Stuart a. Scheingold

Classic political and legal study of how the early years of formation of the European Union relied on consensus and legal processes -- but not an analogy to federalization as in U.S. Constitutional law -- to evolve integration and respect for higher authority than national law. Law and lawyers were involved in these early steps, as shown by political activity and research more than by the customary analysis of doctrine. Part of the Classics of Law & Society Series of Quid Pro Books, this book is recognized as a fundamental contribution to the developing conceptualization of the E.U. through law and politics. It was originally published in the Occasional Papers Series of the Harvard University Center for International Affairs. It is introduced and explained in its 2011 edition by E.U. expert J rg Fedtke, a law professor at Tulane University. More recent studies confirm this line of inquiry, writes Fedtke, and "show just how topical the core ideas of THE LAW IN POLITICAL INTEGRATION remain today."

This title reveals how novels of political estrangement have drawn on cultural narratives to capture the zeitgeist of the 20th Century and the disillusionment of modernism. Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have been drawn into exhaustive analyses of what went wrong in 'the terrible 20th Century', as Winston Churchill dubbed it. In this book Scheingold adds political novels to those inquiries and argues that they make a distinctive and hitherto neglected contribution to the collective memory of the 20th Century. These fictional accounts are the work of some of the century's most celebrated novelists: Kafka, Heller, Boll, Grass, Vonnegut and others. As refracted through the literary imagination, the 'terrible' 20th Century takes on new meaning - meaning that tends to elude historians and social scientists. Novelists peer into the shattered lives, the moral dilemmas, and the emotional chaos of the century - thus viewing a collective catastrophe through the everyday lives of victims, victimizers, temporizers, opportunists, true believers, and those who simply averted their eyes. In so doing, these novelists reveal, sometimes prophetically, the etiology of catastrophe, and both deepen our memory of the past and help us think more clearly about the future.

Lawyers in the United States are frequently described as "hired guns," willing to fight for any client and advance any interest. Claiming that their own beliefs are irrelevant to their work, they view lawyering as a technical activity, not a moral or political one. But there are others, those the authors call cause lawyers, who refuse to put aside their own convictions while they do their legal work. This "deviant" strain of lawyering is as significant as it is controversial, both in the legal profession and in the world of politics. It challenges mainstream ideas of what lawyers should do and of how they should behave. Human rights lawyers, feminist lawyers, right-to-life lawyers, civil rights and civil liberties lawyers, anti-death penalty lawyers, environmental lawyers, property rights lawyers, anti-poverty lawyers—cause lawyers go by many names, serving many causes. Something to Believe In explores the work that cause lawyers do, the role of moral and political commitment in their practice, their relationships to the organized legal profession, and the contributions they make to democratic politics.

Stuart A. Scheingold's landmark work introduced a new understanding of the contribution of rights to progressive social movements, and thirty years later it still stands as a pioneering and provocative work, bridging political science and sociolegal studies. In the preface to this new edition, the author provides a cogent analysis of the burgeoning scholarship that has been built on the foundations laid in his original volume. A new foreword from Malcolm Feeley of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law traces the intellectual roots of The Politics of Rights to the classic texts of social theory and sociolegal studies."Scheingold presents a clear, thoughtful discussion of the ways in which rights can both empower and constrain those seeking change in American society. While much of the writing on rights is abstract and obscure, The Politics of Rights stands out as an accessible and engaging discussion." -Gerald N. Rosenberg, University of Chicago"This book has already exerted an enormous influence on two generations of scholars. It has had an enormous influence on political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as historians and legal scholars. With this new edition, this influence is likely to continue for still more generations. The Politics of Rights has, I believe, become an American classic."-Malcolm Feeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, from the forewordStuart A. Scheingold is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Washington.