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"Legislation -- United States -- States"
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What does Congress do?
The Founding Fathers made Congress two houses for a reason. The Senate gives every state equal representation, while the House of Representatives allows states with a larger population a bigger voice in government. Learning how this system works is an important piece of understanding how laws are made in the United States. This book breaks down the many jobs of Congress as well as the specific qualifications needed to be a representative or senator. Written simply and clearly, the social studies content can aid any student looking to better understand how Congress works.
Book
More Than You Wanted to Know
Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure-requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well.More Than You Wanted to Knowsurveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices?
Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite.
Timely and provocative,More Than You Wanted to Knowtakes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.
eBook
Inside Congress : a guide for navigating the politics of the House and Senate floors
\"Required reading for anyone who wants to understand how to work within Congress. The House and Senate have unique rules and procedures to determine how legislation moves from a policy idea to law. Evolved over the last 200 years, the rules of both chambers are designed to act as the engine for that process. Each legislative body has its own leadership positions to oversee this legislative process. To the novice, whether a newly elected representative, a lawmaker's staff on her first day at work, or a constituent visiting Washington, the entire process can seem incomprehensible. What is an open rule for a House Appropriations bill and how does it affect consideration? Why are unanimous consent agreements needed in the Senate? The authors of Inside Congress, all congressional veterans, have written the definitive guide to how Congress really works. It is the accessible and necessary resource to understanding and interpreting procedural tools, arcane precedents, and the role of party politics in the making of legislation in Congress\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
At Liberty to Die
Over the past hundred years, average life expectancy in America has nearly doubled, due largely to scientific and medical advances, but also as a consequence of safer working conditions, a heightened awareness of the importance of diet and health, and other factors. Yet while longevity is celebrated as an achievement in modern civilization, the longer people live, the more likely they are to succumb to chronic, terminal illnesses. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 47 years, with a majority of American deaths attributed to influenza, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or other diseases. In 2000, the average life expectancy was nearly 80 years, and for too many people, these long lifespans included cancer, heart failure, Lou Gehrig's disease, AIDS, or other fatal illnesses, and with them, came debilitating pain and the loss of a once-full and often independent lifestyle. In this compelling and provocative book, noted legal scholar Howard Ball poses the pressing question: is it appropriate, legally and ethically, for a competent individual to have the liberty to decide how and when to die when faced with a terminal illness? At Liberty to Die charts how, the right of a competent, terminally ill person to die on his or her own terms with the help of a doctor has come deeply embroiled in debates about the relationship between religion, civil liberties, politics, and law in American life. Exploring both the legal rulings and the media frenzies that accompanied the Terry Schiavo case and others like it, Howard Ball contends that despite raging battles in all the states where right to die legislation has been proposed, the opposition to the right to die is intractable in its stance. Combining constitutional analysis, legal history, and current events, Ball surveys the constitutional arguments that have driven the right to die debate.
eBook
The digital person : technology and privacy in the information age
Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, electronic databases are compiling information about you. As you surf the Internet, an unprecedented amount of your personal information is being recorded and preserved forever in the digital minds of computers. For each individual, these databases create a profile of activities, interests, and preferences used to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives. The creation and use of these databases—which Daniel J. Solove calls “digital dossiers”—has thus far gone largely unchecked. In this startling account of new technologies for gathering and using personal data, Solove explains why digital dossiers pose a grave threat to our privacy.
The Digital Person sets forth a new understanding of what privacy is, one that is appropriate for the new challenges of the Information Age. Solove recommends how the law can be reformed to simultaneously protect our privacy and allow us to enjoy the benefits of our increasingly digital world.
The first volume in the series EX MACHINA: LAW, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY
eBook
Proving Pregnancy
Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late
eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving
Pregnancy documents how women-Black and white, enslaved and
free-gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and
legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in
prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and
relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate
life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for
infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused
of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white
male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that
reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical
capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the
reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine
simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over
that of local institutions. These transformations placed all
women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in
ways they had not been before. Reframing knowledge of the body as
property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the
federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to
formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new
legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to
knowledge of the female body to white men.
eBook
Understanding how laws are made
\"This book for elementary readers highlights the sequence of events from the idea to implementation. Full-color photographs and a timeline support each step in the process, from an idea for a new law through writing a bill, getting Congress to pass it and the president signing it into law. A glossary, further resources, and an index are included\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Corporate crops : biotechnology, agriculture, and the struggle for control
Biotechnology crop production area increased from 1.7 million hectares to 148 million hectares worldwide between 1996 to 2010. While genetically modified food is a contentious issue, the debates are usually limited to health and environmental concerns, ignoring the broader questions of social control that arise when food production methods become corporate-owned intellectual property. Drawing on legal documents and dozens of interviews with farmers and other stakeholders, Corporate Crops covers four case studies based around litigation between biotechnology corporations and farmers. Pechlaner investigates the extent to which the proprietary aspects of biotechnologies—from patents on seeds to a plethora of new rules and contractual obligations associated with the technologies—are reorganizing crop production. The lawsuits include patent infringement litigation launched by Monsanto against a Saskatchewan canola farmer who, in turn, claimed his crops had been involuntarily contaminated by the company’s GM technology; a class action application by two Saskatchewan organic canola farmers launched against Monsanto and Aventis (later Bayer) for the loss of their organic market due to contamination with GMOs; and two cases in Mississippi in which Monsanto sued farmers for saving seeds containing its patented GM technology. Pechlaner argues that well-funded corporate lawyers have a decided advantage over independent farmers in the courts and in creating new forms of power and control in agricultural production. Corporate Crops demonstrates the effects of this intersection between the courts and the fields where profits, not just a food supply, are reaped.
eBook