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Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 9th Edition.

Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 9th Edition. Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, 2014. ISBN: 9781454833888.

Lucid, comprehensive, and definitive in its field, this text covers every aspect of economic analysis of the law.

Features:

  • Two new chapters, one on intellectual property, one on international and comparative law, both exploding fields of great importance.
  • Earlier editions’ questions have been converted to answers, making the book more accessible and informative.
  • Revised to be clearer and less technical.
  • More eclectic, reflecting recent criticisms of “rational choice” theory, in particular the need to supplement it with insights from psychology.
  • Greater attention paid to judicial behavior, realistically modeled and explained in economic terms.
  • Incorporates insights from the veritable explosion of books and articles published in the last few years on economic analysis of law.

Richard A. Posner is a judge of the U.S. Court Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of numerous books, including Overcoming Law, a New York Times Book Review editors’ choices for best book of 1995 and An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton, one of Times‘ choices for Best Book of the Year in 1999 and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, 2000.

《经济学家》2013年最佳图书

参考:《经济学家》年度最佳图书:2011201220142015201620172018

分为政治、传记、历史、经济、科技、文化、小说七类:

Politics and current affairs


My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. By Ari Shavit. Spiegel & Grau; 464 pages; $28. To be published in Britain by Scribe in February; £20.

Drawing on interviews, historical documents, diaries and letters, as well as his own family story, Ari Shavit, a Tel Aviv newspaper columnist mines four generations of history to tease out the conflicts and contradictions in his controversial homeland. A passionate elegy.

New Book: We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution. By Bruce Ackerman

We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution

We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution. By Bruce Ackerman. Harvard University Press 2014. ISBN: 9780674050297, 0674050290.

The Civil Rights Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman’s sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. From Rosa Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution.

Ackerman anchors his discussion in the landmark statutes of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Challenging conventional legal analysis and arguing instead that constitutional politics won the day, he describes the complex interactions among branches of government—and also between government and the ordinary people who participated in the struggle. He showcases leaders such as Everett Dirksen, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon who insisted on real change, not just formal equality, for blacks and other minorities.

The Civil Rights Revolution transformed the Constitution, but not through judicial activism or Article V amendments. The breakthrough was the passage of laws that ended the institutionalized humiliations of Jim Crow and ensured equal rights at work, in schools, and in the voting booth. This legislation gained congressional approval only because of the mobilized support of the American people—and their principles deserve a central place in the nation’s history. Ackerman’s arguments are especially important at a time when the Roberts Court is actively undermining major achievements of America’s Second Reconstruction.

高鸿钧:《法缘记忆:醉心梦语》

法缘记忆:醉心梦语高鸿钧:《法缘记忆:醉心梦语》,上海三联书店2013年。ISBN: 9787542642714.

内容简介

作者从业法学数十年,但始终不曾忘记文学的梦想。数年前,于青灯黄卷之余,偶感“法塔”不可承受之重,遂打量世事人情,但见红尘滚滚、浊浪滔滔、大千世界、无奇不有,于是写下这五十余篇别有趣味的短章,所涉内容多与法界相关。

作者简介

高鸿钧,1955年生,黑龙江海伦人;吉林大学法律系77级本科,中国政法大学81级研究生。研究生毕业留校,1991年调至中国社会科学院法学研究所,副研究员、研究员,1998年至今在清华大学法学院任教授;主要领域为比较法学、法理学和外国法制史;中国法学会比较法研究会副会长,全国外国法制史研究会副会长,清华大学法学院法律全球化研究中心主任。

刘皓明:雅典与梭伦:评柯素芝《出世与神情:西王母在中世纪中国》

Suzanne Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China, Stanford University Press, 1993.

到西安必登大雁塔。初唐时期留到今天的人造地面结构本来就屈指可数,而它们中间,恐怕没有哪个比大雁塔更人文荟萃了吧?要说能在长安这样的都市屹立一千三百多年而不倒,实在不是易事,因为就算能历尽乱世的兵燹劫掠而幸存,却保不齐躲得过“盛世”的拆迁;就连自然风景,不也早已因过度开发超限承载而疮痍满目、面目全非了吗?

