Deference: The Legal Concept and the Legal Practice, coauthored by Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman (Radzyner Law School), analyzes the concept of deference and how it relates to legal issues such as precedent, appellate review, federalism, and separation of powers in American law. The authors suggest that deference, which centers on how one deals with previous legal decisions, is fundamental to law, yet remains underanalyzed and undertheorized. 

Their book aims to bring deference to the forefront of legal discussion and serve as a starting point for future scholarship about the concept. The authors provide a descriptive and conceptual analysis of deference that they hope will be applied by future projects on the topic.  

“A lot of legal disputes are about deference—who gets to decide a question and how much weight those decisions hold for later actors,” Lawson says. “In order to address those disputes, one needs to know what deference means and how it functions. Our goal in the book is to provide a vocabulary and analytical framework for those disputes that will hopefully make discussion clearer and more productive, however one thinks those disputes should ultimately be resolved.”

Gary Lawson is the Philip S. Beck Professor of Law. He has authored six editions of a textbook on administrative law, co-authored two books on aspects of constitutional history, and authored or coauthored more than seventy scholarly articles.

 Deference: The Legal Concept and the Legal Practice was published in November 2019 by Oxford University Press.

Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell (Fordham University School of Law) coauthored The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s, which explores the construction of the US Constitution and its exclusion of women and people of color.

“How did this exclusion actually become part of the white, male ideology of what they called democracy?” Leonard asks. “There’s a weird paradox in there—it’s not just that they forgot these people; the exclusion itself was part of the notion of what democracy was to these white men.”

Although many Constitutional scholars look primarily to the courts to track the interpretation of the Constitution, Leonard and Cornell’s analysis considers a variety of social, political, cultural, and institutional factors.

Through this broader analysis, the book explores how nontraditional constitutional figures like the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten played a role in shaping the law alongside the white, male elites like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall.

Gerald Leonard is a leading scholar on constitutionalism and previously authored The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois.

 The Partisan Republic was published in January 2019 by Cambridge University Press.

The Color Line provides a concise history of the role of race and ethnicity in the United States, from the early colonial period to the present, to reveal the public policies and private actions that have enabled racial subordination and the stories of those who have fought against it.

For most of American history, whiteness has been more valuable than citizenship. Non-whites have been second-class citizens—subject to enslavement, segregation, lynching, deportation, internment, and mass incarceration.

Despite reforms, the color line persists, in part the entrenched legacy of past practices.

Americans of color, as well as some whites, have opposed the color line. Some have devoted their lives to combating racial inequity, and some have given their lives in that struggle. The Color Line offers that double-edged story.

Focusing on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans, it explores how racial subordination developed, how it has been resisted, and how it has been sustained through independence, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and subsequent reforms. The Color Line also considers the position of European immigrants, addresses relevant moral issues, and identifies persistent problems of public policy, arguing that all four centuries of racial subordination are relevant to understanding contemporary America and some of its most urgent issues.

David Lyons is a professor of philosophy and a professor of law emeritus and has been a political activist since the 1940s.

The Color Line was published in December 2019 by Routledge.

Summary provided by Professor Lyons.

Linda McClain, an expert in feminist legal studies, examines the concept of bigotry in her new book, Who’s the Bigot?: Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. She traces the rhetoric of bigotry and notes that, although there is a long political history of denouncing bigotry, people disagree over exactly who is a bigot and what constitutes bigotry.

McClain says that in her research, “It was striking how much more frequently the language of bigotry featured in the context of racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism, rather than sexism.

 “One of the things I say in my book is that bigotry is a rhetorical tool. Someone says, ‘you are branding me a bigot!’ and that’s like a tactic for saying, ‘I’m not like those odious racists of the past! How can you apply that to me?’”

Linda McClain is the Robert Kent Professor of Law and has authored and coauthored numerous books on topics related to family law, gender issues, and civil rights. 

Who’s the Bigot? was published by Oxford University Press in March 2020.

Jay Wexler examines the importance of religious freedom for minority religions in his book, Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life. The book chronicles Wexler’s travels across the country to engage with non-Christians who have been at the forefront of advocating for religious liberty in the US.

He suggests that we live in a post-separation of Church and State system, and illustrates this through several Supreme Court cases that demonstrate the country’s trend away from a secular state. If a secular state is out of reach, he argues that a pluralist society is the next-best option to uphold free speech, inclusivity, and diversity.

“Even if it’s chaotic, I prefer the chaos to hegemony,” says Wexler, who has written two previous books about church-state law. “My guess is that over time the chaos will go away and people will recognize that we do live in a religiously diverse nation, so I think it’s at least worth trying.”

Professor Wexler’s scholarship focuses on church-state law, constitutional law, environmental law, and marijuana law, and he has authored six books. 

Our Non-Christian Nation was published in June 2019 by Stanford University Press.