Library News & Events
You can browse for events by using the links below, or search our entire calendar by clicking here http://morris.law.yale.edu/iii/calendar/month.
Book Talk - Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World
Please join Jack Balkin and Visiting Professor Sanford Levinson as they discuss Professor Balkin's newest work: Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World.
During this book talk, Balkin will argue that the American constitutional project is based in faith, hope, and a narrative of shared redemption. Our belief that the Constitution will deliver us from evil shows in the stories we tell one another about where our country came from and where it is headed, and in the way we use these historical touchstones to justify our fervent (and opposed) political creeds. What will such a Constitution become? We cannot know. But Balkin believes that our belief in the legitimacy of the Constitution requires a leap of faith—a gamble on the ultimate vindication of a political project that has already survived many follies and near-catastrophes, and whose destiny is still over the horizon.
Faculty Publications: Prescribing a Healthy Portion of Proportionality
What is proportionality analysis and why is it good for us? In a jointly-written article published in the Emory Law Journal, Prof. Stone Sweet demonstrates why this widely-used method for balancing rights in foreign constitutional courts isn't as foreign an idea as it sounds. In fact, a home-grown version of proporionality analysis might be just the thing to cure some of the chronic pathologies created by our system of tiered review.
Further Reading
TORONTO L.J. 383, 389 (2007).
Today! Book Talk: Off the Record - Sidebars from a Trial Lawyer's Life
Kurt Melchior '51 will take you on a colorful guided tour of the off-the-record side of a seasoned trial lawyer's courtroom life. With almost sixty years of practice, Kurt has seen it all, and his experiences have yielded an instructive and entertaining book. Each of the one-hundred-plus, wide-ranging anecdotes is true. From dealing with the client who baldly lies to get a lawyer to take his case, to how to handle a star witness who's so nervous she's shaking, to the fine points of jury selection. "Off the Record" offers "on-the-job training" and delightful insight.
Watch the Book Talk: In Defense of Women - Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate
Judge Nancy Gertner, who now presides over court cases for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, recalls her struggle to succeed personally and professionally while working on benchmark cases during the 1970s here. She defended clients in some of the most prominent criminal and civil rights cases of the time, including a woman suing the psychiatrist who had repeatedly molested her; another on trial for murdering her abusive husband; Teresa Contardo, suing Merrill Lynch for discrimination; and Clare Dalton, suing Harvard Law School for the same offense. All the while, Gertner drove home the point that women lawyers belonged in our courtrooms.
Panel discussion included Dennis Curtis, Linda Greenhouse, Judith Resnik, Reva Siegel and Kate Stith.
New Law Library Acquisitions for July and August 2011
Yale Law Library's list of new acquisitions for July and August 2011 is available here.
Use the subject, category or language facets to refine the list. Both full and refined lists are searchable.
From Legal Pads to iPads: An Exhibition of Great Yale Legal Scholarship
Yale Law Library Reading Room, Fall 2011
Using quills, fountain pens, pencil stubs and bics, typewriters and word processors, legal pads and iPads, the Yale Law faculty has a long and distinguished history of producing great legal scholarship. The Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository is an online, open access website which was developed with the intention of making almost all past and present Yale faculty legal scholarship freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world with access to the web. It is now recognized as one of the most valuable free portals to legal scholarship available on the internet.
This multimedia exhibition celebrates the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository and the continuing brilliance of Yale Law faculty scholarship.
CHANGES IN YALE LAW LIBRARY COLLECTION ARRANGEMENT
Over the summer we made some changes in the arrangement of our collection. What follows outlines those changes.
Note: The location of books can also be ascertained by looking the title up in the MORRIS catalog.
Moved from L4 level to L5 level
KF 900 – KF 2800 call numbers
Moved from L1 level to Upper East Side level
JZ call numbers
Moved from L4 level to Library Shelving Facility
Bankruptcy Reporter
Federal Rules Decisions
Moved from L5 level to Library Shelving Facility
Federal Appendix
Federal Reporter
Federal Supplement
Pacific Digest
South Eastern Reporter
South Western Reporter
How to Restrict Political Advocacy
In an essay appearing in the Winter, 2011 issue of the Temple Law Review, Prof. Owen Fiss reviews the Roberts Court's 2010 opinion in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project -- a decision supporitng Congress's authority to criminalize political advocacy on behalf of foreign terrorist organizations. My caveman librarian reading of the case went something like this: "violence BAD, incitement to violence BAD, coordinated advocacy on behalf of terrorist group BAD, independent advocacy on behalf of terrorist group GOOD!" Prof. Fiss's analysis is much more refined and engaging as he demonstrates that all three branches of government share responsibility for incremental post-9/11 losses of liberty.
Further reading:
Transcript of Oral Argument (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, Feb. 23, 2010);
Owen Fiss, "Law Is Everywhere", 117 Yale Law Jouranl 256 (2007);
Owen Fiss, The Irony of Free Speech (1996)
New Law Library Acquisitions for June 2011
The Law Library's list of new acquisitions for June 2011 is available here.
Use the subject, category or language facets to refine the list. The full and refined lists are searchable.
Privatizing Adjudication: WWBD? (what would Bentham do?)
For those of us unable to ask this question of Jeremy Bentham in person, Prof. Judtih Resnik's article in Law and Ethics of Human Rights presents a fascinating review of the value Bentham placed on publicity. That's publicity as in "publicity is the very soul of justice. ... It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial." For Bentham, publicity in courts serves accuracy, educative, disciplinary and legitimating functions.
Prof. Resnik notes that with regard to the accuracy function, publicity can -- and often does -- fail to meet Bentham's expectations. Instead, the thing about public adjudication that interests her and Representing Justice co-author Dennis Curtis is its democratic elements: judges hearing all sides as equals, deciding independently of the government employing them. When the United States tries suspected terrorists in closed military "courts" what remains of democratic norms like equal treatment and constrained government authority when publicity is withdrawn? And in light of the tradition of openness in U.S. courts should such closed adjudicative tribunals even be referred to as "courts"?
Fortunately, whatever becomes of courts as places of public discourse, Bentham and his contemporaries found two other stalwart, too big to fail institutions of discourse: an uncensored press and a subsidized postal system. Hmm... Thanks, guys.