登上大雁塔,自然要吟咏杜甫的名作《同诸公登慈恩寺塔》:

高标跨苍穹,烈风无时休,自非旷士怀,登兹翻百忧……

塔内确也未敢有失风雅,应景地悬挂着这首杜诗及其唱和之作的今人抄卷,只是那字写得实在比北京地下过街通道里立在地上的“收购药材墨盒”的牌子上的字好不了多少。在这种旅游热点,没有挂出像“和谐号”那样用电脑打的“书法作品”,就已经很不错了,不好奢望的。

大雁塔本名慈恩寺塔,慈恩寺是唐高宗为纪念其母长孙皇后、唐太宗之妻修建的,高僧玄奘曾在慈恩寺里奉勅译经。现存寺塔为武后时所重建,虽经后来历代修缮,却仍属为数极少的现存唐代地面结构中最著名的一个,是中古建筑史的活标本。这个凝聚了唐代政治、宗教、思想和物质文化的地面结构,尤其因杜甫《同诸公登慈恩寺塔》而成为唐代文学的一个坐标,这不仅是因为杜甫的诗写得好,还由于当年同杜甫一起登塔并唱和的“诸公”——高适、岑参、储光羲、薛据——的诗作也一一尚在。翻阅《文苑英华》,看到这首杜诗同其唱和之作被放在一起,读者仿佛能看到天宝十二年秋(西历753年)的某一天,这几位诗人在慈恩寺兴会的场景。因此除了文学价值之外,这组诗还有极高的史料价值。上个世纪末以来人文研究界时髦搞所谓物质文化(material culture)和公共空间,像杜甫高适岑参等人登慈恩寺塔的唱和之作,可以是这类研究的绝妙素材。

费拉里(编):柏拉图《理想国》剑桥指南

社会思想译丛 ★ 新书讯

G. R. F. 费拉里(G. R. F. Ferrari)编:《柏拉图〈理想国〉剑桥指南》(The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic),陈高华、李诚予、张博、岳林、胡艾忻、吕舒婷译,北京大学出版社2013年。ISBN: 9787301225912. @豆瓣 @小组

内容简介

柏拉图《理想国》剑桥指南

《理想国》是古典世界中仍为今人广泛阅读的杰作,本书是对它的一个新近的全面阐释,其中包括的十六篇文章由不同学科背景和研究路径的一流学者撰写,呈现了广泛的解释光谱。无论是初读者,还是较有经验的研究者,都可从中获得教益。前三篇文章是从《理想国》整体出发进行的论述,余下的文章则是按顺序对《理想国》涉及的不同主题的专门阐释;同时,在某些特别重要的主题上,读者还可以领略不同学者从不同路径给出的不同阐释,从而丰富读者对《理想国》的认识。

书评

无论对于研究生还是高年级大学生而言,这都是一部极佳的导读作品,它在引领研习者穿越《理想国》这个错综复杂的文本的同时,让他们领略围绕它而形成的当代争论。一一爱德华·巴特勒(Edward Butler)

这是一本汇集众多名家之作的书,认真探讨《理想国》的研究者应该人手一本。一一尼古拉斯·史密斯(Nicholas D. Smith)

巴顿等:《贸易体制的演进:GATT与WTO体制中的政治学、法学和经济学》

社会思想译丛 ★ 新书讯

约翰·H.巴顿、朱迪思·L.戈尔斯坦、蒂莫西·E.乔里林、理查德·R.斯坦伯格:《贸易体制的演进:GATT与WTO体制中的政治学、法学和经济学》(The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO),廖诗评译,北京大学出版社2013年。ISBN: 9787301217009. @豆瓣 @小组

内容简介

贸易体制的演进:GATT与WTO体制中的政治学、法学和经济学

本书对国际多边贸易体制发展中的政治史和经济史进行了全面分析,这一体制即为世界贸易组织(WTO)及其前身关税与贸易总协定(GATT)。本书对从“二战”后该体制产生至今过程中的法律规则、原则、实践和规范进行了分析,同时分析了体制特点的变化给国内市场开放政策的维持与重构带来的影响。分析当代GATT/WTO体制的规则及其背后的经济学逻辑的著作有很多,而本书则是首部对体制规则发展背后的政治学逻辑进行探讨的著作。

罗杰·科特瑞尔:《法理学的政治分析:法律哲学批判导论》

社会思想译丛 ★ 新书讯

法理学的政治分析:法律哲学批判导论罗杰·科特瑞尔(Roger Cotterrell):《法理学的政治分析:法律哲学批判导论
The Politics of Jurisprudence: A Critical Introduction to Legal Philosophy),
张笑宇译,
北京大学出版社2013年。
ISBN: 9787301216736.
@豆瓣 @小组

内容简介

本书讨论法理学研究什么、它试图做什么以及如何完成这些工作,最为重要的是,它的诸多结论如何能够影响法律实践的日常问题,以及主要的社会、道德和政治观念。作者选择对几位关键法学家的观点进行分析,阐明了法律理论的一般特点,并尝试用一种职业主义和政治分析的方法,来表达这些理论。

本书第一版更多是作为学生教材使用。对此,作者开辟了他的方法,在此版中展现了自初版以来逐渐引人关注的理论中最为重要的领域。新版做了大量修订,著述更为明晰,并且恰当的评述了迄今为止的相关文献。有两章新内容处理了近十年来兴起的对英美法律哲学非常多样化的批判性进路。

New Book: Religion without God. By Ronald Dworkin

Religion without GodReligion without God. By Ronald Dworkin. (罗纳德·德沃金:《没有上帝的宗教》) Harvard University Press 2013. ISBN: 9780674726826, 0674726820.

