Binding Promises: The Late 20th-Century Reformation of Contract Law
Author: W. David Slawson During its classical period, American contract law had three prominent characteristics: nearly unlimited freedom to choose the contents of a contract, a clear separation from the law of tort (the law of civil wrongs), and the power to make contracts without regard to the other party's ability to understand them. Combining incisive historical analysis with a keen sense of judicial politics, W. David Slawson shows how judges brought the classical period to an end about 1960 with a period of reform that continues to this day.American contract law no longer possesses any of the prominent characteristics of its classical period. For instance, courts now refuse to enforce standard contracts according to their terms; they implement the consumer's reasonable expectations instead. Businesses can no longer count on making the contracts they want: laws for certain industries or for businesses generally set many business obligations regardless of what the contracts say. A person who knowingly breaches a contract and then tries to avoid liability is subject to heavy penalties.As Slawson demonstrates, judges accomplished all these reforms, although with some help from scholars. Legislation contributed very little despite its presence in massive amounts and despite the efforts of modern institutions of law reform such as the Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Slawson argues persuasively that this comparison demonstrates the superiority of judge-made law to legislation for reforming private law of any kind.
Author: Eve Ball, James Kaywaykla
Chief Victorio of the Warm Springs Apache, has recounted the turbulent life of his people between 1876 and 1886. This eyewitness account . . . recalls not only the hunger, pursuit, and strife of those years, but also the thoughts, feelings, and culture of the hunted tribe. Recommended as general reading. Library Journal This volume contains a great deal of interesting information. Journal of the West The Apache point of view presented with great clarity. Books of the Southwest A valuable addition to the southwestern frontier shelf and long will be drawn upon and used. Journal of Arizona History
Author: David Neumark
As anxieties about Americas economic competitiveness mounted in the 1980s, so too did concerns that the nations schools were not adequately preparing young people for the modern workplace. Spurred by widespread joblessness and job instability among young adults, the federal government launched ambitious educational reforms in the 1990s to promote career development activities for students. In recent years, however, the federal government has shifted its focus to test-based reforms like No Child Left Behind that emphasize purely academic subjects. At this critical juncture in education reform, Improving School-To-Work Transitions, edited by David Neumark, weighs the successes and failures of the 90s-era school-to-work initiatives, and assesses how high schools, colleges, and government can help youths make a smoother transition into stable, well-paying employment. Drawing on evidence from national longitudinal studies, surveys, interviews, and case studies, the contributors to Improving School-To-Work Transitions offer thought-provoking perspectives on a variety of aspects of the school-to-work problem. Deborah Reed, Christopher Jepsen, and Laura Hill emphasize the importance of focusing school-to-work programs on the diverse needs of different demographic groups, particularly immigrants, who represent a growing proportion of the youth population. David Neumark and Donna Rothstein investigate the impact of school-to-work programs on the forgotten half, students at the greatest risk of not attending college. Using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they find that participation by these students in programs like job shadowing, mentoring, and summer internships raise employment and college attendance rates among men and earnings among women. In a study of nine high schools with National Academy Foundation career academies, Terry Orr and her fellow researchers find that career academy participants are more engaged in school and are more likely to attend a four-year college than their peers. Nan Maxwell studies the skills demanded in entry-level jobs and finds that many supposedly low-skilled jobs actually demand extensive skills in reading, writing, and math, as well as the new basic skills of communication and problem-solving. Maxwell recommends that school districts collaborate with researchers to identify which skills are most in demand in their local labor markets. At a time when test-based educational reforms are making career development programs increasingly vulnerable, it is worth examining the possibilities and challenges of integrating career-related learning into the school environment. Written for educators, policymakers, researchers, and anyone concerned about how schools are shaping the economic opportunities of young people, Improving School-To-Work Transitions provides an authoritative guide to a crucial issue in education reform.
Author: Ephraim Shoham-Steiner Translated by Haim Watzman
In medieval Europe, the much larger Christian population regarded Jews as their inferiors, but how did both Christians and Jews feel about those who were marginalized within the Ashkenazi Jewish community? In On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe, author Ephraim Shoham-Steiner explores the life and plight of three of these groups. Shoham-Steiner draws on a wide variety of late-tenth- to fifteenth-century material from both internal (Jewish) as well as external (non-Jewish) sources to reconstruct social attitudes toward these others, including lepers, madmen, and the physically impaired. Shoham-Steiner considers how the outsiders were treated by their respective communities, while also maintaining a delicate balance with the surrounding non-Jewish community. On the Margins of a Minority is structured in three pairs of chapters addressing each of these three marginal groups. The first pair deals with the moral attitude toward leprosy and its sufferers; the second with the manifestations of madness and its causes as seen by medieval men and women, and the effect these signs had on the treatment of the insane; the third with impaired and disabled individuals, including those with limited mobility, manual dysfunction, deafness, and blindness. Shoham-Steiner also addresses questions of the religious meaning of impairment in light of religious conceptions of the ideal body. He concludes with a bibliography of sources and studies that informed the research, including useful midrashic, exegetical, homiletic, ethical, and guidance literature, and texts from responsa and halakhic rulings. Understanding and exploring attitudes toward groups and individuals considered other by mainstream society provides us with information about marginalized groups, as well as the inner social mechanisms at work in a larger society. On the Margins of a Minority will appeal to scholars of Jewish medieval history as well as readers interested in the growing field of disability studies.
