New Titles in the Chastek Library

"A timely deep dive into cancel culture, an account of its dangers to all Americans, and the much-needed antidote from the team that brought you Coddling of the American Mind. Cancel culture is a new phenomenon, and this title is the first book to codify it and survey its effects. It includes hard data and research on what cancel culture is and how it works, along with hundreds of new examples showing the left and the right both working to silence their enemies. It will change how you view cancel culture. Rather than a moral panic, we should consider it a dysfunctional part of how Americans battle for power, status, and dominance. Cancel culture is just one symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to 'win' arguments without actually winning arguments. After all, why bother refuting your opponents when you can just take away their platform or career? The good news is that we can beat back this threat to democracy through better citizenship. It offers concrete steps toward reclaiming a free speech culture, with materials specifically tailored for parents, teachers, business leaders, and everyone who uses social media. We can all show intellectual humility and promote the essential American principles of individuality, resilience, and open mindedness." -- Publisher site.

"Americans are constantly asked to identify themselves by race and ethnicity. These classifications, however, defy logic, lumping people with vastly different appearances, cultures, religions, and ethnicities into arbitrary categories. Yet they play a major, growing role in American life. Classified describes how the American system of racial classification has evolved via a combination of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance. Should the U.S. government classify people by race? This book is a call for a drastic reduction in government-mandated use of racial classifications and argues in favor of the separation of race and state." -- Book jacket.

"Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people." -- Publisher site.

"Free Speech and Hate Speech in the United States explores the concept and treatment of hate speech in light of escalating social tensions in the global twenty-first century, proposing a shift in emphasis from the negative protection of individual rights toward a more positive support of social equality. Drawing on Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, the author develops a two-tiered framework for free speech analysis that will promote a strategy for combating hate speech. To illustrate how this framework might impact speech rights in the U.S., she looks specifically at hate speech in the context of symbolic speech, disparaging speech, internet speech and speech on college campuses. Entering into an ongoing debate about the role of speech in society, this book will be of key importance to First Amendment scholars, and to scholars and students of communication studies, media studies, media law, political science, feminist studies, American studies, and history." -- Publisher site.

"As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals, other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the emergence of a multitude of new movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, and of such iconoclasts as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar Republic was able to survive, and the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment." -- Publisher site.

"When the author first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world's youngest billionaire and crypto's Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? This book sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, this book finds the author at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own - until it all came undone." -- Publisher site.

"Market driven healthcare is massively divisive. Opponents argue that a competition approach to medical treatment negatively impacts on quality, while advocates point to increased efficiencies. This book casts a critical eye over both positions to show that the concerns over quality are in fact real. Taking a two part approach, it unveils the fault lines along which healthcare provision and the pursuit of quality would in certain cases clash. It then shows how competition authorities can only effectively assess competition concerns when they ask the fundamental question of how the concept of healthcare quality should be defined and factored into their decisions. Drawing on UK, US and EU examples, it explores antitrust and merger cases in hospital, medical and health insurance markets to give an accurate depiction of the reality and challenges of regulating competition in healthcare provision." -- Publisher site.

"Kant's early critics maintained that his theory of freedom faces a dilemma: either it reduces the will's activity to strict necessity by making it subject to the causality of the moral law, or it reduces the will's activity to blind chance by liberating it from rules of any kind. This Element offers a new interpretation of Kant's theory against the backdrop of this controversy. It argues that Kant was a consistent proponent of the claim that the moral law is the causal law of a free will, and that the supposed ability of free will to choose indifferently between options is an empty concept. Freedom, for Kant, is a power to initiate action from oneself, and the only way to exercise this power is through the law of one's own will, the moral law. Immoral action is not thereby rendered impossible, but it also does not express a genuine ability." -- Back cover of book.

"This book examines the philosophy of judicial review to show how the Supreme Court has transformed elections in America. The Supreme Court has battled over the meaning of rule by the people, and this battle on the Court is a struggle over the defining values of American democracy." -- Publisher site.

"LLCs For Dummies is your comprehensive guide to limited liability companies. You'll explore whether an LLC is the right business structure for your business, how to set up a corporate structure and membership, and the best ways of managing an LLC. Author Jennifer Reuting explains the pros and cons of LLCs and shares insider tips on choosing members, selecting a company name, creating and filing Articles of Organization, managing day-to-day operations, and beyond. This updated edition covers all the latest tax and regulatory information, plus new laws that make it more attractive than ever to start your own business. You'll also find real-world advice on customizing your LLC for your specific business needs, creating a great operating agreement, keeping accurate records, and filing the proper paperwork with Uncle Sam." -- Publisher site.

