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According to Judith Baer, feminist legal scholarship today does not effectively address the harsh realities of women's lives. Feminists have marginalized themselves, she argues, by withdrawing from mainstream intellectual discourse. InOur Lives Before the Law, Baer thus presents the framework for a new feminist jurisprudence--one that would return feminism to relevance by connecting it in fresh and creative ways with liberalism. Baer starts from the traditional feminist premise that the legal system has a male bias and must do more to help women combat violence and overcome political, economic, and social disadvantages. She argues, however, that feminist scholarship has over-corrected for this bias. By emphasizing the ways in which the system fails women, feminists have lost sight of how it can be used to promote women's interests and have made it easy for conventional scholars to ignore legitimate feminist concerns. In particular, feminists have wrongly linked the genuine flaws of conventional legal theory to its basis in liberalism, arguing that liberalism focuses too heavily on individual freedom and not enough on individual responsibility. In fact, Baer contends, liberalism rests on a presumption of personal responsibility and can be used as a powerful intellectual foundation for holding men and male institutions more accountable for their actions. The traditional feminist approach, Baer writes, has led to endless debates about such abstract matters as character differences between men and women, and has failed to deal sufficiently with concrete problems with the legal system. She thus constructs a new feminist interpretation of three central components of conventional theory--equality, rights, and responsibility--through analysis of such pressing legal issues as constitutional interpretation, reproductive choice, and fetal protection. Baer concludes by presenting the outline of what she calls \"feminist post-liberalism\": an approach to jurisprudence that not only values individual freedoms but also recognizes our responsibility for addressing individuals' needs, however different those may be for men and women. Powerfully and passionately written,Our Lives Before the Lawwill have a major impact on the future course of feminist legal scholarship.

Of the 1.65 million lawsuits enforcing federal laws over the past decade, 3 percent were prosecuted by the federal government, while 97 percent were litigated by private parties. When and why did private plaintiff-driven litigation become a dominant model for enforcing federal regulation? The Litigation State shows how government legislation created the nation's reliance upon private litigation, and investigates why Congress would choose to mobilize, through statutory design, private lawsuits to implement federal statutes. Sean Farhang argues that Congress deliberately cultivates such private lawsuits partly as a means of enforcing its will over the resistance of opposing presidents.

Mark Graber looks at the history of abortion law in action to argue that the only defensible, constitutional approach to the issue is to afford all women equal choice--abortion should remain legal or bans should be strictly enforced. Steering away from metaphysical critiques of privacy, Graber compares the philosophical, constitutional, and democratic merits of the two systems of abortion regulation witnessed in the twentieth century: pre-Roe v. Wadestatutory prohibitions on abortion andRoe'sban on significant state interference with the market for safe abortion services. He demonstrates that beforeRoe,pro-life measures were selectively and erratically administered, thereby subverting our constitutional commitment to equal justice. Claiming that these measures would be similarly administered if reinstated, the author seeks to increase support for keeping abortion legal, even among those who have reservations about its morality. Abortion should remain legal, Graber argues, because statutory bans on abortion have a history of being enforced in ways that intentionally discriminate against poor persons and persons of color. In the years beforeRoe, the same law enforcement officials who routinely ignored and sometimes assisted those physicians seeking to terminate pregnancies for their private patients too often prevented competent abortionists from offering the same services to the general public. This double standard violated the fundamental human and constitutional right of equal justice under law, a right that remains a major concern of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Supreme Court's refusal to apply the 1991 Civil Rights Act fully to cases pending when it was enacted adds a sour chapter to one of the saddest stories in the high court's history. It need not be the final chapter. But unless Congress intervenes, the Court's action will cause dismissal of thousands of potentially meritorious discrimination lawsuits -- just because the Court mangled the law before being corrected by Congress in the 1991 act. A series of Supreme Court decisions so muddled the legal rules for job discrimination cases that Congress had to pass the new law to restore the force of longstanding former laws. In one of the worst examples, the Court took an 1866 law safeguarding equal rights \"to make and enforce contracts\" and read the words \"and enforce\" out of the statute.

Wards Cove was among half a dozen decisions that triggered the drive in Congress to reinstate earlier civil rights law. As the bill progressed, Alaska's Republican Senators, Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens, sought the amendment to make sure that the lawsuit, still kicking around in lower courts, would be governed by the Supreme Court's ruling and not by the new law. The Alaska Senators, admittedly siding with the companies at the expense of the workers, had some fairness arguments of their own. They said the canneries had been litigating for 17 years and were entitled to their Supreme Court victory even if Congress now concluded the Court had incorrectly applied the law. Indeed, the employer's special pleading seemed more honorable than some. The usual pitch for Congressional relief comes from a party that has