Title: Gypsy law: Romani legal traditions and culture
Author: Weyrauch, Walter O. (Walter Otto) 1919-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Law | Cultural Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Sociology | European Studies | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: Approximately one thousand years ago Gypsies, or Roma, left their native India. Today Gypsies can be found in countries throughout the world, their distinct culture still intact in spite of the intense persecution they have endured. This authoritative collection brings together leading Gypsy and non-Gypsy scholars to examine the Romani legal system, an autonomous body of law based on an oral tradition and existing alongside dominant national legal networks. For centuries the Roma have survived by using defensive strategies, especially the absolute exclusion of gadje (non-Gypsies) from their private lives, their values, and information about Romani language and social institutions. Sexuality, gender, and the body are fundamental to Gypsy law, with rules that govern being pure (vujo) or impure (marime) . Women play an important role in maintaining legal customs, having the power to sanction and to contaminate, but they are not directly involved in legal proceedings. These essays offer a comparative perspective on Romani legal procedures and identity, including topics such as the United States' criminalization of many aspects of Gypsy law, parallels between Jewish and Gypsy law, and legal distinctions between Romani communities. The contributors raise broad theoretical questions that transcend the specific Gypsy context and offer important insights into understanding oral legal traditions. Together they suggest a theoretical framework for explaining the coexistence of formal and informal law within a single legal system. They also highlight the ethical dilemmas encountered in comparative law research and definitions of "human rights."   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking the borderlands: between Chicano culture and legal discourse 
Author: Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: American Studies | Chicano Studies | Literature | Language and Linguistics | Law | Social and Political Thought | Rhetoric | Postcolonial Studies | United States History | United States History
Publisher's Description: Challenging the long-cherished notion of legal objectivity in the United States, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues that Chicano history has been consistently shaped by racially biased, combative legal interactions. Rethinking the Borderlands is an insightful and provocative exploration of the ways Chicano and Chicana artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage this history in order to resist the disenfranchising effects of legal institutions, including the prison and the court.Gutiérrez-Jones examines the process by which Chicanos have become associated with criminality in both our legal institutions and our mainstream popular culture and thereby offers a new way of understanding minority social experience. Drawing on gender studies and psychoanalysis, as well as critical legal and race studies, Gutiérrez-Jones's approach to the law and legal discourse reveals the high stakes involved when concepts of social justice are fought out in the home, in the workplace and in the streets.   [brief]
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Title: Japan under construction: corruption, politics, and public works 
Author: Woodall, Brian
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Japan
Publisher's Description: In 1987, Japan excluded American firms from bidding on the multibillion-dollar New Kansai International Airport, sparking yet another trade dispute between the United States and Japan. The State Department, Congress, and the President himself were caught up in the dispute, which still smolders even after Congress passed a threatening resolution to retaliate. Scandal after scandal - both domestic and international - splashes across headlines in Japan, generating wave after wave of attempts at reform. Why is this industry so rife with bid-rigging, collusion, and pork-barrel politics? What are the political forces behind the industry? Brian Woodall answers these questions in this book, based on extensive research and over one hundred candid and revealing interviews with contractors, industry association officials, public works bureaucrats, elected politicians and aides, political party officials, journalists, and scholars.This inside view begins with a profile of the institutionalized system of bid-rigging in the public construction market. It explores the powerful positions of unelected bureaucrats, who are often hired by private-sector firms after retirement. Career politicians within the Liberal Democratic Party are revealed to use the construction industry to exploit party factions toward their own electoral ends. Recent events - the Sagawa affair and the massive "general contractors" (zenekon) scandal as well as the political reform movements that followed them - are examined in detail. Throughout, Brian Woodall illuminates the construction rift between Japan and the United States and demonstrates how international pressures were subverted within the shadowy domestic system. Japan Under Construction is must reading for anyone interested in Japanese politics, United States-Japan trade relations, and political corruption and reform anywhere in the world.   [brief]
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Title: Law and the order of culture 