Author: Scott L. Matthews
In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. The accumulation of these influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the South that persists into the twenty-first century.
Author: Frederic Lawrence Holmes
Through his development of quantitative experimental methods, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) implemented a principle that many regard as the cornerstone of modern science: in every operation there is an equal quantity of material before and after the operation. The origin of Lavoisier's methods, however, has remained a missing piece in this remarkable episode of scientific history, perhaps because the talented young scientist himself was not prepared for the journey his discoveries would set before him. In this book, Frederic Holmes suggests that Lavoisier gradually came to understand the nature and power of his quantitative method during the year 1773, when he began to carry out a research program on the fixation and release of airs. Drawing upon Lavoisier's surviving laboratory notebooks, Holmes presents an engaging portrait of a scientist still seeking the way that would lead him to become the leader of one of the great upheavals in the history of science.Holmes follows Lavoisier day-by-day at work in his laboratory over a course of several months. The scientist's resourcefulness and imagination spring to life in this account, as does his propensity to make mistakes, which taught him as much as his successes. During the course of this odyssey, Lavoisier saw his early theory of combustion collapse under the weight of his own efforts to provide experimental evidence to support it. In compensation, he acquired a method and the hard-won experience on which he would later construct a more enduring theoretical structure.Originally published in 1997.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: David J. O'Brien
Since the end of the civil rights era in the sixties it has become increasingly clear that social and political conflicts cannot be resolved entirely at the national level. Struggles between residents of poor neighborhoods and local interest groups or public authorities present some of our most explosive domestic political problems today. This study seeks insight into these problems through an analysis of efforts during the sixties to organize the poor to pursue their interests in local decision-making processes. David J. O'Brien holds that both organizers and scholarly observers of the grass-roots movement have failed to understand properly the process by which interest groups are formed. Arguing that the demise of neighborhood organization cannot be attributed to supposedly unique social, psychological, or cultural characteristics of the poor, he develops an analytical framework that emphasizes the strategic role of incentives and organizational resource problems. This framework helps explain not only the failure of organizers in the sixties to grasp the problems of interest group formation, but also the assumptions that prevented them from identifying the source of their frustration. The author assesses the different approaches that have been taken to neighborhood organization, and outlines a model for future efforts.Originally published in 1976.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Tammy L. Lewis
Ecuador is biologically diverse, petroleum rich, and economically poor. Its extraordinary biodiversity has attracted attention and funding from such transnational environmental organizations as Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United States Agency for International Development. In Ecuador itself there are more than 200 environmental groups dedicated to sustainable development, and the countrys 2008 constitution grants constitutional rights to nature. The current leftist government is committed both to lifting its people out of poverty and pursuing sustainable development, but Petroleum extraction is Ecuadors leading source of revenue. While extraction generates economic growth, which supports the states social welfare agenda, it also causes environmental destruction. Given these competing concerns, will Ecuador be able to achieve sustainability? In this book, Tammy Lewis examines the movement for sustainable development in Ecuador through four eras: movement origins (1978 to 1987), neoliberal boom (1987 to 2000), neoliberal bust (2000 to 2006), and citizens revolution (2006 to 2015). Lewis presents a typology of Ecuadors environmental organizations: ecoimperialists, transnational environmentalists from other countries; ecodependents, national groups that partner with transnational groups; and ecoresisters, home-grown environmentalists who reject the dominant development paradigm. She examines the interplay of transnational funding, the Ecuadorian environmental movement, and the states environmental and development policies. Along the way, addressing literatures in environmental sociology, social movements, and development studies, she explores what configuration of forcespolitical, economic, and environmentalis most likely to lead to a sustainable balance between the social system and the ecosystem.
Author: John Carter Wood
This book offers the first in-depth study of one of the most gripping trials of inter-war Britain, that of farmers wife Beatrice Pace for the arsenic murder of her husband. A riveting tale from the golden age of press sensationalism, the book offers insights into the eras justice system, gender debates and celebrity culture. Based on extensive research, it locates the Pace saga in the vibrant world of 1920s press reporting and illuminates a forgotten chapter in the history of civil liberties by considering the debates the case raised about police powers and the legal system. Spanning settings from the Pace's lonely cottage in the Forest of Dean to the House of Commons and using sources ranging from meticulous detective reports to heartfelt admirers letters, The most remarkable woman in England combines serious scholarship with vivid storytelling to bring to life the extraordinary lives of ordinary people between the wars.