Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law
I have just finished listening to Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia, a fun read that gives a very different perspective on Word War I and various accidents of Middle East history.
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Richard Epstein
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and Senior Lecturer
Rick Atkinson, Guns at Last Light. The history of the last year of the war shows what a grind that was, even with an overwhelming advantage in firepower. War is indeed hell.
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Nicholas Stephanopoulos
Assistant Professor of Law
I recently finished Jack Balkin's Living Originalism, which is his effort to fuse originalism and living constitutionalism and to show that they're actually opposite sides of the same coin. Balkin is a wonderful writer, and I find his argument that we are being true to the Constitution's original meaning when we construe abstract phrases like "due process" and "equal protection" in accordance with our own times and values to be utterly convincing. As he says, the Framers deliberately chose to use specific language in some places and highly abstract language in others, and the latter choice delegates the interpretive project to future generations. My biggest complaint about the book is Balkin's tendency to deify the Constitution. Even given the greater interpretive flexibility that his method implies, there are still many aspects of the Constitution that we can't change and that we would never choose today (e.g., the Electoral College, the two senators-per-state rule, etc.). Balkin's method is also fairly indeterminate; it just tells us that pretty much any constitutional construction that can be reconciled with the text is permissible. Despite these caveats, Living Originalism is a classic that everyone interested in constitutional law should read.
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Michael Schill
Dean and Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law
Derek Bok, Higher Education in America. The two-time former President of Harvard (and former Dean of its law school) has written the most comprehensive analysis of the problems facing higher education in years. The book and its copious annotations is destined to become the authoritative text for higher ed researchers for decades to come.
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Michael Schill
Dean and Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law
William G. Bowen, Higher Education in the Digital Age. My President at Princeton, Bill Bowen, shows up for the second year in a row on my list of the books I learned the most from over the past year. Bowen’s book, based upon his 2012 Tanner Lectures at Stanford, demonstrates once again that he is the most astute observer of higher education in the nation. His analysis of the potential of on-line education and MOOCs to bend the cost curve and help solve the “cost disease” facing colleges and universities is balanced, intelligent and prescient.
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Joan Neal
Class of 1949 Lecturer in Law
The Boys in the Boat is the story of the University of Washington men’s rowing team that went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s a great story about really admirable young men, and told very well. These kids were the sons of loggers, farmers and fishermen struggling through the Great Depression (not third-generation rowers like some of their Ivy League competition), but with the right coach (and a Zen-like boat builder who was a man of few words) they were able to come together to create a truly great crew. Although the book highlights both the physical demands of the sport as well as its elegance and beauty, this is a really enjoyable read even if you know nothing about the sport.
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Eduardo Peñalver
John P. Wilson Professor of Law
David Byrne, How Music Works. Written by the legendary lead-singer of the Talking Heads, it's an interesting discussion of the interaction between individual invention and social circumstance in the creation of music (and, by implication, in the creative process more broadly).
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Mary Anne Case
Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law
Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone and Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans by Dale Carpenter. It's nice to see what became of work I first encountered in drafts presented at my Law School Workshop on Regulation of Family, Sex and Gender.
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
Brian Christian, The Most Human Human, recounts Christian’s preparation for an annual competition, inspired by Alan Turing, in which humans attempt to discern whether they are communicating with another human or a computer program written for the purpose of fooling them. The software writers seek to win for their program the award of “most human machine” by being the most frequently confused for a human, while the human conversationalist most frequently identified as such is the “most human human.” In a pleasantly meandering book, Christian investigates the nature of human conversation.
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M. Todd Henderson
Professor of Law
It is obvious, but How China Became Capitalist is worth reading not only because it was Ronald Coase's last major work, but also because it is an intriguing and unconventional account of recent Chinese history. The move toward capitalism in China is perhaps the biggest global story of the past four decades, and Coase tells it in an approachable and insightful way. The punch line -- that the revolution was not top down but rather bottom up, or, as Coase tells it, the product of many "marginal revolutions" -- is sure to make us appreciate China in new and surprising ways.
