on his years of experience in policy and medicine, Clifton proposes an attainable solution through the development of an American Medical Quality System."

Beth Simone Noveck. Wiki Government: How Technology can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009.
JK 1764 N68 2009

"Collaborative democracy--government with the people--is a new vision of governance in the digital age. Wiki Government explains how to translate the vision into reality. Beth Simone Noveck draws on her experience in creating Peer-to-Patent, the federal government's first social networking initiative, to show how technology can connect the expertise of the many to the power of the few. In the process, she reveals what it takes to innovate in government. Launched in 2007, Peer-to-Patent connects patent examiners to volunteer scientists and technologists via the web. These dedicated but overtaxed officials decide which of the million-plus patent applications currently in the pipeline to approve. Their decisions help determine which start-up pioneers a new industry and which disappears without a trace. Patent examiners have traditionally worked in secret, cut off from essential information and racing against the clock to rule on lengthy, technical claims. Peer-to-Patent shows how policymakers can improve decision-making by harnessing networks to public institutions. By encouraging, coordinating, and structuring citizen participation, technology can make government both more open and more effective at solving today's complex social and economic problems. Wiki Government describes how this model can be applied in a wide variety of settings and offers a fundamental rethinking of effective governance and democratic legitimacy for the twenty-first century."

Jeff Sharlet. The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. New York: Harper Collins, 2008.
BT 82.2 S53 2008

"They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a 'leadership led by God,' to be won not by force but through 'quiet diplomacy.' Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls. The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a 'family' that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of 'biblical capitalism,' military might, and American empire. Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not 'What do fundamentalists want?' but 'What have they already done?'."

Douglas Littlefield. Conflict on the Rio Grande: Water and the Law, 1879-1939. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2008.
HD 1694 A3 L58 2008

"The history of the Rio Grande since the late nineteenth century reflects the evolution of water resource management in the West. It was here that the earliest interstate and international water allocation problems pitted irrigators in southern New Mexico against farmers downstream in El Paso and Juarez, with voluntary resolution of that conflict setting important precedents for national and international water law. In this first scholarly treatment of the politics of water law along the Rio Grande, Douglas R. Littlefield describes those early interstate apportionment conflicts and explains how they relate to the development of western water law and policy and to international relations with Mexico. Embracing environmental, legal, and social history, Conflict on the Rio Grande tells how residents employed various resolution strategies considered by other scholars to have been implemented only later in American history. Littlefield offers clear analyses of appropriation and riparian water rights doctrines, along with understandable accounts of court cases and laws. Examining events that led up to the 1904 settlement among U.S. and Mexican communities and the formation of the Rio Grande Compact in 1938, Littlefield describes how communities grappled over water issues as much with one another as with governmental authorities."

Brian Jennings. Censorship: the Threat to Silence Talk Radio. New York: Threshold Edition, 2009.
KF 2812 J46 2009

"Freedom of speech. It is our most cherished privilege as Americans, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution since 1791. During the Reagan administration the FCC voted to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, which required all licensed broadcasters to present 'balanced' viewpoints on controversial issues. Conservative talk radio burgeoned, giving rise to the father of conservative talk, Rush Limbaugh [...] and others. The format was a smash hit -- resonating with listeners from coast to coast and giving a powerful voice to the conservative movement. Soon such programming, attracting an estimated 50 million listeners weekly, dominated the airwaves where liberal talk radio failed. Popular, profitable, outspoken, powerful, influential -- it's what the American people wanted, and its success was the Democrats' worst nightmare. Now, the principles of the Fairness Doctrine threaten to be reinstated--if not directly, then through back-door tactics involving ownership of stations. Under cover of being 'fair,' they will prove to be anything but: They will be used as a means of censorship by those with contempt for conservative talk radio. With our current Congress firmly under Democratic control, the future of talk radio -- indeed, freedom of speech for all Americans -- is under direct attack."