Author: Post, Robert 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Law | United States History | Literary Theory and Criticism | Postcolonial Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Law and the Order of Culture is an outstanding collection of essays that explores the cultural creation of legal meaning, addressing interpretive processes within the law as well as the social constitution of legal doctrine. Originally published in Representations , these essays are at the center of the "law and literature" movement which exemplifies a burgeoning literature in feminist jurisprudence, critical legal studies, and other work that has focused on law as evidence of cultural orderings. For this edition Robert Post has written a new introduction, proposing an analytic framework for this literature and discussion of the seven essays contained within the book.Ranging over a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to the volume address such central issues as the construction of legal normativity, interpretive theory and practice in constitutional law, the function of legal metaphors, the interpretive foundations of the law/fact distinction, and the role of politics in contemporary critical legal studies. Law and the Order of Culture will attract a broad and eclectic readership across many disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: In the house of the law: gender and Islamic law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine
Author: Tucker, Judith E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Law | Islam | Women's Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: In an rewarding new study, Tucker explores the way in which Islamic legal thinkers understood Islam as it related to women and gender roles. In seventeenth and eighteenth century Syria and Palestine, Muslim legal thinkers gave considerable attention to women's roles in society, and Tucker shows how fatwa s, or legal opinions, greatly influenced these roles. She challenges prevailing views on Islam and gender, revealing Islamic law to have been more fluid and flexible than previously thought. Although the legal system had a consistent patriarchal orientation, it was modulated by sensitivities to the practical needs of women, men, and children. In her comprehensive overview of a field long neglected by scholars, Tucker deepens our understanding of how societies, including our own, construct gender roles.   [brief]
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Title: Morality tales: law and gender in the Ottoman court of Aintab
Author: Peirce, Leslie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this skillful analysis, Leslie Peirce delves into the life of a sixteenth-century Middle Eastern community, bringing to light the ways that women and men used their local law court to solve personal, family, and community problems. Examining one year's proceedings of the court of Aintab, an Anatolian city that had recently been conquered by the Ottoman sultanate, Peirce argues that local residents responded to new opportunities and new constraints by negotiating flexible legal practices. Their actions and the different compromises they reached in court influenced how society viewed gender and also created a dialogue with the ruling regime over mutual rights and obligations. Locating its discussion of gender and legal issues in the context of the changing administrative practices and shifting power relations of the period, Morality Tales argues that it was only in local interpretation that legal rules acquired vitality and meaning.   [brief]
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Title: Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics
Author: Thomason, Sarah Grey
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Language and Linguistics | Linguistic Theory | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Ten years of research back up the bold new theory advanced by authors Thomason and Kaufman, who rescue the study of contact-induced language change from the neglect it has suffered in recent decades. The authors establish an important new framework for the historical analysis of all degrees of conta . . . [more]
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Title: From craft to profession: the practice of architecture in nineteenth-century America
Author: Woods, Mary N 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | United States History
Publisher's Description: This is the first in-depth study of how the architectural profession emerged in early American history. Mary Woods dispels the prevailing notion that the profession developed under the leadership of men formally schooled in architecture as an art during the late nineteenth century. Instead, she cites several instances in the early 1800s of craftsmen-builders who shifted their identity to that of professional architects. While struggling to survive as designers and supervisors of construction projects, these men organized professional societies and worked for architectural education, appropriate compensation, and accreditation.In such leading architectural practitioners as B. Henry Latrobe, Alexander J. Davis, H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Stanford White, Woods sees collaborators, partners, merchandisers, educators, and lobbyists rather than inspired creators. She documents their contributions as well as those, far less familiar, of women architects and people of color in the profession's early days.Woods's extensive research yields a remarkable range of archival materials: correspondence among carpenters; 200-year-old lawsuits; architect-client spats; the organization of craft guilds, apprenticeships, university programs, and correspondence schools; and the structure of architectural practices, labor unions, and the building industry. In presenting a more accurate composite of the architectural profession's history, Woods lays a foundation for reclaiming the profession's past and recasting its future. Her study will appeal not only to architects, but also to historians, sociologists, and readers with an interest in architecture's place in America today.   [brief]