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David Weisbach
Walter J. Blum Professor of Law
Angus Deaton, The Great Escape. A history of how western countries escaped poverty and how other countries might too.
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Eric Posner
Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law
The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans are an impressively concise and vivid account of the Nazi era.
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Jonathan Masur
Deputy Dean and Professor of Law
The best pleasure reading I did this year was Gone Girl, a mystery by Gillian Flynn. At the most basic level, the book is a compelling whodunit with real narrative momentum. At the same time, it’s a fascinating portrait of a psychopath and an exploration of storytelling with an unreliable narrator. The characters Flynn has created are engaging and three-dimensional, and the story is propulsive. But Flynn leaves the reader without a reliable foothold. Every deductive step is filled with uncertainty and doubt. The overall effect is disquieting and unsettling, as a really good mystery should be.
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Joan Neal
Class of 1949 Lecturer in Law
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. This is the story of how a series of people were able to “crack” the code to decipher a language found on archeological remains in Crete (from 1,000 years before Classical Greek). The challenge here was that no one knew either what spoken language the writing recorded, or what the alphabet was that was used for recording the unknown language – making the decipherment doubly difficult. It tells the story through three individuals – the archeologist who found the tablets, a woman who spent years/decades doing incredibly detailed work to discover important clues about the alphabet (doing manually on index cards what we would use supercomputers to do today), and then the amateur who was able to take this important legwork and achieve the final decipherment. If you are interested in history or linguistics or even just gripping mysteries, this book is a great read.
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Dennis Hutchinson
Sr. Lect. in Law and William Rainey Harper Professor in the College
I am reading Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück. This is a doorstop, more than 600 pages, but it reveals the startling development of a poetic sensibility over a half-century, from severe and dark to deep and gently optimistic, but always with an eerie precision for word and phrase. She is tough to read in great gobs, but richly rewarding.
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Joan Neal
Class of 1949 Lecturer in Law
Like Dreamers: The Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, and the Divided Israel They Created. This book (by an Israeli journalist) tells the history of modern Israel through the lens of a handful of members of a particular paratrooper brigade. This diverse group of Israelis–including both kibbutzniks and religious scholars–came together with a shared goal in the Six-Day War. Afterwards, however, these men had entirely different visions of what Israel should become and took very different paths – one helping to move Israel toward capitalism, some struggling to maintain the socialist kibbutzim, some founding religious settlements, some becoming artists, and one becoming a terrorist who spent time in an Israeli prison. All of them were interesting men who helped to shape modern Israel and its complex problems.
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David Zarfes
Clinical Professor of Law; Director, Lecturer Recruitment; Director, Corporate Lab Programs
The Inheritor’s Powder: A Tale of Arsenic, Murder, and the New Forensic Science. Arsenic poisoning was the means of choice for ridding oneself of an unwanted spouse, in early nineteenth-century England. By the mid-century, arsenic poisoning was most commonly the default option for unhappy wives seeking refuge from bad marriages. (In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women to buy arsenic.) It was also employed by those awaiting an inheritance, most frequently young males eager to climb the social ladder. These problems and their contribution to the role of medicine in the law are the subject of Sandra Hempel’s new book.
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Geoffrey Stone
Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor
I recently read Linda Hirshman's Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. Linda, an alum of our Law School (Class of 1969), has written a wonderfully readable and insightful account of how American attitudes towards homosexuals changed. It is a story filled with fascinating characters, interesting anecdotes, and important lessons about the nature of political movements in America.
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Craig Futterman
Clinical Professor of Law
I thoroughly enjoyed Khaled Hosseini’s newest novel, And the Mountains Echoed. Among the things that continue to stick with me in the months since I read the book is Hosseini’s resistance to making his main characters heroes. Their human flaws and frailties, along with their sometimes disappointing moral decisions, shed far more light on the complexities of our life choices than the presentation of characters who make the choices that we hope that we would make in similar situations. I also love Hosseini’s artistry in shifting voices and perspectives across characters from different generations, times, and countries to share a complex story of family.
