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Throughout the twentieth century, elite US law schools have been presented as sites of power, admiration, influence and envy. Robert Stevens, in the opening of his seminal 1983 work Law School, suggested that foreign lawyers looked wistfully at elite US law schools. At a time when US political institutions—and even law schools—seem to have lost much of their former global luster, this book investigates whether in reality the elite US models ever proved so attractive to foreigners. Collectively the contributions cast doubt on traditional narratives that point toward the globalization or homogenization of legal education. They challenge the idea that many educators beyond the United States believed that the adoption of American models would lead to better legal education and scholarship, better legal systems, better lawyers, and better governance. And they illuminate the cultural and political significance of attempts to transplant US models. The book consists of historical examinations of American contacts within legal education in fourteen countries: China, Japan, Israel, the Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, France, Brazil, Sweden, Estonia, England, Australia, and Canada. And it includes critical commentary from two leading American law professors, along with a founding chapter from Bruce Kimball, the leading historian of Harvard Law School.

This book brings together an array of leading scholars to engage three critical questions surrounding the current debate over a federal right to education. First, should the United States recognize such a right? The authors of part 1 collectively answer this question as they weigh the arguments for and against. They paint a picture of crippling inequality within our schools—sharing accounts of massive racial and socioeconomic disparities along the way—which compels them to form a nearly unanimous consensus that a federal right to education would reap important benefits for all students. But even assuming this is true, a second question remains as to how the United States could establish such a right. Accordingly, the authors of part 2 explore three different mechanisms for establishing a federal right: implying the right through the Constitution, enacting the right in federal law, or adopting it through a constitutional amendment. Finally, if a federal right to education is recognized, what should it guarantee? The authors of part 3 confront this critical substantive question by weaving novel policy solutions together with evidence-based reforms to present options for ensuring that a federal right to education encompasses the tools and policy levers that are necessary to accomplish the goals that reformers espouse. Their proposals also provide key insights for impactful reforms for state courts interpreting education rights as well state lawmakers seeking to improve educational opportunities and outcomes. In response to these and other fundamental questions about the vast opportunity and achievement gaps of American schoolchildren, this volume builds on the current dialogue—both political and scholarly—that contends that education is the critical civil rights issue of our time.

The wide-ranging chapters of this ambitious volume advance our understanding of how Natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires strained to use the other’s law as a political, strategic, and moral resource.  Europeans and Natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right. Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their resort to each other’s law. Each misconstrued the other’s legal commitments while learning about them. The contributors explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: how and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically, and morally—to Natives, and vice versa? To address this question, the volume goes beyond existing scholarship, which juxtaposes settlers’ and Natives’ understanding in empire-specific circumstances, by adding another axis of comparison, that between English and Iberian New World empires. Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples. Understanding the conflict and transformation of notions of justice and law through a dual comparative study of legal intelligibility is the objective of this volume.

Visual and multimedia digital technologies are transforming the practice of law: how lawyers construct and argue their cases, present evidence to juries, and communicate with each other. They are also changing how law is disseminated throughout and used by the general public. What are these technologies, how are they used and perceived in the courtroom and in wider culture, and how do they affect legal decision making? This book explains how, when, and why legal practice moved from a largely words-only environment to one more dependent on and driven by images, and how rapidly developing technologies have further accelerated this change. It discusses older visual technologies, such as videotape evidence, and then current and future uses of visual displays and digital multimedia technologies, including trial presentation software and interactive multimedia. It also describes how law itself is going online, in the form of virtual courts, cyberjuries, and more, and explores the implications of law's movement to computer screens.

In daily life and in tax law, time is taken for granted as something that is ever present but beyond our control. Time moves endlessly and relentlessly forward, constantly slipping from our grasp. But what if life were more like science fiction? What if we could, at will, move through time to alter its course? Or what if we could harness time by turning it into an exchangeable commodity, truly using time as money? In fact, there is no need to open a novel or watch a film to experience time travel or to see time used as a medium of exchange. As Tax Time demonstrates through accessible explanation and analysis of examples drawn from the United States and other countries, we need look no further than our tax laws to see time manipulated in these—and many other—ways. But Tax Time does more than just complicate and overturn prevailing views of how time operates in and through tax law. In asserting that time in tax law is the product of pure imagination, Tax Time calls into question the world beyond time that we have created for ourselves. Has the tax imagination been used to work toward a more just world, or merely to entrench and exacerbate existing injustices? Finding that the tax imagination is too often used to perpetrate or perpetuate injustice, Tax Time calls for a systematic reexamination and reworking of the relationship between time and tax law with the aim of using the power of the tax imagination as a tool for moving society toward a better and more just future.