New ebooks purchased in April 2022

A selection of law ebook titles purchased in April, in association with the ebooks@cambridge team. These are all available through iDiscover, and include:

A Treatise on Dharma, by Yajnavalkya; edited and translated by Patrick Olivelle (Harvard University Press, 2019)

A Treatise on Dharma, written in the fourth or fifth century, is the finest example of the genre of dharmaśāstra—texts on religious, civil, and criminal law and the duties of rulers—that informed Indian life for a thousand years. It illuminates major cultural innovations, such as the prominence of documents in commercial and legal proceedings, the use of ordeals in resolving disputes, and the growing importance of yoga in spiritual practices. Composed by an anonymous author during the reign of the imperial Guptas, the Treatise is ascribed to the Upanishadic philosopher Yajnavalkya, whose instruction of a group of sages serves as the frame narrative for the work. It became the most influential legal text in medieval India, and a twelfth-century interpretation came to be considered “the law of the land” under British rule. This translation of A Treatise on Dharma, based on a new critical edition and presented alongside the Sanskrit original in the Devanagari script, opens the classical age of ancient Indian law to modern readers.

ALWD Guide to Legal Citation (7th edition), by Association of Legal Writing Directors and Carolyn V. Williams (Aspen Publishing, 2021)

The ALWD Guide to Legal Citation explains legal citation formats for all types of legal documents in a clear, pedagogically sound manner. The Guide’s plain language, numerous examples, and clear, integrated structure to explaining the legal system of citation for legal materials is easy for students, professors, practitioners, and judges to understand and use. 

Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West, edited by Katrina Jagodinsky and Pablo Mitchell (University Press of Kansas, 2018)

In the American imagination “the West” denotes a border—between civilization and wilderness, past and future, native and newcomer—and its lawlessness is legendary. In fact, there was an abundance of law in the West, as in all borderland regions of vying and overlapping claims, jurisdictions, and domains. It is this legal borderland that Beyond the Borders of the Law explores. Combining the concepts and insights of critical legal studies and western/borderlands history, this book demonstrates how profoundly the North American West has been, and continues to be, a site of contradictory, overlapping, and overreaching legal structures and practices steeped in articulations of race, gender, and power.

Choice of Law and Multistate Justice (Special edition), by Friedrich Juenger (Brill, 2005)

A revised version of the late Friedrich Juenger’s Hague Lectures, this "special edition" presents the most pervasive and trenchant critique of the traditional approaches to choice of law, both of the multilateralist and unilateralist kind, to date. An undisputed classic, Juenger's book is both a timeless critique of the traditional choice-of-law approaches and a timely plea to move beyond them in the age of globalization.

Research Handbook on Law and Literature, edited by Peter Goodrich, Daniela Gandorfer and Cecilia Gebruers (Edward Elgar, 2022)

In this original and thought-provoking Research Handbook, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, lawyers, judges, and writers offer a range of perspectives on rethinking law by means of literary concepts. Presenting a comprehensive introduction to jurisliterary themes, it destabilises the traditional hierarchy that places law before literature and exposes the literary nature of the legal. Chapters explore multiple genres and modes, from travel reviews to graphic novels, from poetics to ghost-writing, from cartography to speculative fiction. Working with diverse methods and areas of inquiry, including enstrangement, colonial entanglements, blockchain narratives, transing and transgression of many kinds, matterphor, aesthetics and epistemology, this Research Handbook provides a systematic application of literary approaches to the reading of law.

State Theory and the Law: an Introduction, by Thomas Vesting (Edward Elgar, 2022)

There has been renewed and growing interest in exploring the significant role played by law in the centralization of power and sovereignty – right from the earliest point. This timely book serves as an introduction into state theory, providing an overview of the conceptual history and the interdisciplinary tradition of the continental European general theory of the state.

All of these ebooks are available to current University of Cambridge staff and students with a Raven password. A full list of ebook platforms can be viewed via the ebooks@cambridge LibGuide.