"Appointed to Washington Territory's District and Supreme Courts in 1857 despite being under indictment for murder, Edmund C. Fitzhugh's biography offers unique insights into the territory and 19th century American West." -- Publisher site.

"Using non-technical, accessible language, this book analyses the laws, regulations, customs, and norms that affect public protest. It explains how the law of public protest imposes a system of 'managed dissent,' which has led to overly broad and punitive limits on public expression and collective protest." -- Publisher site.

"For years, Martin wondered what it was some white residents of Clinton didn’t want remembered. So, she went back, eventually interviewing over sixty townsfolk—including nearly a dozen of the first students to desegregate Clinton High—to piece together what happened back in 1956: the death threats and beatings, picket lines and cross burnings, neighbors turned on neighbors and preachers for the first time at a loss for words. The National Guard rushed to town, along with national journalists like Edward R. Morrow and even evangelist Billy Graham. But that wasn’t the most explosive secret Martin learned." -- Publisher site.

"For years, commentators have complained that white-collar crime is both overcriminalized and underenforced. This book transcends that debate and argues that white collar crime's weaknesses rest on how we make its laws, how we enforce them, and how we talk about enforcing them." -- Publisher site.

"In the modern era, legal feminists gravitated back to pragmatic and concrete ideas of formal equality, and the associated legalisms of equal rights and equal protection. Yet through each of these periods, the two common imperatives were to place women at the center of analysis and to recognize law as a fundamental agent of change." -- Publisher site.

"...the rise of private equity funds such as the Big Four of Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR, which has amassed $2.7 trillion of assets, and are eroding the legitimacy and accountability of American capitalism, not by controlling public companies, but by taking them over entirely, and removing them from public discourse and public scrutiny. This quiet accumulation in the last few decades represents a dramatic transformation in how the American economy operates--a sea change that few of us have noticed and all of us need to consider. Harvard law professor John Coates forcefully calls our attention to what is sure to be one of the major political and economic issues of our time." -- Back cover.

"For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation's capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown." -- Publisher site.

"The Supreme Court, once the most respected institution in American government, is now routinely criticized for rendering decisions based on the individual justices' partisan leanings rather than on a faithful reading of the law. For legal scholar Aaron Tang, however, partisanship is not the Court's root problem. Overconfidence is. Conservative and liberal justices alike have adopted a tone of uncompromising certainty in their ability to solve society's problems with just the right lawyerly arguments. The result is a Court that lurches stridently from one case to the next, delegitimizing opposing views and undermining public confidence in itself. To restore the Court's legitimacy, Tang proposes a different approach to hard cases: a "least harm principle" under which the Court rules against the side with the greatest ability to avoid the harm it would suffer in defeat. Examining a surprising number of popular opinions where the Court has applied this approach, Tang shows how the least harm principle can provide a promising and legally grounded framework for the difficult cases that divide our nation." -- Publisher site.

"Taming the Street is a book rooted in the drama of the 1930s, but as inequality in America has again reached Jazz Age levels, one of Henriques' many ambitions for the book is to bring to life a time when the system worked in the public interest. An idealistic time when we knew what had to be done, and summoned the will to do it, against the power of an American oligarch." -- Publisher site.

"Women, men, families, the law, politics, medicine, the media--and, of course, children (born and unborn)--have all been brutalized by the culture of death fostered by Roe v. Wade. Abortion hollows out marriage and the family. It undermines the rule of law and corrupts our political system. It turns healers into executioners and "women's health" into a euphemism for extermination. Ryan T. Anderson, a compelling and reasoned voice in our most contentious cultural debates, and the pro-life journalist Alexandra DeSanctis expose the false promises of the abortion movement and explain why it has made everything worse." -- Publisher site.

"Koonin takes readers behind the headlines to the more nuanced science itself, dispelling popular myths and unveiling little-known truths: despite a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures actually decreased from 1940 to 1970. What's more, the models we use to predict the future aren't able to accurately describe the climate of the past, suggesting they are deeply flawed. Unsettled is a reality check buoyed by hope, offering the truth about climate science that you aren't getting elsewhere--what we know, what we don't and what it all means for our future." -- Publisher site.

"Further exploring the extent of federal environmental law impacts on water rights, the book discusses the federal agencies with major water use impacts, including the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and other agencies whose actions, particularly projects they operate or lands that they manage and regulate, have a considerable impact on state law water rights and the execution of water projects. Central to any discussion of the federal impact on water rights are the major environmental laws. Individual chapters cover: Endangered Species Act; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; the Clean Water Act; the Wilderness Act designations and the wild and scenic rivers designations; and the National Environmental Policy Act." -- Publisher site.

"This textbook links theory to policy and practice and takes a comparative, international focus on current issues, making it vital reading for any student of Youth Justice." -- Publisher site.