Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives About Women and Workplace Discrimination

[Excerpt] Few of the countless real-life stories of workplace discrimination suffered by men and women everyday are ever told publicly. This book boldly and eloquently rights that wrong, going where no plaintiff testimony could ever dare because these stories are often too raw, honest, ambiguous, and nuanced to be told in court or reported in a newspaper. Consider a high school girl\u27s genuine passion for her much older boss, for example, or a middle-class black woman\u27s ambivalence about hiring a younger black woman coming off of welfare—just a couple of the riveting situations portrayed in this book. Most real-life stories, of course, are also too complex to be fully rendered in a court case or human resource department memo. Fiction is less instrumental than nonfiction. Sometimes, because it does not have to persuade, outrage, or inspire a remedy—though it can do any of those things—fiction can afford to be more truthful. In the past, authors such as David Mamet, purportedly striving for complexity on workplace discrimination, have simply served up backlash and stereotype. The stories in this book do something far more provocative; some inspire us to anger on the workers\u27 behalf, others to uncomfortable, unwelcome feelings. All of them leave us thinking hard

The Nature Press, Vol. 3

Nature News was a newsletter publication about activities at the Cheadle Center for Biodiveristy and Ecological Restoration

Foreword

The land trust community and governments at all levels have become married to conservation easements as their land conservation tool of choice. The numbers speak for themselves: as of the date of this writing, there were reportedly 1,700 land trusts that have protected twelve million acres of land by use of conservation easements. The bulk of this growth both in conservation easements and the land trusts that deploy them has occurred since the 1980s when federal income tax incentives became more fully utilized by conservation easement donors. But the parties to this marriage have become complacent and inattentive in the face of a rapidly changing world resulting from global ecological catastrophes such as climate change and accelerated species extinction

Foreword

The land trust community and governments at all levels have become married to conservation easements as their land conservation tool of choice. The numbers speak for themselves: as of the date of this writing, there were reportedly 1,700 land trusts that have protected twelve million acres of land by use of conservation easements. The bulk of this growth both in conservation easements and the land trusts that deploy them has occurred since the 1980s when federal income tax incentives became more fully utilized by conservation easement donors. But the parties to this marriage have become complacent and inattentive in the face of a rapidly changing world resulting from global ecological catastrophes such as climate change and accelerated species extinction

Oh, the Treatise!

This foreword to the Michigan Law Review’s 2013 Survey of Books Related to the Law considers the history of the American legal treatise in light of the well-known criticisms of legal scholarship published by Judge Harry Edwards in 1992. As part of his critique, Edwards characterized the legal treatise as “[t]he paradigm of ‘practical’ legal scholarship.” In his words, treatises “create an interpretive framework; categorize the mass of legal authorities in terms of this framework; interpret closely the various authoritative texts within each category; and thereby demonstrate for judges or practitioners what ‘the law’ requires.” Part I examines the origins of the legal treatise and its early importance to the U.S. lawyers; Part II the impact that the massive growth in published case law had on the treatise during the latter part of the nineteenth century; and Part III the implications for the treatise of shifts from print to electronic formats in the twentieth century. The Foreword concludes by speculating briefly on the continuing need for the treatise in light of Edwards’s concerns and its place in the digital legal information environment