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Martha Nussbaum
Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics
For a Greenberg Seminar I'm teaching with Richard Posner on "Southern Literature and the Law," I recently read for the first time Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. This amazing novel, neglected in its day because it did not fit the agenda of the "racial uplift" movement, and rediscovered and championed by Henry Louis Gates, tells the story of an African-American woman searching for real love and joy. After a lifeless marriage to a respectable and successful man who becomes the first black mayor of a town in Florida, she lets down her hair (literally) and runs off with Tea Cake, a drifter and gambler who plays the guitar. The two move to the Everglades and work in the fields, have fun, and love each other passionately. The novel is sensuous, powerful, and just sheer fun, partly because it is about fun, although there is a tragic ending that I won't divulge. The racial uplift people didn't like the fact that the novel showed African-Americans loving sex, loving gambling and drinking, and simply not being normative. But that is exactly what is great about it: it's about release from the straitjacket of normativity. Before I read it, I listened to an audio version read by the wonderful actress Ruby Dee, which I think one of the best performances ever given by an American actress. All the characters, all the dialects and voices, even to the way Tea Cake (looking at Janie) says "Mmm, mmm."
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Jennifer Nou
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law
I’d highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow—about how and why we make seemingly impulsive and otherwise irrational decisions.
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Randy Picker
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law
Anne Libera, The Second City Almanac of Improvisation. The Second City is one of the great cultural institutions of Chicago and one with strong University of Chicago ties. Bernie Sahlins, AB ’43, co-founded Second City and that grew out of an earlier incarnation on campus. Libera’s book offers a window into the process of improvisation and sketch creation at Second City. It does so through materials that she has assembled from the gifted comedians who have flowed through Second City over the years, including early greats such as Alan Arkin and more recent prominent Second City alums such as Tina Fey. A fun, easy read on the creative process at work and play.
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, recounts the horrible and amazing story of the murder of James Garfield. Millard moves across multiple subjects, the politics leading to Garfield’s election, the motive of his assassin, the efforts of Alexander Graham Bell to save his President, the failures of pre-antiseptic medicine, and the succession of Chester Arthur.
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Laura Weinrib
Assistant Professor of Law
My recommendation this year is Pure, a novel by Andrew Miller. The book traces the efforts of a young engineer named Jean-Baptiste Baratte to dig up the ancient Parisian cemetery of Les Innocents and to demolish the church that sits on its grounds. In the run-up to the French Revolution, the cemetery’s walls are crumbling, and the stench and poison of its mass grave are seeping into the surroundings. Baratte is charged with exhuming the corpses, a task he approaches with as much ambivalence as the personalities he meets and the futures they promise. Despite the premise, the novel is far more than allegory. Its rich details and captivating characters make Miller’s grisly exploration of Baratte’s physical and spiritual journey a gripping and rewarding read.
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Aziz Huq
Assistant Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a gripping account of the origins of statistical justifications for the harsh policing of African Americans. Readers interested in our current debates on racial profiling may find the latter revealingly illuminated by Muhammad’s genealogy of the early statistical foundations of claims about the intrinsic nature of black criminality.
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Jennifer Nou
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law
After seeing the movie, I’d recommend reading Solomon’s Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave to get Northrup’s first-person account of slavery’s brutalities; the film has important visuals, but the book does a better job of conveying Northrup’s perspectives on his experiences.
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Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law
The Crusades, by Zoe Oldenbourg, is a terrific history, attentive to social history, personalities, religious fervor and much more.
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Aziz Huq
Assistant Professor of Law
Rain by Don Paterson, a Scottish poet and musician, is an accessible, yet bracingly astringent, book of poems that captures both Paterson’s local cadences and also vocalizes evocatively wider concerns of aging, loss, and grief.
