FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

The Woman Who Would Be President

Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President by Jill Norgren

Obscured in the historical shadow by her colleague, Susan B. Anthony, Belva Lockwood became the first woman ever allowed to practice at bar of the U. S. Supreme Court in 1879.  She continued her trailblazing ways as the first woman to run a full campaign for the U. S. Presidency in 1884.  Lockwood would be more widely recognized today if her personal papers had not been destroyed after her death.  Norgren is Professor Emerita of Government at John Jay College and the Graduate  Center of the City University of New York.  A copy of the book is in the Law Library                      

Posted by Trisha Simonds

Disability Harassment

"Building on the insights of both disability studies and civil rights scholars, Mark C. Weber frames his examination of disability harassment on the premise that disabled people are members of a minority group that must negotiate an artificial environment of physical and attitudinal barriers.  The book considers courts' approaches to the problem of disability harassment, particularly the application of an analogy to race and sex harassment and the development of legal remedies and policy reforms under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

While litigation under the ADA has addressed discrimination in public accomodations, employment, and education, Weber points out that the law has done little to combat disability harassment.  He recommends that arguments based on unused portions of the ADA should be developed and new legal remedies advanced to address the problem.  Disability Harassment also draws on legal sources to explore special problems of harassment in the public schools, and closes with an appeal to judges and lawmakers for expanded legal protection against harassment." Excerpt taken from front book jacket.

Mark C. Weber's new book on disability rights is available at KF 480 .W43 in the FSU Law Library.

Posted by Marin Dell

A Guide to Mooting

The Art of Argument: A Guide to Mooting is for law students who want a step-by-step guide on how to ready themselves for an international mooting competition. However, the guidance Christopher Kee gives on "the process of developing, presenting and defending a convincing argument" will benefit other students as well. Here's what's covered:

•    what to do when you first get the moot problem
•    how to begin researching the subject matter
•    how to build an argument
•    how to present written and oral submissions
•    the value of practice moots
•    how to handle yourself at the competition

In case the word "mooting" has aroused your curiosity, check here and here.

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Ethical Eye: Animal Welfare

Animal Welfare

Just how much do animals suffer? Does legislation make a difference to animal welfare and do economic factors hinder its improvement ? The treatment of animals has long been a subject of debate, yet attitudes towards animal welfare still differ greatly and genuine concern for animals has only really developed over the last few decades. The general public is concerned by this issue and has gradually started to exert pressure on those who use animals to change their ways and on politicians to introduce new legislation.

This book about animal welfare takes a detailed look at the ethical issues, religious viewpoints and the attitudes of different countries towards animal welfare, as well as at the Council of Europe conventions and other European instruments aimed at tackling this issue at an international level.

Posted by Toni Urquhart

The Rescue of Joshua Glover

The Rescue of Joshua Glover

On March 11, 1854, the people of Wisconsin prevented agents of the federal government from carrying away the fugitive slave, Joshua Glover. Assembling in mass outside the Milwaukee courthouse, they demanded that the federal officers respect his civil liberties as they would those of any other citizen of the state. When the officers refused, the crowd took matters into its own hands and rescued Joshua Glover. The federal government brought his rescuers to trial, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervened and took the bold step of ruling the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.

Posted by Toni Urquhart

The Silencing of Ruby McCollum

The Silencing of Ruby McCollum:  Race, Class, and Gender in the South by Tammy Evans  (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2006).  Evans is an adjunct professor of composition at the University of Miami's Bradenton campus.

Silencing refutes the carefully constructed public memory of one of the most famous biracial murders in the U.S.  In 1952, Ruby McCollum, an African American housewife, drove to the office of Dr. C. LeRoy Adams, beloved white physician in the segregated town of Live Oak, Florida, and gunned down the doctor. 

"This groundbreaking work reads like a murder mystery, only in this case what has been killed is our American integrity and the right of an individual to a fair trial.  Evans has finally addressed the pervasive silence that distorts, fragments, and threatens to bury the history of so many southern places and people." -- Rebecca Mark, Tulane University

Posted by Trisha Simonds

Living Speech for All

No one can love and be just who does not understand the empire of force and know how not to respect it. ~Simone Weil

This single sentence from Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad triggered James Boyd White’s unwavering interest in the activity of speech. His book, Living Speech, is “a profound examination of the ethics of human expression—in the law and in the rest of life.”

