After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the 
Middle East (BOOK): Shadi Mokhtari
This book presents snapshots of human rights being appropriated, promoted, claimed, reclaimed, and contested within and between the American and Middle Eastern contexts. The inquiry has three facets: first, it explores intersections between human rights norms and power as they unfold in the era. Second, it lays out the layers of the era's American and Middle Eastern encounter on the human rights plane. Finally, it draws out the era's key lessons for moving the human rights project forward.
Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President's War Powers (BOOK): James F. Simon
This surprisingly taut and gripping book by NYU law professor Simon (What Kind of Nation) examines the limits of presidential prerogative during the Civil War. Lincoln and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney saw eye to eye on certain matters; both, for example, disliked slavery. But beginning in 1857, when Lincoln criticized Taney's decision in the Dred Scott case, the pair began to spar. They diverged further once Lincoln became president when Taney insisted that secession was constitutional and preferable to bloodshed, and blamed the Civil War on Lincoln. In 1861, Taney argued that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was illegal. This holding was, Simon argues, "a clarion call for the president to respect the civil liberties of American citizens." In an 1862 group of cases, Taney joined a minority opinion that Lincoln lacked the authority to order the seizure of Southern ships. Had Taney had the chance, suggests Simon, he would have declared the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional; he and Lincoln agreed that the Constitution left slavery up to individual states, but Lincoln argued that the president's war powers trumped states' rights. Simon's focus on Lincoln and Taney makes for a dramatic, charged narrative—and the focus on presidential war powers makes this historical study extremely timely.
Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror (BOOK): Peter Jan Honigsberg foreword by Erwin Chemerinsky
"Provides a compelling account of the human costs of the erosion of civil rights in the post-9/11 US."--Times Higher Education
"A powerful indictment Bush's War on Terror, vivid and horrifying and hard to put down."--Publishers Weekly
Speaking Up: The Unintended Costs of Free Speech in Public Schools (BOOK): Anne Proffitt Dupre
How the Supreme Court treats speech cases can be a mirror into that Court's soul, especially when the cases are about student speech. In this fascinating book, Anne Dupre reveals the deep inconsistencies and drunkard's reel of the jurisprudence in these cases, from the iconic Tinker through the recent Bong Hits 4 Jesus, and the difficulties that educators now face in regulating even threatening student speech. I have taught these cases many times, and like the kaleidoscope, they shift each time. But I will never look at them quite the same way after reading the story she tells of conflicting principles and no-win situations for teachers.--Michael A. Olivas, William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law, University of Houston, and author, The Law And Higher Education: Cases And Materials on Colleges in Court Third Edition
Dupre examines the history of the debate on free speech in schools in the contexts of protests, student publications, religious speech, textbook selection, teacher speech, and civility. She also includes as a case study the Alaska case of the students who sued when suspended for displaying a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner. Well written, insightful, and occasionally humorous, this book is a great study of free speech in schools.--Mark Bay, Library Journal
Bring[s] fresh perspectives to an always vibrant area of the law...Dupre subtly makes the argument that the trend toward greater student speech rights since the 1960s has come at a cost to the larger "liberty of a nation."--Mark Walsh, Education Week
Dupre puts the free-speech-in-school debate in context, pointing up the difference between free speech granted to a kindergartner versus a college student, as students more and more often challenge the elders on free-speech issues.--Vanessa Bush, Booklist
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