Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 328 pages.

Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail industries, has evolved from an arena dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. And as in other areas of retail, this transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process. This has been especially pronounced in bookselling, argues Laura J. Miller, bccause more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives that debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to questions of profit?

In Reluctant Capitalists, Miller looks at a century of book retailing, demonstrating that the independent/chain dynamic is not entirely new. It began one hundred years ago when department stores began selling books, continued through the 1960s with the emergence of national chain stores, and exploded with the formation of “superstores” in the 1990s. The advent of the Internet has further spurred tremendous changes in how booksellers approach their business. All of these changes have met resistance from book professionals and readers who believe that the book business should somehow be “above” market forces and instead embrace more noble priorities.

Miller uses interviews with bookstore customers and members of the book industry to explain why books evoke such distinct and heated reactions. She reveals why customers have such fierce loyalty to certain bookstores and why they identify so strongly with different types of books. In the process, she also teases out the meanings of retailing and consumption in American culture at large, underscoring her point that any type of consumer behavior is inevitably political, with consequences for communities as well as commercial institutions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
1. Commercial Culture and Its Discontents
2. From Dry Goods Merchant to Internet Mogul: Bookselling through American History
3. Providing for the Sovereign Consumer: Selecting and Recommending Books
4. Designing the Bookstore for the Standardized Consumer
5. Serving the Entertained Consumer: The Multifunction Bookstore
6. Bargaining with the Rational Consumer: Selling the Low-Cost Book
7. The Revolt of the Retailers: Independent Bookseller Activism
8. Pursuing the Citizen-Consumer: Consumption as Politics
Appendix: Ownership Histories of Major American Chain Bookstores
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes

Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes, Harvard University Press, 2006. 320 pages.

How should a judge’s moral convictions bear on his judgments about what the law is? Lawyers, sociologists, philosophers, politicians, and judges all have answers to that question: these range from “nothing” to “everything.” In his new book Ronald Dworkin argues that the question is much more complex than it has often been taken to be and charts a variety of dimensions–semantic, jurisprudential, and doctrinal–in which law and morals are undoubtedly interwoven. He restates and summarizes his own widely discussed account of these connections, which emphasizes the sovereign importance of moral principle in legal and constitutional interpretation, and then reviews and criticizes the most influential rival theories to his own. He argues that pragmatism is empty as a theory of law, that value pluralism misunderstands the nature of moral concepts, that constitutional originalism reflects an impoverished view of the role of a constitution in a democratic society, and that contemporary legal positivism is based on a mistaken semantic theory and an erroneous account of the nature of authority. In the course of that critical study he discusses the work of many of the most influential lawyers and philosophers of the era, including Isaiah Berlin, Richard Posner, Cass Sunstein, Antonin Scalia, and Joseph Raz. Dworkin’s new collection of essays and original chapters is a model of lucid, logical, and impassioned reasoning that will advance the crucially important debate about the roles of justice in law.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Law and Morals
1. Pragmatism and Law
2. In Praise of Theory
3. Darwin’s New Bulldog
4. Moral Pluralism
5. Originalism and Fidelity
6. Hart’s Postscript and the Point of Political Philosophy
7. Thirty Years On
8. The Concepts of Law
9. Rawls and the Law
Notes
Sources

Adrian Vermeule, Judging under Uncertainty

Adrian Vermeule, Judging under Uncertainty: An Institutional Theory of Legal Interpretation, Harvard University Press, 2006.

How should judges, in America and elsewhere, interpret statutes and the Constitution? Previous work on these fundamental questions has typically started from abstract views about the nature of democracy or constitutionalism, or the nature of legal language, or the essence of the rule of law. From these conceptual premises, theorists typically deduce an ambitious role for judges, particularly in striking down statutes on constitutional grounds. In this book, Adrian Vermeule breaks new ground by rejecting both the conceptual approach and the judge-centered conclusions of older theorists. Vermeule shows that any approach to legal interpretation rests on institutional and empirical premises about the capacities of judges and the systemic effects of their rulings. Drawing upon a range of social science tools from political science, economics, decision theory, and other disciplines, he argues that legal interpretation is above all an exercise in decisionmaking under severe empirical uncertainty. In view of their limited information and competence, judges should adopt a restrictive, unambitious set of tools for interpreting statutory and constitutional provisions, deferring to administrative agencies where statutes are unclear and deferring to legislatures where constitutional language is unclear or states general aspirations.

Contents

Introduction (PDF) 1

I. Critique
1 Interpretation without Institutions (PDF) 15
2 Dynamism and Pragmatism: A Tale of Two Nirvanas 40

II. Reconstruction
3 The Institutional Turn 63
4 Judicial Capacities: A Case Study 86
5 Systemic Effects and Judicial Coordination 118

III. Applications
6 Judges, Uncertainty, and Bounded Rationality 153
7 Statutory Interpretation 183
8 Judicial Review and Constitutional Interpretation 230
Conclusion: Interim Interpretive Theory 289

Notes 293
Index (PDF) 323