Böcker utgivna av Harvard University Press

Much of our law is based on authoritative texts, such as constitutions and statutes. The common law, in contrast, is that part of the law that is established by the courts. Common law rules predominate in some areas of law, such as torts and contracts, and are extremely important in other areas, such as corporations. Nevertheless, it has been far from clear what principles courts use--or should use--in establishing common law rules. In this lucid yet subtly argued book, Melvin Eisenberg develops the principles that govern this process. The rules established in every common law case, he shows, are a product of the interplay between the rules announced in past precedents, on the one hand, and moral norms, policies, and experience, on the other. However, a court establishing a common law rule is not free, as a legislator would be, to employ those norms and policies it thinks best. Rather, it can properly employ only those that have a requisite degree of social support. More specifically, the common law should seek to satisfy three standards. First, it should correspond to the body of rules that would be arrived at by giving appropriate weight to all moral norms, policies, and experiential propositions that have the requisite support, and by making the best choices where norms, policies, and experience conflict. Second, all the rules that make up the body of the law should be consistent with one another. Third, the rules adopted in past precedents should be applied consistently over time. Often, these three standards point in the same direction. The central problems of legal reasoning arise when they do not. These problems are resolved by the principles of common law adjudication. With the general principles of common law adjudication as a background, the author then examines and explains the specific modes of common law reasoning, such as reasoning from precedent, reasoning by analogy, drawing distinctions, and overruling. Throughout the book, the analysis is fully illustrated by leading cases. This innovative and carefully worked out account of the common law will be of great interest to lawyers, law students, students in undergraduate legal studies programs, scholars interested in legal theory, and all those who want to understand the basic legal institutions of our society.

This book tells the story of how the transition to democracy in South Africa enfranchised blacks politically but without raising most of them from poverty. It shows in detail how the continuing strength of the white establishment forces the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) to compromise plans for full political and economic transformation. Deferring the economic transformation, the new dispensation nurtures a small black elite. The new elite absorbs the economic interests of the established white elites while continuing to share racial identities with the majority of their countrymen, muffling the divisions between rich whites and poor blacks, thus ensuring political stability in the new South Africa.Although democratic South Africa is officially "non-racial," the book shows that racial solidarities continue to play a role in the country's political economy. Ironically, racial identities, which ultimately proved the undoing of apartheid, have come to the rescue of contemporary democratic capitalism. The author explains how and why racial solidarities are being revamped, focusing particularly on the role of black economic empowerment, the black bourgeoisie, and how calls to represent the identities of black South Africans are having the effect of substituting the racial interests of black elites for the economic interests of the black poor.

Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Michael Thompson s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues like life that have the power to revive philosophy.As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with."

What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and understanding that overhauls and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. What is replaced is the test for explanatorily relevant causal information: Strevens discards the usual criterion of counterfactual dependence in favor of a criterion that turns on a process of progressive abstraction away from a fully detailed, physical causal story. The augmentations include the introduction of a new, non-causal explanatory relevance relation entanglement and an independent theory of the role of black-boxing and functional specification in explanation.The abstraction-centered notion of difference-making leads to a rich causal treatment of many aspects of explanation that have been either ignored or handled inadequately by earlier causal approaches, including the explanation of laws and other regularities, with particular attention to the explanation of physically contingent high-level laws, idealization in explanation, and probabilistic explanation in deterministic systems, as in statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and medicine.The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences."

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on Ethics and the Internet. The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question?Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure."

In the first extensive American study of child psychiatry in the Soviet Union, Dr. Nancy Rollins explains that her aim is two-fold: to expand knowledge of the theory, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders of children and adolescents and to stimulate a professional dialogue. Her attainment of this goal is clearly evidenced here by means of her astute assessment of the findings of her four-month visit to Russia as an individual investigator on the Medical Cultural Exchange program. The author's basic concern about the relationship between a society's child-rearing practices, character formation, and psychiatric disorder propelled her to ponder such questions as: Is there a describable difference between the Soviet conscience and the American conscience, as it develops during the years of childhood and adolescence? What about the problems of sexual identity in the two societies? Identity crises? Why have Soviet psychiatrists and educators remained so consistently anti-Freudian?In addressing herself to the various questions that intrigued her, Dr. Rollins first considers the history of Soviet psychiatric thought, with the major influences shaping the direction of Soviet child psychiatry and the social perspective with personal impressions of Soviet culture and society. Ensuing chapters, based upon first-hand observations and case material, take a close look at such topics as the organization of psychiatric services, diagnosis, general treatment methods, special psychotherapy, research, and psychiatric training programs. The author's reactions to the people she encountered in children's psychoneurological hospitals, polyclinics, sanatoria, and research institutions contributes a lively dimension to this impressive work.The study points out some differences between Soviet and American treatment methods; for example, Soviet treatment aims at inducing peace and relaxation in the patient, whereas American methods encourage exposure to and mastery of conflicts and tolerance of anxiety. Dr. Rollins also offers suggestions for further study and reflects on the relation of psychiatry and culture in the two countries.

