New Book: “Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Law, Policy and Practice”

New Book: Margaret Colgate Love, Jenny Roberts & Cecilia Klingele, Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Law, Policy and Practice (2013).

-Congrats to the authors!  =)

New Book: “Marginal Workers: How Legal Fault Lines Divide Workers and Leave Them without Protection”

New Book: Ruben J. Garcia, Marginal Workers: How Legal Fault Lines Divide Workers and Leave Them without Protection (2012).  Book description below:

Undocumented and authorized immigrant laborers, female workers, workers of color, guest workers, and unionized workers together compose an enormous and diverse part of the labor force in America. Labor and employment laws are supposed to protect employees from various workplace threats, such as poor wages, bad working conditions, and unfair dismissal. Yet as members of individual groups with minority status, the rights of many of these individuals are often dictated by other types of law, such as constitutional and immigration laws. Worse still, the groups who fall into these cracks in the legal system often do not have the political power necessary to change the laws for better protection.

In Marginal Workers, Ruben J. Garcia demonstrates that when it comes to these marginal workers, the sum of the law is less than its parts, and, despite what appears to be a plethora of applicable statutes, marginal workers are frequently lacking in protection. To ameliorate the status of marginal workers, he argues for a new paradigm in worker protection, one based on human freedom and rights, and points to a number of examples in which marginal workers have organized for greater justice on the job in spite of the weakness of the law.

William J. Wilson review of Coming Apart and The Great Divergence

Of interest: William J. Wilson, The Great Disparity, The Nation, July 30, 2012 edition (reviewing Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence and Charles Murray’s Losing Ground).

Self-Promoting Post: New Book (not on Poverty Law) that I co-edited has been published…

This is a self-promoting post, but if you think your school or students at your school might be interested in this book, please let your librarian know.  =)

Tribes, Land, and the Environment (Sarah Krakoff & Ezra Rosser eds. 2012) was published just last month by Ashgate as part of their “Law, Property, and Society” series.  The table of contents can be found here and the introductory chapter that Sarah and I wrote can be found here.  The book is expensive (Sarah and I have agreed to give any proceeds we get from the book to the Native American Rights Fund) but I do think it has great chapters related to tribes and the environment written by some great scholars.

Finally, I want to give a big THANK YOU to my co-editor.  Sarah is a real leader and scholar in both the environmental law and Indian law fields and the book throughout reflects her scholarly insight and ability as an editor.  THANK YOU!

Book Review: “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?”

Photo Copyright Ezra Rosser 2011

Book Review: Jared Diamond, What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?, N.Y. Review of Books, June 7, 2012.

New Book: “The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto”

New Book: Travis Smiley and Cornell West, The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (2012).  And here is a related brief article on Salon written by the authors.  The Amazon.com link to the book is here.

Two New Books: “Why Don’t American Cities Burn?” & “Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances”

Chicago

Two New Books of interest:

1. Michael B. Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (2011).

2. Whither Opportunity?  Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (Greg J. Duncan & Richard Murnane eds. 2011)

GREG J. DUNCAN

RICHARD MURNANE

Raj Patel’s “The Value of Nothing” (2010)

I just finished reading Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (2010).  It is worth quoting the entirety of my favorite paragraph from the book:

There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.  One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel.  The other is a book about orcs.

Classic!  The book moves freely across a huge range of topics, parts of the globe, and economic thought.  It is also very readable and full of fun use of language.  Academic readers might fault the somewhat thin aspect of some of its coverage and argument, but as a popular press attack on our market-dominated society, it is great.  Patel’s conclusion, that local democratic involvement is needed to counter the dominance of market-thinking, that citizen values should trump market values (or lack of value) is welcome.  In comparison with my advocacy of market approaches to poverty, his thinking is more optimistic regarding the possibility of reining in market thinking.

New Book: “Strategies Against Poverty: Designs from the North and alternatives from the South”

New Book: Clasco-Crop has published a new book of interest that is available in its entirety online Strategies Against Poverty: Designs from the North and Alternatives from the South (Alicia Puyana Mutis & Samwell Ong’wen Okuro eds. 2011).

New Book: “Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty”

New Book: Kaaryn Gustafson, Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty (2011).  Abstract below:

Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred—so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between.

In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable—not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States.