Complex Justice

Complex Justice PDF Author: Joshua M. Dunn
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606607
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages. Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical "judicial activism" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit the policy choices available to lower court judges, introducing complications the Supreme Court would not anticipate. He demonstrates that the Kansas City case is a model lesson for the types of problems that develop for lower courts in any area in which the Supreme Court attempts to create significant change. Dunn's exploration of this landmark case deepens our understanding of when courts can and cannot successfully create and manage public policy.

Complex Justice

Complex Justice PDF Author: Joshua M. Dunn
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606607
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages. Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical "judicial activism" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit the policy choices available to lower court judges, introducing complications the Supreme Court would not anticipate. He demonstrates that the Kansas City case is a model lesson for the types of problems that develop for lower courts in any area in which the Supreme Court attempts to create significant change. Dunn's exploration of this landmark case deepens our understanding of when courts can and cannot successfully create and manage public policy.

Minding the Law

Minding the Law PDF Author: Anthony G. AMSTERDAM
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674020200
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
In this remarkable collaboration, one of the nation's leading civil rights lawyers joins forces with one of the world's foremost cultural psychologists to put American constitutional law into an American cultural context. By close readings of key Supreme Court opinions, they show how storytelling tactics and deeply rooted mythic structures shape the Court's decisions about race, family law, and the death penalty. Minding the Law explores crucial psychological processes involved in the work of lawyers and judges: deciding whether particular cases fit within a legal rule ("categorizing"), telling stories to justify one's claims or undercut those of an adversary ("narrative"), and tailoring one's language to be persuasive without appearing partisan ("rhetorics"). Because these processes are not unique to the law, courts' decisions cannot rest solely upon legal logic but must also depend vitally upon the underlying culture's storehouse of familiar tales of heroes and villains. But a culture's stock of stories is not changeless. Amsterdam and Bruner argue that culture itself is a dialectic constantly in progress, a conflict between the established canon and newly imagined "possible worlds." They illustrate the swings of this dialectic by a masterly analysis of the Supreme Court's race-discrimination decisions during the past century. A passionate plea for heightened consciousness about the way law is practiced and made, Minding the Law/tilte will be welcomed by a new generation concerned with renewing law's commitment to a humane justice. Table of Contents: 1. Invitation to a Journey 2. On Categories 3. Categorizing at the Supreme Court Missouri v. Jenkins and Michael H. v. Gerald D. 4. On Narrative 5. Narratives at Court Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Freeman v. Pitts 6. On Rhetorics 7. The Rhetorics of Death McCleskey v. Kemp 8. On the Dialectic of Culture 9. Race, the Court, and America's Dialectic From Plessy through Brown to Pitts and Jenkins 10. Reflections on a Voyage Appendix: Analysis of Nouns and Verbs in the Prigg, Pitts, and Brown Opinions Notes Table of Cases Index Reviews of this book: Amsterdam, a distinguished Supreme Court litigator, wanted to do more than share the fruits of his practical experience. He also wanted to...get students to think about thinking like a lawyer...To decode what he calls "law-think," he enlisted the aid of the venerable cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner...[and] the collaboration has resulted in [this] unusual book. --James Ryerson, Lingua Franca Reviews of this book: It is hard to imagine a better time for the publication of Minding the Law, a brilliant dissection of the court's work by two eminent scholars, law professor Anthony G. Amsterdam and cultural anthropologist Jerome Bruner...Issue by issue, case by case, Amsterdam and Bruner make mincemeat of the court's handling of the most important constitutional issue of the modern era: how to eradicate the American legacy of race discrimination, especially against blacks. --Edward Lazarus, Los Angeles Times Book Review Reviews of this book: This book is a gem...[Its thesis] is easily stated but remarkably unrecognized among a shockingly large number of lawyers and law professors: law is a storytelling enterprise thoroughly entrenched in culture....Whereas critical legal theorists have talked among themselves for the past two decades, Amsterdam and Bruner seek to engage all of us in a dialogue. For that, they should be applauded. --Daniel R. Williams, New York Law Journal Reviews of this book: In Minding the Law, Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner show us how the Supreme Court creates the magic of inevitability. They are angry at what they see. Their book is premised on the conviction that many of the choices made in Supreme Court opinions 'lack any justification in the text'...Their method is to analyze the text of opinions and to show how the conclusions reached do not always follow from the logic of the argument. They also show how the Court casts its rhetoric like a spell, mesmerizing its audience, and making the highly contingent shine with the light of inevitability. --Mitchell Goodman, News and Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina) Reviews of this book: What do controversial Supreme Court decisions and classic age-old tales of adultery, villainy, and combat have in common? Everything--at least in the eyes of [Amsterdam and Bruner]. In this substantial study, which is equal parts dense and entertaining, the authors use theoretical discussions of literary technique and myths to expose what they see as the secret intentions of Supreme Court opinions...Studying how lawyers and judges employ the various literary devices at their disposal and noting the similarities between legal thinking and classic tactics of storytelling and persuasion, they believe, can have 'astonishing consciousness-retrieving effects'...The agile minds of Amsterdam and Bruner, clearly storehouses of knowledge on a range of subjects, allow an approach that might sound far-fetched occasionally but pays dividends in the form of gained perspective--and amusement. --Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Washington Times Reviews of this book: Stories and the way judges-intentionally or not-categorize and spin them, are as responsible for legal rulings as logic and precedent, Mr. Amsterdam and Mr. Bruner said. Their novel attempt to reach into the psyche of...members of the Supreme Court is part of a growing interest in a long-neglected and cryptic subject: the psychology of judicial decision-making. --Patricia Cohen, New York Times Most law professors teach by the 'case method,' or say they do. In this fascinating book, Anthony Amsterdam--a lawyer--and Jerome Bruner--a psychologist--expose how limited most case 'analysis' really is, as they show how much can be learned through the close reading of the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that constitute an opinion (or other pieces of legal writing). Reading this book will undoubtedly make one a better lawyer, and teacher of lawyers. But the book's value and interest goes far beyond the legal profession, as it analyzes the way that rhetoric--in law, politics, and beyond--creates pictures and convictions in the minds of readers and listeners. --Sanford Levinson, author of Constitutional Faith Tony Amsterdam, the leader in the legal campaign against the death penalty, and Jerome Bruner, who has struggled for equal justice in education for forty years, have written a guide to demystifying legal reasoning. With clarity, wit, and immense learning, they reveal the semantic tricks lawyers and judges sometimes use--consciously and unconsciously--to justify the results they want to reach. --Jack Greenberg, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