From the publisher:

Language is our key to imagining the world, others, and ourselves. Yet sometimes our ways of talking dehumanize others and trivialize human experience. In war other people are imagined as enemies to be killed. The language of race objectifies those it touches, and propaganda disables democracy. Advertising reduces us to consumers, and clichés destroy the life of the imagination.

Boyd’s breakdown of Weil’s “empire of force”:

That is in fact the poem’s central achievement: to identify and to criticize, indeed to undermine, what Weil calls the empire of force—the ideology, the way of imagining the world and oneself and others within it—that is always present in war and required by it, but present also in our lives whenever people deny the humanity of others whom they destroy, manipulate, or exploit.

Posted by Toni Urquhart

A New Judicial Biography

The law library’s Acquisitions Assistant position has its perks: Clearly I have the advantage of a heads-up on titles ordered and titles arriving on an approval basis. Some of these items appeal to the lover-of-good-story in me and therefore get snagged out of normal library processing, toted home, devoured, then returned to circulation where they’ll be shelved to await the next reader. I can think of a few books offhand—Habeas Codfish, Breaking Silence, If Only, Storming the Court, and Executed on a Technicality—whose pages have crossed my eyes before they’ve reached the bookshelf. Here’s a new one to add to my list: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by G. Edward White. (It’ll be with me over the weekend.)

I’m keenly interested in this man whose eloquent style and literary interests seem much more akin to those of “a poet or writer instead of a Supreme Court justice.” In fact, White tells us that Holmes had to give up some of his interests: “He had quite self-consciously given up those other pursuits in order to concentrate on law.” I’d like to think of the magnificent handlebar mustache as a self-consciously chosen remainder of his inclination for adventure.

Here’s an autograph:

Posted by Toni Urquhart

The Case of Mimi the Cat

After being shot at by a local villager just before sunrise, a black cat, which “ducked and ran away,” goes missing for a couple of weeks. She returns home with a scratch on her paw. Two witnesses to the alleged armed attack offer testimony based on the psychological faculty of perception—in this case, visual acuity.

Mimi’s case and other smile-eliciting case descriptions are in a new book published by Amsterdam University Press: The Popular Policeman and Other Cases: Psychological Perspectives on Legal Evidence. (We have a copy.)

The authors hope to encourage consideration “of often neglected issues in the field of psychology and the law.” There is potential for expert witness testimony in areas “that psychologists are not thought to possess relevant information.” The case descriptions collected here may provide useful training in the application of psychology within a legal context. An added plus: “…some cases, in spite of their sometimes dramatic qualities, may occasionally elicit a smile.”

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Abuse of Trust

Tamar Frankel’s Trust and Honesty: America’s Business Culture at a Crossroad was initially entitled “Abuse of Trust.” Frankel says she chose a different title after her research indicated:

“It is that America is becoming used to abuse of trust and deception. It is that American culture has been moving toward dishonesty, regardless of whether fraud has been actually rising.”

The evolution of American culture to a postmodernist insensitivity toward accuracy has not happened overnight. “American culture has been moving in the direction of dishonesty for some time.”

In the first chapter of Trust and Honesty, Frankel describes a few types of fraud that have been on the increase—fraud in healthcare, insurance frauds, identity theft, energy theft, students’ cheating and dishonest victims. I’m wondering what happened to a mention of dishonest writers (see Michiko Kakutani’s piece in The New York Times).

This book urges American’s to care about widespread dishonesty. Frankel says that “an abuse of trust can destroy the economy and prosperity and America’s world leadership.” She is urging us to put the brakes on further acceptance of dishonesty as a way of life.  Even Maureen Dowd reminds us in ‘Oprah! How Could Ya?’ that the “sharing of feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth.”

Check out this latest addition to our library’s collection and draw your own conclusions.

Posted by Toni Urquhart