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Title: The prince and the law, 1200-1600: sovereignty and rights in the western legal tradition
Author: Pennington, Kenneth
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Medieval History | Law
Publisher's Description: The power of the prince versus the rights of his subjects is one of the basic struggles in the history of law and government. In this masterful history of monarchy, conceptions of law, and due process, Kenneth Pennington addresses that struggle and opens an entirely new vista in the study of Western legal tradition.Pennington investigates legal interpretations of the monarch's power from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. Then, tracing the evolution of defendants' rights, he demonstrates that the origins of due process are not rooted in English common law as is generally assumed. It was not a sturdy Anglo-Saxon, but, most probably, a French jurist of the late thirteenth century who wrote, "A man is innocent until proven guilty."This is the first book to examine in detail the origins of our concept of due process. It also reveals a fascinating paradox: while a theory of individual rights was evolving, so, too, was the concept of the prince's "absolute power." Pennington illuminates this paradox with a clarity that will greatly interest students of political theory as well as legal historians.   [brief]
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Title: "Peaks of Yemen I summon": poetry as cultural practice in a North Yemeni tribe
Author: Caton, Steven Charles 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Folklore and Mythology | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: In this first full-scale ethnographic study of Yemeni tribal poetry, Steven Caton reveals an astonishingly rich folkloric system where poetry is both a creation of art and a political and social act. Almost always spoken or chanted, Yemeni tribal poetry is cast in an idiom considered colloquial and "ungrammatical," yet admired for its wit and spontaneity. In Yemeni society, the poet has power over people. By eloquence the poet can stir or, if his poetic talents are truly outstanding, motivate an audience to do his bidding. Yemeni tribesmen think, in fact, that poetry's transformative effect is too essential not to use for pressing public issues.Drawing on his three years of field research in North Yemen, Caton illustrates the significance of poetry in Yemeni society by analyzing three verse genres and their use in weddings, war mediations, and political discourse on the state. Moreover, Caton provides the first anthropology of poetics. Challenging Western cultural assumptions that political poetry can rarely rise above doggerel, Caton develops a model of poetry as cultural practice. To compose a poem is to construct oneself as a peacemaker, as a warrior, as a Muslim. Thus the poet engages in constitutive social practice.Because of its highly interdisciplinary approach, this book will interest a wide range of readers including anthropologists, linguists, folklorists, literary critics, and scholars of Middle Eastern society, language, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Gadamer's repercussions: reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics 
Author: Krajewski, Bruce 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer also influenced the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on Gadamer's writings about ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, the relevance of his work for other disciplines is only now beginning to be properly considered and understood. In an effort to address this slant, this volume brings together many prominent scholars to assess, re-evaluate, and question Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, as well as his place in intellectual history. The book includes a recent essay by Gadamer on "the task of hermeneutics," as well as essays by distinguished contributors including Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Gerald Bruns, Georgia Warnke, and many others. The contributors situate Gadamer's views in surprising ways and show that his writings speak to a range of contemporary debates - from constitutional questions to issues of modern art. A controversial final section attempts to uncover and clarify Gadamer's history in relation to National Socialism. More an investigation and questioning than a celebration of this venerable and profoundly influential philosopher, this collection will become a catalyst for any future rethinking of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a significant starting place for rereading and reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer.   [brief]
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Title: Lawyers, lawsuits, and legal rights: the battle over litigation in American society 
Author: Burke, Thomas Frederick
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Law
Publisher's Description: Lawsuits over coffee burns, playground injuries, even bad teaching: litigation "horror stories" create the impression that Americans are greedy, quarrelsome, and sue-happy. The truth, as this book makes clear, is quite different. What Thomas Burke describes in Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights is a nation not of litigious citizens, but of litigious policies - laws that promote the use of litigation in resolving disputes and implementing public policies. This book is a cogent account of how such policies have come to shape public life and everyday practices in the United States. As litigious policies have proliferated, so have struggles to limit litigation - and these struggles offer insight into the nation's court-centered public policy style. Burke focuses on three cases: the effort to block the Americans with Disabilities Act; an attempt to reduce accident litigation by creating a no-fault auto insurance system in California; and the enactment of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act. These cases suggest that litigious policies are deeply rooted in the American constitutional tradition. Burke shows how the diffuse, divided structure of American government, together with the anti-statist ethos of American political culture, creates incentives for political actors to use the courts to address their concerns. The first clear and comprehensive account of the national politics of litigation, his work provides a new way to understand and address the "litigiousness" of American society.   [brief]