A Digest of Supreme Court Decisions Affecting Education

A Digest of Supreme Court Decisions Affecting Education PDF Author: Perry Alan Zirkel
Publisher: Phi Delta Kappa International
ISBN: 9780873678353
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


Racism in Kansas City

Racism in Kansas City PDF Author: G. S. Griffin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943338023
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
RACISM IN KANSAS CITY: A SHORT HISTORY BY G.S. GRIFFIN FOREWORD BY ALVIN BROOKS Anti-black racism still infects American society. African Americans are more likely than whites to be killed by police, to be pulled over, arrested, imprisoned, and executed. They are more likely to be turned down for a job, to be underpaid, or offered a bad home loan than equally qualified whites. Racism's effects are tragic. The killing of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, triggered riots. A white terrorist massacred black worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina. Eight black churches were burned in the South in ten days. Kansas Citians, like so many others across the nation, wonder, "Could it happen here?" The answer lies in this study of Kansas City's darkest moments-slavery, the border war, the Civil War, bombings of black homes, lynchings, the segregation of neighborhoods and schools, the civil rights struggle, the Black Panther movement, the 1968 race riot, assassinations in the 1970s, the infamous Missouri v. Jenkins U.S. Supreme Court case, and the racial inequities that still plague Kansas City today. Threaded throughout Racism in Kansas City are stories of those who fought ardently against racist policies...and sometimes won. Racism in Kansas City, in the end, offers readers a hopeful message: with awareness comes understanding and then change.

Creating the Suburban School Advantage

Creating the Suburban School Advantage PDF Author: John L. Rury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501748416
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.

Right Turn

Right Turn PDF Author: Raymond Wolters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351292420
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 778

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Book Description
In the spirit of the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 called for nondiscrimination for American citizens, seeking equality without regard for race, color, or creed. After the mid-1960s, to make amends for wrongs of the past, some people called for benign discrimination to give blacks a special boost. In business and government this could be accomplished through racial preferences or quotas; in public education, by considering race when assigning students to schools. By 1980 this course reached a crossroads. Raymond Wolters maintains that Ronald Reagan and William Bradford Reynolds made the "right turn" when they questioned and limited the use of racial considerations in drawing electoral boundaries. He also documents the Reagan administration's considerable success in reinforcing within the country, and reviving within the judiciary, the conviction that every person black or white should be considered an individual with unique talents and inalienable rights. This book begins with a biographical chapter on William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General who was the principal architect of Reagan's civil rights policies. It then analyzes three main civil rights issues: voting rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. Wolters describes specific cases: at-large elections and minority vote dilutions; congressional districting in New Orleans; legislative districting in North Carolina; the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964; social science critiques of affirmative action; the question of quotas; and school desegregation and forced busing. Because Ronald Reagan and William Bradford Reynolds were men of the right, and because most journalists and historians are on the left, Wolters feels the "people of words" have dealt harshly with the Reagan administration. In writing this book, he hopes to correct the record on a subject that has been badly represented. Wolters points out that, beginning in the 1980s and continuing in the 1990s, the Supreme Court endorsed the legal arguments that Reagan's lawyers developed in the fields of voting rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. In Right Turn, Wolters responds to those who claimed that Reagan and Reynolds were racists who wanted to turn back the clock on civil rights, and he describes civil rights cases and controversies in a way that is comprehensible to general readers as well as to lawyers and historians.

Section 1983 Litigation

Section 1983 Litigation PDF Author: Schwartz
Publisher: Wolters Kluwer
ISBN: 0471117617
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 6176

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Book Description
In this invaluable three-volume set, you'll get an analysis of every aspect of the statute from the plaintiffs' and defendants' side of the courtroom - from direction on potential to considerations about choice of forum. This reference also gives you citations to state and district court decisions and circuit-by-circuit breakdowns of leading decisions. Plus, you'll explore constitutional rights enforceable under Section 1983, every facet of municipal liability and qualified immunity, bifurcating claims against officers and municipalities, and more. Martin A. Schwartz, an expert of Section 1983 actions, goes a step further and provides positions on open issues. Also available as part of the Section 1983 Litigation Complete Six-Volume Set.

Ethics and Professional Responsibility for Paralegals

Ethics and Professional Responsibility for Paralegals PDF Author: Therese A Cannon
Publisher: Aspen Publishing
ISBN: 1543820549
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
"College-level textbook on ethics and professional responsibility"--

Commentaries on the Criminal Law of Missouri

Commentaries on the Criminal Law of Missouri PDF Author: Thomas Adiel Sherwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criminal law
Languages : en
Pages : 1052

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Book Description


Jurisdiction of Federal Courts

Jurisdiction of Federal Courts PDF Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on the Constitution
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description