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About This Book

In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions that men and women have asked through the ages: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What is death and what is immortality? Based on the 2011 Einstein Lectures, Religion without God is inspired by remarks Einstein made that if religion consists of awe toward mysteries which “manifest themselves in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, and which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms,” then, he, Einstein, was a religious person.

Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence.

Dworkin hoped that this short book would contribute to rational conversation and the softening of religious fear and hatred. Religion without God is the work of a humanist who recognized both the possibilities and limitations of humanity.

New Book: The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government. By Richard A. Epstein

The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government.
By Richard A. Epstein.
Harvard University Press 2013.
ISBN: 9780674724891, 0674724895.

The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited GovernmentAmerican liberals and conservatives alike take for granted a progressive view of the Constitution that took root in the early twentieth century. Richard Epstein laments this complacency which, he believes, explains America’s current economic malaise and political gridlock. Steering clear of well-worn debates between defenders of originalism and proponents of a living Constitution, Epstein employs close textual reading, historical analysis, and political and economic theory to urge a return to the classical liberal theory of governance that animated the framers’ original text, and to the limited government this theory supports.

Grounded in the thought of Locke, Hume, Madison, and other Enlightenment figures, the classical liberal tradition emphasized federalism, restricted government, separation of powers, property rights, and economic liberties. The most serious challenge to this tradition, Epstein contends, has come from New Deal progressives and their intellectual defenders. Unlike Thomas Paine, who saw government as a necessary evil at best, the progressives embraced government as a force for administering social good. The Supreme Court has unwisely ratified the progressive program by sustaining an ever-lengthening list of legislative programs at odds with the classical liberal Constitution.

Epstein’s carefully considered analysis addresses both halves of the constitutional enterprise: its structural safeguards against excessive government power and its protection of individual rights. He illuminates contemporary disputes ranging from presidential prerogatives to health care legislation, while reexamining such enduring topics as the institution of judicial review, the federal government’s role in regulating economic activity, freedom of speech and religion, and equal protection.

New Book: Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law. By Teemu Ruskola

Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern LawLegal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law(《法律东方主义:中国·美国·现代法律》). By Teemu Ruskola. Harvard University Press 2013. ISBN: 0674073061, 9780674073067.

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day.

The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

New Book: The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution. By Marcia Coyle

The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the ConstitutionThe Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution. By Marcia Coyle. Simon & Schuster 2013. ISBN: 1451627513; 9781451627510.

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The Roberts Court, seven years old, sits at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Through four landmark decisions, Marcia Coyle, one of the most prestigious experts on the Supreme Court, reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.

Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the U.S. Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action.

Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside account of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began—the personalities and conflicts that catapulted them onto the national scene—and how they ultimately exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United campaign case. Most dramatically, her analysis shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups are strategizing to find cases and crafting them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority.

The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat at the struggle to lay down the law of the land.

New Book: Reflections on Judging. By Richard A. Posner

Reflections on Judging. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press 2013. ISBN: 0674725085, 9780674725089

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Reflections on JudgingIn Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers.

For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges—most notably Justice Antonin Scalia—needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating “canons of constructions” (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.


Review

“A deep and thought-provoking collection of insightful analyses of various aspects of being a judge, told from an insider’s perspective, but with appropriate and equally thoughtful caveats about the advantages and disadvantages of an insider’s account.”—Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law


Table of Contents

Introduction: A Judge on the Challenges to Judges
Two Kinds of Complexity
Extrajudicial Writing by Judges
Plan of the Book
Appendix: External versus Internal Complexity in Federal Adjudication

1. The Road to 219 South Dearborn Street
Education and Early Career
The Federal Judicial Appointment Process in 1981
Transition, and the Question of Initial Judicial Training

2. The Federal Judiciary Evolves
A Half-Century of Change
Input-Output, with Special Reference to the Supreme Court
Staff and Specialization in Relation to Rank

3. The Challenge of Complexity
Complexity Further Explained
Examples, Primarily from Criminal Law and Sentencing
The Impact of Technology
Judicial Insouciance about the Real
Specialization the Solution?
Internal Complexity: The Case of the Bluebook

4. Formalism and Realism in Appellate Decision Making
The Formalist Judge
The Realist Judge
Advice to New Appellate Judges