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Title: In Search of equality: the Chinese struggle against discrimination in nineteenth-century America
Author: McClain, Charles J
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Law | California and the West | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | American Studies | Asian American Studies
Publisher's Description: Charles McClain's illuminating new study probes Chinese efforts to battle manifold discrimination - in housing, employment, and education - in nineteenth-century America. Challenging the stereotypical image of a passive, insular group, McClain reveals a politically savvy population capable of mobilizing to fight mistreatment. He draws on English- and Chinese-language documents and rarely studied sources to chronicle the ways the Chinese sought redress and change in American courts.McClain focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of almost one-fifth of the fifty thousand Chinese working in California in 1870. He cites cases in which Chinese laundrymen challenged the city of San Francisco's discriminatory building restrictions, and lawsuits brought by parents to protest the exclusion of Chinese children from public schools. While vindication in the courtroom did not always bring immediate change (Chinese schoolchildren in San Francisco continued to be segregated well into the twentieth century), the Chinese community's efforts were instrumental in establishing several legal landmarks.In their battles for justice, the Chinese community helped to clarify many judicial issues, including the parameters of the Fourteenth Amendment and the legal meanings of nondiscrimination and equality. Discussing a wide range of court cases and gleaning their larger constitutional significance, In Search of Equality brings to light an important chapter of American cultural and ethnic history. It should attract attention from American and legal historians, ethnic studies scholars, and students of California culture.   [brief]
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Title: The vestal and the fasces: Hegel, Lacan, property, and the feminine 
Author: Schroeder, Jeanne Lorraine
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Law | Philosophy | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this feminist exploration of the erotics of the marketplace, Hegel's notion of property and Lacan's idea of the phallus serve parallel functions in creating the subjectivity necessary for self-actualization. Subjectivity requires intersubjective relationships mediated through a regime of possessing, enjoying, and exchanging an object of desire. For Hegel, this regime is property; for Lacan, it is sexuality, symbolized by the Phallus, which we conflate with the male organ and the female body. Property law, in Jeanne Schroeder's account, is implicitly figured by similar anatomical metaphors for that which men wish to possess and that which women try to be and enjoy. This is reflected in imagery taken from ancient Rome - the axe and bundle of sticks known as the Fasces, and the virgin priestess called the Vestal.Schroeder traces the persistence of phallic metaphors in modern jurisprudence. Rejecting the dominant schools of legal feminism, she reconceptualizes property - the legal relationship as well as its not necessarily material object - as a necessary moment in the human struggle for love and recognition. The Feminine, for Schroeder, is the radical negativity at the heart of both Lacan's split subject and Hegel's concept of freedom. Feminine emancipation and private property are, therefore, equally necessary conditions for the actualization of the free individual and the just society. Feminist scholars, social theorists, political scientists, philosophers, and lawyers will find in Schroeder's analysis scintillating new perspectives on property theory and the feminine within the market and the law.   [brief]
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Title: Punishment: theory and practice 
Author: Tunick, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Social and Political Thought | Law
Publisher's Description: What actions should be punished? Should plea-bargaining be allowed? How should sentencing be determined? In this original, penetrating study, Mark Tunick explores not only why society punishes wrongdoing, but also how it implements punishment.Contending that the theory and practice of punishment are inherently linked, Tunick draws on a broad range of thinkers, from the radical criticisms of Nietzsche, Foucault, and some Marxist theorists through the sociological theories of Durkheim and Girard to various philosophical traditions and the "law and economics" movement. He defends punishment against its radical critics and offers a version of retribution, distinct from revenge, that holds that we punish not to deter or reform, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's righteous anger. Demonstrating first how this theory best accounts for how punishment is carried out, he then provides "immanent criticism" of certain features of our practice that don't accord with the retributive principle.Thought-provoking and deftly argued, Punishment will garner attention and spark debate among political theorists, philosophers, legal scholars, sociologists, and criminologists.   [brief]
