The authors analyze abortion and death penalty decisions by the Supreme Court and argue that they provide prime examples of abrupt legal change. After proposing that the strength of legal arguments has at least as much impact on Court decisions as do public opinion and justices' political beliefs, they focus on the way litigators propel certain issues onto the Court's agenda and seek to persuade the justices to affect legal change.

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality. The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.

No, this is not specifically designed for people who expect to be Hollywood stars, but rather for women who wish to return to their maiden name, for children who want their caring stepdad's name, and changes for ethnic or sociological reasons. Of course, if you want to alter your ethnic or hard-to-pronounce name to something catchy for showbiz purposes, that's okay too. As is typical with the Do-It-Yourself Legal Publishers series, this book includes every possible scrap of information on the change-your-name subject. Anosike includes courtroom transcripts of actual name-change cases, all the legal forms and step-by-steps on filling them out, and the legal code for every state and territory in the U.S. Much of this material is new (the book had been published previously in 1990), and it is the specifics of state-by-state statutes and the hand-holding instructions on filling out the legal documents that make this the quintessential legal-cost-minimizing manual currently available. - Joe Collins; 126p-

Why is the law notoriously unclear, arcane, slow to change in the face of changing circumstances? In this sweeping comparative analysis of the lawmaking process from ancient Rome to the present day, Alan Watson argues that the answer has largely to do with the mixed ancestry of modern law, the confusion of sources—custom, legislation, scholarly writing, and judicial precedent—from which it derives.

Exploring how the way in which assisted dying is legalised affects the regime produced, this text suggests that the experience of one jurisdiction cannot readily be translated to another, and argues for a subtler understanding of euthanasia against the backgrounds of diverse legal and political cultures.

Presents comprehensively the currently un-mapped constellation of issues related to climate change, public health, and the law.