"1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Threatened by Elizabeth's intellect, independence, and outspokenness, her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her and makes a plan to put her back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum. The horrific conditions...

In recent decades, laws and workplace policies have emerged that seek to address the "balance" between work and family. Millions of women in the U.S. take some time off when they give birth or adopt a child, making use of "family-friendly" laws and policies in order to spend time recuperating and to initiate a bond with their children. The Balance Gap traces the paths individual women take in understanding and invoking work/life balance laws and policies....

"Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha is a poet and essayist whose most recent book, the memoir Dirty River, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. She is also a long-time member of the disability justice movement, which advocates for the rights of the disabled. In her latest book of essays, Leah writes passionately and personally about disability justice, on subject such as the creation...

One of the major questions facing the world today is the role of law in shaping identity and in balancing tradition with modernity. In an arid corner of the Mediterranean region in the first decades of the twentieth century, Mandate Palestine was confronting these very issues. Assaf Likhovski examines the legal history of Palestine, showing how law and identity interacted in a complex colonial society in which British rulers and Jewish and Arab subjects...

In the early 1990's, when organizations representing the 2.6 million U.S. nationals living abroad appealed to Congress for their own non-voting representative, the response of one Senator was to dismiss these "moans of the mink-swathed Americans abroad." However, the image of a life of luxury abroad is usually a harsher reality complicated by income taxes, military duty, and legal jurisdiction. What exactly is the obligation of a state toward citizens...

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. Maria Agren chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences.A public sphere of influence--including the wife's family and the local community--held sway over...

A Quaker lawyer looks at Friends' relationship with the American legal system and at Friends' legal ethics. George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, admonished his followers against "going to law." In this fascinating, wide-ranging book, a Quaker lawyer explores the relationship between Quakers and the American legal system and discusses Friends' legal ethics. A highly influential group in the US both for their spiritual ideals of...

This all new edition is based on Frederic G. Reamer's key reference for practitioners: Social Work Malpractice and Liability: Strategies for Prevention. Rooted in his own experiences as an expert witness in court and licensing board cases, the volume introduces the concepts of negligence, malpractice, and liability before turning to the subject of risk management. Drawing and reflecting on recent cases and research, Reamer details a variety of problems...

In Egypt's modern history, reform of personal status laws has often formed an integral part of political, cultural, and religious contestations among different factions of society. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, two significant reforms were introduced in Egyptian personal status laws: women's right to petition for no-fault judicial divorce law (khul') and the new mediation-based family courts. Legal Reform and Gender Justice examines...

This legal history of the Chinese experience in the American West, based on the author's lifetime of research in legal sources all over the West--from California to Montana to New Mexico--serves as a basic account of the legal treatment of Chinese immigrants in the West.