“Blockchains will matter crucially; this book, beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience, powerfully demonstrates how.”
—Lawrence Lessig

“Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace—explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order… Blockchain and the Law is not just a theoretical guide. It’s also a moral one.”
—Fortune

Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros?

The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to make financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen, they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities’ ability to supervise activities in banking, commerce, and the law. As this essential book makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.

“If you…don’t ‘get’ crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you.”
—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous, it is inflexible, which leaves it vulnerable, once it has been set in motion, to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address.”
—James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

A uniquely data-rich analysis of the British elite from the Victorian era to today: who gets in, how they get there, what they like and look like, where they go to school, and what politics they perpetuate.

Think of the British elite and familiar caricatures spring to mind. But are today’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and political instincts?

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman combed through a trove of data in search of an answer, scrutinizing the profiles, interests, and careers of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today. At the heart of this meticulously researched study is the historical database of Who’s Who, but Reeves and Friedman also mined genealogical records, examined probate data, and interviewed over 200 leading figures from a wide range of backgrounds and professions to uncover who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want.

What they found is that there is less movement at the top than we think. Yes, there has been some progress on including women and Black and Asian Brits, but those born into the top 1 percent are just as likely to get into the elite today as they were 125 years ago. What has changed is how elites present themselves. Today’s elite pedal hard to convince us they are perfectly ordinary.

Why should we care? Because the elites we have affect the politics we get. While scholars have long proposed that the family you are born into, and the schools you attend, leave a mark on the exercise of power, the empirical evidence has been thin—until now.

Define and Rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference.

A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice.

Maine’s theories were later translated into “native administration” in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law’s legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectual and political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key figures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania’s first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism’s political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

Following a vast expansion in the twentieth century, government is beginning to creak at the joints under its enormous weight. The signs are clear: a bloated civil service, low approval ratings for Congress and the President, increasing federal-state conflict, rampant distrust of politicians and government officials, record state deficits, and major unrest among public employees.

In this compact, clearly written book, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein advocates a much smaller federal government, arguing that our over-regulated state allows too much discretion on the part of regulators, which results in arbitrary, unfair decisions, rent-seeking, and other abuses. Epstein bases his classical liberalism on the twin pillars of the rule of law and of private contracts and property rights—an overarching structure that allows private property to keep its form regardless of changes in population, tastes, technology, and wealth. This structure also makes possible a restrained public administration to implement limited objectives. Government continues to play a key role as night-watchman, but with the added flexibility in revenues and expenditures to attend to national defense and infrastructure formation.

Although no legal system can eliminate the need for discretion in the management of both private and public affairs, predictable laws can cabin the zone of discretion and permit arbitrary decisions to be challenged. Joining a set of strong property rights with sound but limited public administration could strengthen the rule of law, with its virtues of neutrality, generality, clarity, consistency, and forward-lookingness, and reverse the contempt and cynicism that have overcome us.

Winner, 2022 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award, Arkansas Historical Association

The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state’s development.

Barnes shows that the Klan seemed to wield power everywhere in 1920s Arkansas. Klansmen led businesses and held elected offices and prominent roles in legal, medical, and religious institutions, while the women of the Klan supported rallies and charitable activities and planned social gatherings where cross burnings were regular occurrences. Inside their organization, Klan members bonded during picnic barbeques and parades and over shared religious traditions. Outside of it, they united to direct armed threats, merciless physical brutality, and torrents of hateful rhetoric against individuals who did not conform to their exclusionary vision.

By the mid-1920s, internal divisions, scandals, and an overzealous attempt to dominate local and state elections caused Arkansas’s Klan to fall apart nearly as quickly as it had risen. Yet as the organization dissolved and the formal trappings of its flamboyant presence receded, the attitudes the Klan embraced never fully disappeared. In documenting this history, Barnes shows how the Klan’s early success still casts a long shadow on the state to this day.

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate.

What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently.

How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason.

Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

A robust defense of democratic populism by one of America’s most renowned and controversial constitutional scholars—the award-winning author of We the People.

Populism is a threat to the democratic world, fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds—or so its critics would have us believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce Ackerman showed that Americans have repeatedly rejected this view. Now he draws on a quarter century of scholarship in this essential and surprising inquiry into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism around the world. He takes us to India, South Africa, Italy, France, Poland, Burma, Israel, and Iran and provides a blow-by-blow account of the tribulations that confronted popular movements in their insurgent campaigns for constitutional democracy. Despite their many differences, populist leaders such as Nehru, Mandela, and de Gaulle encountered similar dilemmas at critical turning points, and each managed something overlooked but essential. Rather than deploy their charismatic leadership to retain power, they instead used it to confer legitimacy to the citizens and institutions of constitutional democracy.

Ackerman returns to the United States in his last chapter to provide new insights into the Founders’ acts of constitutional statesmanship as they met very similar challenges to those confronting populist leaders today. In the age of Trump, the democratic system of checks and balances will not survive unless ordinary citizens rally to its defense. Revolutionary Constitutions shows how activists can learn from their predecessors’ successes and profit from their mistakes, and sets up Ackerman’s next volume, which will address how elites and insiders co-opt and destroy the momentum of revolutionary movements.