5. The Inadequate Appellate Record
Internet Research by Judges
Is a Word Really Worth a Thousand Pictures?

6. Coping Strategies for Appellate Judges I: Judicial Self-Restraint
Thayer and His Epigones
The Decline of Self-Restraint
The Rise of Constitutional Theory
Thayerism’s Death and Legacy

7. Coping Strategies for Appellate Judges II: Interpretation
The Spirit Killeth, but the Letter Giveth Life
Dreaming a Constitution
Opposites Attract and Repel
Realist Interpretation

8. Make It Simple, Make It New: Opinion Writing and Appellate Advocacy
The Signs of Bad Judicial Writing
The Writer Model versus the Manager Model
Management versus Managerialism
The Formalist Opinion
Rules of Good Opinion Writing
The Morris Opinion
Some Tips on Appellate Advocacy
Appendix: United States v. Morris (Original and Rewritten)

9. Forays into the District Court
Expert Witnesses and Trial by Jury: An Anecdotal Introduction
Party-Appointed and Court-Appointed Expert Witnesses
The Jury
Jury Trials in Patent Cases
Internet Research by Jurors
Other Issues
Appendix: Jury Instructions in Chamberlain v. Lear

10. What Can Be Done, Modestly?
Staffing
Initial Judicial Training
Continuing Judicial Education
The Widening Gap between Academia and the Judiciary
The Role of the Law Schools in Continuing Judicial Education
MOOCs to the Rescue?

Conclusion: Realism, the Path Forward
Acknowledgments
Index


Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

冯象:《摩西五经》修订版缀言

《摩西五经》初版是二〇〇五年春节过后脱稿的,一晃七年过去。其间于俗务之余译注了《智慧书》与《新约》,攒得些经验体会;“回头再看,就见出许多不足”(《创世记·修订版后记》),于是到了修订的时节。

译文的变动,粗粗算来,将近五千处。大多是进一步节俭文字、锤炼风格,但也有勘误、取别解或新说的。那初版的底本,原是八十年代中在哈佛念书时用的斯图加特旧版希伯来文传统本《圣经》(BHS, 1976),从《智慧书》开始,才换成第五版BHS(1997)。后者的注释,总体而言较旧版保守,反映了西方古典及中古语文研究的潮流。这次修订,生僻语词的校读,除开个别无善解多歧义的,一般就参照新版。

夹注,《摩西五经》不如《新约》详细,趁此机会增添两项内容:一是简要补充古代近东宗教、历史文化跟经文串解的知识;二是列出中文旧译一些有代表性的舛误——主要是和合本,因其流传较广,常被引用——方便读者对照查阅。

另有少数拗口的人名地名,做了减字换字或谐音意译。如《民数记》二十二章,善解城先知、比珥之子巴兰(Balaam,源自希腊语七十士本),据原文发音改作比兰(bil`am,谐音混乱,bela`);再如《创世纪》三十八章,犹大三个儿子取名厄尔、俄男、安儿(参较和合本:珥、俄南、示拉),是谐音意译,反讽暗示三人或因作恶而丧生,或未能尽到小叔娶寡嫂“替哥哥结子实”的义务,致使家庭不得安宁。

本书初版问世迄今,几乎每天收到各地读者和信友的电邮,“提问、商榷、谈心得或祝祷,于我都是极大的勉励”(《新约·前言》)。在此谨表谢忱,并希望这第二版也能给诸君送上一份“生命的粮”。昔日,见不足者有言:

如果译经是与圣者相遇,修订
便是“面对面同他交谈”
如摩西受嘱托:一次又一次
灵中狂喜,决口心堤。

二〇一二年五月于清华园

《摩西五经》(修订版),冯象译注,牛津大学出版社·香港,2013。

《经济学家》2012年最佳图书

参考:《经济学家》年度最佳图书:2011201320142015201620172018

分为政治、传记、历史、经济、科技、文化、文学七类:

The best books of 2012 were about Richard Burton, Titian, Rin Tin Tin, the revolution in Iran, the great famine in China, secret houses in London, good oil companies, bad pharma and management in ten words

Politics and current affairs

The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era
The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era
. By Michael Grunwald. Simon & Schuster; 528 pages.
The most interesting book so far about the first Obama administration and what the president’s $787 billion stimulus package was actually spent on, by an award-winning author and journalist. Even Republicans should read it.

The Immigrant Exodus: Why America is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent
The Immigrant Exodus: Why America is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent
. By Vivek Wadhwa. Wharton Digital Press; 106 pages.
A nation that can attract the cleverest people in the world can innovate and prosper indefinitely. An Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic explains how America is forgetting this crucial lesson—to its cost.

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