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Title: Music as cultural practice, 1800-1900 
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In Music as Cultural Practice , Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society.In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.   [brief]
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Title: Just interpretations: law between ethics and politics 
Author: Rosenfeld, Michel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: American Studies | Social and Political Thought | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: In pluralistic societies that lack common ethical, social, and political values, legal interpretation is constantly under siege. Just interpretations - that is, interpretations that reflect a shared vision of justice - may become just interpretations in the sense of mere interpretations, rooted in the orientations and interests of different groups. Confronting this crisis in legal interpretation, Just Interpretations offers a critical appraisal of the principal theoretical trends in contemporary American and European jurisprudence and proposes an alternative approach.Michel Rosenfeld's critique focuses on neoformalism, pragmatism, discourse theory, and legal autopoiesis, and includes discussions of such authors as Habermas, Rorty, Posner, Luhmann, Dworkin, Fish, and Weinrib. To overcome the drawbacks of these theories, Rosenfeld elaborates a theory of "comprehensive pluralism," based on a substantive vision of pluralism. This approach, building on the insights of deconstruction, turns the fact of pluralism into a guiding normative imperative. Just Interpretations will attract the attention of constitutional scholars, political scientists, and critical theorists, and will also address an interdisciplinary audience interested in texts, interpretations, and postmodern concerns with justice.   [brief]
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Title: Toward a definition of antisemitism
Author: Langmuir, Gavin I
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Medieval History | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism offers new contributions by Gavin I. Langmuir to the history of antisemitism, together with some that have been published separately. The collection makes Langmuir's innovative work on the subject available to scholars in medieval and Jewish history and religious studies. The underlying question that unites the book is: what is antisemitism, where and when did it emerge, and why? After two chapters that highlight the failure of historians until recently to depict Jews and attitudes toward them fairly, the majority of the chapters are historical studies of crucial developments in the legal status of Jews and in beliefs about them during the Middle Ages. Two concluding chapters provide an overview. In the first, the author summarizes the historical developments, indicating concretely when and where antisemitism as he defines it emerged. In the second, Langmuir criticizes recent theories about prejudice and racism and develops his own general theory about the nature and dynamics of antisemitism.   [brief]
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Title: The collective and the individual in Russia: a study of practices
Author: Kharkhordin, Oleg 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Social Theory | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Oleg Kharkhordin has constructed a compelling, subtle, and complex genealogy of the Soviet individual that is as much about Michel Foucault as it is about Russia. Examining the period from the Russian Revolution to the fall of Gorbachev, Kharkhordin demonstrates that Party rituals - which forced each Communist to reflect intensely and repeatedly on his or her "self," an entirely novel experience for many of them - had their antecedents in the Orthodox Christian practices of doing penance in the public gaze. Individualization in Soviet Russia occurred through the intensification of these public penitential practices rather than the private confessional practices that are characteristic of Western Christianity. He also finds that objectification of the individual in Russia relied on practices of mutual surveillance among peers, rather than on the hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors that characterized the West. The implications of this book expand well beyond its brilliant analysis of the connection between Bolshevism and Eastern Orthodoxy to shed light on many questions about the nature of Russian society and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Tokugawa village practice: class, status, power, law 
Author: Ooms, Herman
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Law
Publisher's Description: In contrast to modern Japanese citizens, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) villagers frequently resorted to lawsuits to settle conflicts. Herman Ooms uses colorful, skillfully analyzed case studies to trace the evolution of class and status conflicts through lawsuits and petitions in villages. Inspired by the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this exploration of social and legal history illuminates the texture and detail of village life, focusing on relations to authority.Opening with a story of an angry peasant woman's lifelong struggle against village authority (a story involving murder and revenge), Ooms highlights the role played by obscure historical actors including local elites, commoners, women, and outcastes. He also discusses the important role lineages played in village politics and examines the origins of discrimination against Japan's burakumin , or outcastes.   [brief]
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