Since the arrival of the Puritans, various religious groups, including Quakers, Jews, Catholics, and Protestant sects, have migrated to the United States. The role of religion in motivating their migration and shaping their settlement experiences has been well documented. What has not been recorded is the contemporary story of how migrants from Mexico and Central America rely on religion their clergy, faith, cultural expressions, and everyday religious practices to endure the undocumented journey. At a time when anti-immigrant feeling is rising among the American public and when immigration is often cast in economic or deviant terms, "Migration Miracle" humanizes the controversy by exploring the harsh realities of the migrants desperate journeys. Drawing on over 300 interviews with men, women, and children, Jacqueline Hagan focuses on an unexplored dimension of the migration undertaking the role of religion and faith in surviving the journey. Each year hundreds of thousands of migrants risk their lives to cross the border into the United States, yet until now, few scholars have sought migrants own accounts of their experiences."

In a world where more people know who Princess Di was than who their own senators are, where Graceland draws more visitors per year than the White House, and where Michael Jordan is an industry unto himself, fame and celebrity are central currencies. In this book, Tyler Cowen explores and elucidates the economics of fame.

This important contribution to the literature on mobility in nineteenth-century America examines with a fine microscope the world of work in Poughkeepsie, New York. The careers of all workers in each occupation--the entire labor force in this city with an 1870 population of 20,000--are traced over three decades. The book clarifies for the first time in any mobility study the meaning of shifts in employment through detailed examination of individual occupations. It shows concretely how industrialization altered the structure of opportunity; it specifies how the change affected the occupational niches and paths of mobility found by Irish, German, and British newcomers compared to white and black natives. By reassessing the significance of achieving particular occupations such as clerking and craft proprietorships, the book poses important questions for historical interpretations of gross indices of mobility such as shift from blue-collar to white-collar status. The authors favor comparability in their general analysis of mobility from federal census rolls and city directories, but they refine it through a broad research base, including tax rolls, local newspapers, and voluntary association records. Their study is one of the first to make systematic use of the credit reports on every business in one city from the R. G. Dun & Co. manuscripts. It also provides the first full description of the employment of women, permitting comparison with the opportunities for men. Other distinctive aspects include treatment of the crucial dimension of wealth and income, close attention to shifts in occupations produced by transformations in technology, marketing, and finance, and some disentangling of the influence of religion and nationality upon achievement. The fine lens of this microscopic study has enabled Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen to describe geographic, occupational, and property mobility in a small city with statistical precision, to illuminate the larger social processes which shaped that mobility, and, simultaneously, to vivify the working lives of anonymous American men and women.

Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau's autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes's Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau's memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading the Reveries by showing the ways this work needs to--and in effect does--generate a reader, without betraying Rousseau's utter solitude. Friedlander's book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition's revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls's influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau's writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida's deconstruction. Friedlander's reading of the Reveries, a work that has fascinated generations of readers, is an incomparable introduction to one of the greatest thinkers in Western culture.

The controversies between traditionalists and postmodernists are the topic of this book. It examines questions at the heart of the debate, such as: truth, reason, and objectivity - can we survive without them? What happens to law, science and the persuit of justice when these ideals are abandoned? The clash of belief and skepticism, and our need for intellectual stability are also examined.

In this blistering critique of our failing public schools and our fuzzy thinking about how to fix them, Myron Lieberman explains why public education is in irreversible and terminal decline and tells us what we must do to get American schooling back on track. No other book on educational policy or reform covers such a broad range of issues or draws upon such extensive empirical data across such diverse academic disciplines. This is a refreshingly clear analysis of our educational crisis and a rallying cry for market-system approaches to school reform. Nobody emerges unscathed--Lieberman's analysis challenges the advocates of choice as well as the defenders of the public schools.

What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese fiction and Japanese politicians' America bashing?

AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us. Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis. She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.

In demanding equal rights and the vote for women, woman suffragists introduced liberal feminist dissent into an emerging national movement against absolute power in the forms of patriarchy, church administrations, slavery and false dogmas.

America may now be the last remaining superpower, but what does this triumph mean when the challenges faced often defy military solutions? This text examines this question with its implications for America's role in the post-Cold War world. Ronald Steel offers a critique of a high-stakes game of foreign policy played by rules that no longer apply, and then proposes an alternative view of the world and America's place in it.

Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

"Worlds of Dissent" analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences-diverse, uncertain, nameless-have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Vaclav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West-including Ludvik Vaculik, whose 1980 diary "The Czech Dream Book" is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. "Worlds of Dissent" offers a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed society."

Place and orientation are important aspects of human experience. Place evokes geography and culture and conjures up history and myth. Place is not only a particular physical location but an idea, a mental construction that captures and directs the human relationship to the world. The distinguished contributors to this volume invite us to reflect on the significance of places, real and imagined, in the religious traditions they study and on how places are known, imagined, remembered, and struggled for. Whether looking at the ways myth and ritual reinforce the Yoruba's bond to the land or at Australian Aboriginal engagements with the origins of the created world, exploring Hildegard of Bingen's experience of heaven or myths of the underworld in contemporary American millennialism, listening to oral narratives of divine politics and deserted places of Rajasthan or investigating literal and literary images of the Promised Land, these essays underscore that place is constructed in the intersection of material conditions, political realities, narrative, and ritual performance.

After the American Civil War many soldiers returned to civilian life still battling the lifelong effects of combat, and looked to the federal government for help. This text explores the origins of the National Home within the political culture of the US state formation, and the effects of war.