New ebooks purchased in July 2022

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

American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19, by John Fabian Witt (Yale University Press, 2020)

From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history’s answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?

High Courts in Global Perspective: Evidence, Methodologies, and Findings, edited by Nuno Garoupa, Rebecca D. Gill, and Lydia B. Tiede (University of Virginia Press, 2021)

High Courts in Global Perspective pulls back the curtain on the interlocutors of court systems internationally. This book creates a framework for a comparative analysis that weaves together a collective narrative on high court behavior and the scholarship needed for a deeper understanding of cross-national contexts. From the U.S. federal courts to the constitutional courts of Africa, from the high courts in Latin America to the Court of Justice of the European Union, high courts perform different functions in different societies, and the contributors take us through particularities of regulation and legislative review as well as considering the legitimacy of the court to serve as an honest broker in times of political transition. Unique in its focus and groundbreaking in its access, this comparative study will help scholars better understand the roles that constitutional courts and judges play in deciding some of the most divisive issues facing societies across the globe. From Africa to Europe to Australia and continents and nations in between, we get an insider’s look into the construction and workings of the world’s courts while also receiving an object lesson on best practices in comparative quantitative scholarship today.

Political Philosophy and Taxation: a History from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by Robert F. van Brederode (Springer, 2022)

This book explores how taxation is related to the role of the state and its relationship with its constituents, the concept of private property rights, the concepts of societal fairness and justice, and the battle between the individual and the collective. This book appeals to students and scholars who want to know how philosophers in the past and present think about taxation, and how their thinking has developed through cross-influencing.

Tracing British West Indian Slavery Laws: a Comparative Analysis of Legal Transplants, by Justine K. Collins (Routledge, 2022) 

This book provides a legal historical insight into colonial laws on enslavement and the plantation system in the British West Indies. The volume is a work of comparative legal history of the English-speaking Caribbean which concentrates on how the laws of England served to catalyse the slavery laws and also legislation pertaining to post-emancipation societies. The book illustrates how these “borrowed” laws from England not only developed colonial slavery laws within the English-speaking Caribbean but also inspired the slavery codes of a number of North American plantation systems. The cusp of the work focuses on the interconnectivities among the English-speaking slave holding Atlantic and how persons, free and unfree, moved throughout the system and brought laws with them which greatly affected the various enslaved societies.

Trusts Law (5th edition), by Charlie Webb and Tim Akkouh (Red Globe Press, 2017)

This textbook is a comprehensive and accessible guide to Trusts Law. The authors bring a unique combination of academic rigour and hands-on commercial experience to the explanation of their subject and it is these practical insights which make the book essential reading for all law students. 

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.