Download or read book The Legal Foundations of Inequality written by Professor of Constitutional Theory and Political Philosophy Roberto Gargarella and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the influence of opposing constitutional ideals during the 'founding period' of constitutionalism in the Americas.

Download or read book The Legal Foundations of Inequality written by Roberto Gargarella and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the influence of opposing constitutional ideals during the 'founding period' of constitutionalism in the Americas.

Download or read book The Legal Foundations of Inequality written by Roberto Gargarella and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long revolutionary movements that gave birth to constitutional democracies in the Americas were founded on egalitarian constitutional ideals. They claimed that all men were created equal with similar capacities and also that the community should become self-governing. Following the first constitutional debates that took place in the region, these promising egalitarian claims, which gave legitimacy to the revolutions, soon fell out of favor. Advocates of a conservative order challenged both ideals and favored constitutions that established religion and created an exclusionary political structure. Liberals proposed constitutions that protected individual autonomy and rights but established severe restrictions on the principle of majority rule. Radicals favored an openly majoritarian constitutional organization that, according to many, directly threatened the protection of individual rights. This book examines the influence of these opposite views during the 'founding period' of constitutionalism in countries including the United States, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.

Download or read book Judging Inequality written by James L. Gibson and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy.

Download or read book The Code of Capital written by Katharina Pistor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital - and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations--assets that exist only in law. A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it."--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Supreme Inequality written by Adam Cohen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.

Download or read book Not Enough written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring wealth, resolved to fulfill their citizens’ most basic needs without forgetting to contain how much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse of empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scale. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead. Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.

Download or read book Social Justice written by Madison Powers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume develops a theory of social justice for the specific context of health care policy, although it can also be applied to education, economic development and other social policy issues where resources are limited.

Download or read book Democracy Inequality and Representation in Comparative Perspective written by Pablo Beramendi and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gap between the richest and poorest Americans has grown steadily over the last thirty years, and economic inequality is on the rise in many other industrialized democracies as well. But the magnitude and pace of the increase differs dramatically across nations. A country’s political system and its institutions play a critical role in determining levels of inequality in a society. Democracy, Inequality, and Representation argues that the reverse is also true—inequality itself shapes political systems and institutions in powerful and often overlooked ways. In Democracy, Inequality, and Representation, distinguished political scientists and economists use a set of international databases to examine the political causes and consequences of income inequality. The volume opens with an examination of how differing systems of political representation contribute to cross-national variations in levels of inequality. Torben Iverson and David Soskice calculate that taxes and income transfers help reduce the poverty rate in Sweden by over 80 percent, while the comparable figure for the United States is only 13 percent. Noting that traditional economic models fail to account for this striking discrepancy, the authors show how variations in electoral systems lead to very different outcomes. But political causes of disparity are only one part of the equation. The contributors also examine how inequality shapes the democratic process. Pablo Beramendi and Christopher Anderson show how disparity mutes political voices: at the individual level, citizens with the lowest incomes are the least likely to vote, while high levels of inequality in a society result in diminished electoral participation overall. Thomas Cusack, Iverson, and Philipp Rehm demonstrate that uncertainty in the economy changes voters’ attitudes; the mere risk of losing one’s job generates increased popular demand for income support policies almost as much as actual unemployment does. Ronald Rogowski and Duncan McRae illustrate how changes in levels of inequality can drive reforms in political institutions themselves. Increased demand for female labor participation during World War II led to greater equality between men and women, which in turn encouraged many European countries to extend voting rights to women for the first time. The contributors to this important new volume skillfully disentangle a series of complex relationships between economics and politics to show how inequality both shapes and is shaped by policy. Democracy, Inequality, and Representation provides deeply nuanced insight into why some democracies are able to curtail inequality—while others continue to witness a division that grows ever deeper.

Download or read book Personalized Law written by Omri Ben-Shahar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law"---rules that vary person by person---will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. In this book, Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat not only present this concept in a clear, easily accessible way, but they offer specific examples of how personalized law may be implemented across a variety of real-life applications.

Download or read book Corruption Inequality and the Rule of Law written by Eric M. Uslaner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corruption flouts rules of fairness and gives some people advantages that others don't have. Corruption is persistent; there is little evidence that countries can escape the curse of corruption easily-or at all. Instead of focusing on institutional reform, Uslaner suggests that the roots of corruption lie in economic and legal inequality and low levels of generalized trust (which are not readily changed) and poor policy choices (which may be more likely to change). Economic inequality provides a fertile breeding ground for corruption-and, in turn, it leads to further inequalities. Just as corruption is persistent, inequality and trust do not change much over time in my cross-national aggregate analyses. Uslaner argues that high inequality leads to low trust and high corruption, and then to more inequality-an inequality trap and identifies direct linkages between inequality and trust in surveys of the mass public and elites in transition countries. Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland-College Park, where he has taught since 1975. He has written seven books including The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and The Decline of Comity in Congress (University of Michigan Press, 1993). In 1981-82 he was Fulbright Professor of American Studies and Political Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and in 2005, he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist Lecturer at Novosibirsk State Technical University, Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia. In 2006 he was appointed the first Senior Research Fellow at the Center for American Law and Political Science at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China.