Winner of the Julia Ward Howe Prize

“The gripping story of the most important environmental law case ever decided by the Supreme Court.”
—Scott Turow

“In the tradition of A Civil Action, this book makes a compelling story of the court fight that paved the way for regulating the emissions now overheating the planet. It offers a poignant reminder of how far we’ve come—and how far we still must go.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

On an unseasonably warm October morning, an idealistic young lawyer working on a shoestring budget for an environmental organization no one had heard of hand-delivered a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency, asking it to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from new cars. The Clean Air Act authorized the EPA to regulate “any air pollutant” thought to endanger public health. But could carbon dioxide really be considered a harmful pollutant? And even if the EPA had the authority to regulate emissions, could it be forced to do so?

The Rule of Five tells the dramatic story of how Joe Mendelson and the band of lawyers who joined him carried his case all the way to the Supreme Court. It reveals how accident, infighting, luck, superb lawyering, politics, and the arcane practices of the Supreme Court collided to produce a legal miracle. The final ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, by a razor-thin 5–4 margin brilliantly crafted by Justice John Paul Stevens, paved the way to important environmental safeguards which the Trump administration fought hard to unravel and many now seek to expand.

“There’s no better book if you want to understand the past, present, and future of environmental litigation.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“A riveting story, beautifully told.”
—Foreign Affairs

“Wonderful…A master class in how the Supreme Court works and, more broadly, how major cases navigate through the legal system.”
—Science

One of the most influential texts in the Middle Ages, The Rule of Saint Benedict offers guidance about both the spiritual and organizational dimensions, from the loftiest to the lowliest, of monastic life. This new Latin-English edition has features of interest for first-time readers of the Rule as well as for scholars of medieval history and language.

The Latin text is a transcription of manuscript 914 of the Abbey of St. Gall (Switzerland), an early ninth-century copy regarded as the version that most closely reproduces Benedict's style. The saint’s idiom was informal, sometimes conversational, and heavily influenced by the spoken Latin of the sixth century CE. In the Rule his voice and thought processes come through in all their strength and humanity. Readers will find background to the monastic life in the notes. This volume also includes texts and translations of two letters that explain the origins of the St. Gall version as well as an index to all the translated materials.

Drawing on early modern literature and historical documents, this study investigates the various political, discursive, and symbolic measures employed to negotiate and support female sovereignty by both early modern writers and the rulers themselves. The detailed analysis of the women's responses--or inability to respond--to these strictures underscores the relationship between early modern authors and sovereigns and the complex and vexed situation of European women rulers.

Contributors are Tracy Adams, Anne J. Cruz, Éva Deák, Mary C. Ekman, Catherine L. Howey, Elizabeth Ketner, Carole Levin, Sandra Logan, Magdalena S. Sánchez, Mihoko Suzuki, and Barbara F. Weissberger.

This book explores the trials of Spanish democracy from the death of Franco to the present. But the heart of the story is the generation that came of age in the 1960s, assumed political power, and formed the first Socialist government in 1982 with Felipe González as Prime Minister, which was returned to power in four consecutive elections. Starting in 1993, however, the government came under siege. High officials were accused of authorizing the assassination of as many as twenty-eight Basque nationalists suspected of terrorism over the years, and of covering up these crimes. This scandal, along with other disclosures of corruption and serious law-breaking, shook the country's confidence in its legal and political institutions and in its ability to hold its leaders to the rule of law.

The author probes for the roots of these events in the character of the generation that assumed power and in the immature nature of the civil society it inherited. Facing unusually high unemployment, internal economic and social pressures, the stringent requirements for joining the European Union, and the demands of Catalan and Basque nationalists, the government lost its way and was eventually voted out of office.

Using Spain as the example, the book examines issues of governance, social change, and internal nationalist movements as they relate to the civil society and the wider polity everywhere.

An essential study of the rule of law by one of the world’s leading liberal political and legal philosophers.

The meaning and value of the rule of law have been debated since antiquity. For many, the rule of law has become the essence of good government. But Jeremy Waldron takes a different view, arguing that it is but one star in a constellation of ideals that define our political morality, ranking alongside democracy, human rights, economic freedom, and social justice.

This timely essay collection, from one of the most respected political philosophers of his generation, is a brief on behalf of thoughtfulness: the intervention of human intelligence in the application of law. Waldron defends thoughtfulness against the claim that it threatens to replace the rule of law with the arbitrary rule of people. To the contrary, he argues, the rule of law requires thoughtfulness: it is impossible to apply a standard such as “reasonableness” on the basis of rules alone, and common legal activities like arguing in court and reasoning from precedents are poorly served by algorithmic logics. This rich compilation also addresses the place of law in protecting human dignity, the relation between rule of law and legislation, and whether vagueness in the law is at odds with law’s role in guiding action.

Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law emphasizes the value of procedures rather than the substance or outcome of legal decisions. Challenging the view that predictability and clarity are cardinal virtues, Waldron shows that real-world controversies often are best approached using a relatively thin concept of the rule of law, together with the thoughtfulness that a legal system frames and enables.