Download or read book Social Inequality written by Kathryn Neckerman and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2004-06-18 with total page 1044 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inequality in income, earnings, and wealth has risen dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. Most research into this issue has focused on the causes—global trade, new technology, and economic policy—rather than the consequences of inequality. In Social Inequality, a group of the nation's leading social scientists opens a wide-ranging inquiry into the social implications of rising economic inequality. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the existing research, they assess whether the recent run-up in economic inequality has been accompanied by rising inequality in social domains such as the quality of family and neighborhood life, equal access to education and health care, job satisfaction, and political participation. Marcia Meyers and colleagues find that many low-income mothers cannot afford market-based child care, which contributes to inequality both at the present time—by reducing maternal employment and family income—and through the long-term consequences of informal or low-quality care on children's educational achievement. At the other end of the educational spectrum, Thomas Kane links the growing inequality in college attendance to rising tuition and cuts in financial aid. Neil Fligstein and Taek-Jin Shin show how both job security and job satisfaction have decreased for low-wage workers compared with their higher-paid counterparts. Those who fall behind economically may also suffer diminished access to essential social resources like health care. John Mullahy, Stephanie Robert, and Barbara Wolfe discuss why higher inequality may lead to poorer health: wider inequality might mean increased stress-related ailments for the poor, and it might also be associated with public health care policies that favor the privileged. On the political front, Richard Freeman concludes that political participation has become more stratified as incomes have become more unequal. Workers at the bottom of the income scale may simply be too hard-pressed or too demoralized to care about political participation. Social Inequality concludes with a comprehensive section on the methodological problems involved in disentangling the effects of inequality from other economic factors, which will be of great benefit to future investigators. While today's widening inequality may be a temporary episode, the danger is that the current economic divisions may set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of social disadvantage. The most comprehensive review of this quandary to date, Social Inequality maps out a new agenda for research on inequality in America with important implications for public policy.

Download or read book Inequality and American Democracy written by Lawrence R. Jacobs and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, the United States ended some of its most flagrant inequalities. The "rights revolution" ended statutory prohibitions against women's suffrage and opened the doors of voting booths to African Americans. Yet a more insidious form of inequality has emerged since the 1970s—economic inequality—which appears to have stalled and, in some arenas, reversed progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy. In Inequality and American Democracy, editors Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol headline a distinguished group of political scientists in assessing whether rising economic inequality now threatens hard-won victories in the long struggle to achieve political equality in the United States. Inequality and American Democracy addresses disparities at all levels of the political and policy-making process. Kay Lehman Scholzman, Benjamin Page, Sidney Verba, and Morris Fiorina demonstrate that political participation is highly unequal and strongly related to social class. They show that while economic inequality and the decreasing reliance on volunteers in political campaigns serve to diminish their voice, middle class and working Americans lag behind the rich even in protest activity, long considered the political weapon of the disadvantaged. Larry Bartels, Hugh Heclo, Rodney Hero, and Lawrence Jacobs marshal evidence that the U.S. political system may be disproportionately responsive to the opinions of wealthy constituents and business. They argue that the rapid growth of interest groups and the increasingly strict party-line voting in Congress imperils efforts at enacting policies that are responsive to the preferences of broad publics and to their interests in legislation that extends economic and social opportunity. Jacob Hacker, Suzanne Mettler, and Dianne Pinderhughes demonstrate the feedbacks of government policy on political participation and inequality. In short supply today are inclusive public policies like the G.I. Bill, Social Security legislation, the War on Poverty, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that changed the American political climate, mobilized interest groups, and altered the prospect for initiatives to stem inequality in the last fifty years. Inequality and American Democracy tackles the complex relationships between economic, social, and political inequality with authoritative insight, showcases a new generation of critical studies of American democracy, and highlights an issue of growing concern for the future of our democratic society.

Download or read book Political Order and Inequality written by Carles Boix and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. This book describes the foundations of stateless societies, why and how states emerge, and the basis of political obligation.

Download or read book A Discourse on Inequality written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating examination of the relationship between civilization and inequality from one of history’s greatest minds The first man to erect a fence around a piece of land and declare it his own founded civil society—and doomed mankind to millennia of war and famine. The dawn of modern civilization, argues Jean-Jacques Rousseau in this essential treatise on human nature, was also the beginning of inequality. One of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau based his work in compassion for his fellow man. The great crime of despotism, he believed, was the raising of the cruel above the weak. In this landmark text, he spells out the antidote for man’s ills: a compassionate revolution to pull up the fences and restore the balance of mankind. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Download or read book After the JD written by Ronit Dinovitzer and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The After the JD project will track the professional lives of more than 5,000 lawyers during their first ten years after law school. Whilemost of the project will unfold in coming years, the data presented here provide a first snapshot of the stratified random national sample, based on questionnaires administered two to three years into the new lawyers' careers. The findings presented here will be elaborated and augmented through face-to-face interviews with a sub-sample of roughly 10% of the survey respondents. Building on this first wave, the future work of AJD will employ follow-up questionnaires and personal interviews six and ten years into the respondents' careers. When completed, it will be the first national study of the factors -- personal and professional -- that account for the wide spectrum of legal careers and experiences"--Introduction

Download or read book The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution written by Ganesh Sitaraman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.