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Craig Futterman
Clinical Professor of Law
This is a somewhat odd recommendation, because I have only just begun reading the book, High Rise Stories—Voices from Chicago Public Housing, by Audrey Petty. My students and I spent six years working from the ground floor of Stateway Gardens, a family public housing high rise as the development was gradually demolished building by building as a part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation. Much like the personal stories in this book, our experiences at Stateway complicated our understanding of life in Chicago public housing communities. While the communities were often most known from the outside by conditions of extreme poverty and violence (images of “gangbangers” and drug dealers had a tendency to eclipse all other life), we came to know a real community—individuals and families who adapted to conditions of abandonment. We experienced regular acts profound generosity, care for others, and downright neighborliness that are often lacking in modern neighborhoods. As I recognize the many problems faced by the people there, I also find myself tearing up as I look at the vacant land where hundreds of families once lived. Audrey Petty, whom I know to be a gifted writer and teacher, shares a number of personal narratives in this book that have the potential to complicate all of our understanding of Chicago public housing communities.
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Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Professor of International Law
The New Testament. It’s a runaway bestseller that I’d oddly never read. I was encouraged to do so by Professor Joseph Weiler of NYU, who argued an important case in the European Court of Human Rights defending the Italian state’s ability to put crucifixes in public classrooms. He suggested that I ought to check out the New Testament, as I had only read the Old. Even though you know how the story ends, it’s still a great read after 2000 years. Highly recommended to Jews, Muslims, and those of non-Christian faith who have never looked at it.
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Kenneth Dam
Max Pam Professor Emeritus of American & Foreign Law and Senior Lecturer
Kenneth Pollack,Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy. An analysis of Iran's foreign policy with special reference to its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. Written by a Middle Eastern expert, Kenneth Pollack, who has extensive governmental experience in Middle East Affairs and a long record as a scholar writing on Middle Eastern Affairs.
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Alison LaCroix
Professor of Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar
Three books by British or Irish female authors — one memoir of post-World War II Wales as observed by the literary-minded daughter of a novelistically dysfunctional family (Bad Blood by Lorna Sage); one novel of early 1960s Ireland based heavily on the author's own experience (The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien, not to be confused with her more recent, more lurid memoir Country Girl); and one novel of England in the first half of the twentieth century that spans both world wars and centers on a heroine whose life restarts each time she dies (Life After Life by Kate Atkinson). All three are absorbing personal histories that open a window onto a specific historical moment.
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Anup Malani
Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law
- John Scalzi, Redshirts (but really any John Scalzi book I can get my hand on; he’s a University of Chicago College grad)
- Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer
- Paul Sally, Tools of the Trade
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
Natalie Shapero, No Object, is a brilliant and moving collection of poetry, written by a graduate of the law school (class of 2011). Shapero is a 2012-2014 Kenyon Review fellow at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio and the recent recipient of a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine.
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Academic experts generally avoid the contentious Shakespeare authorship debate, but Shapiro, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, offers a fascinating historiography of the controversy, one that includes the authorship doubts of Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Helen Keller and concludes with the reasons Shapiro believes in the authenticity of the man from Stratford.
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Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law
I am reading Probably Approximately Correct, by Leslie Variant. It is a book that is changing how I think about everyday things, education, and especially legal theory. It connects machine learning, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory. Among other things, it’s a terrific way to see why the new generation finds computer science the field to study.
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Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Professor of International Law
William T. Vollman’s Imperial, which is about a part of Southeastern California where I have relatives who are farmers. The story of the Imperial Valley distills the seamiest sides of California history: turning the desert to farmland with corrupt water deals; environmental degradation; housing booms and housing busts; graveyards of nameless illegal immigrants pursuing busted dreams in El Norte. The story is peculiarly Californian while also capturing the flavor of every border in the world, which all share certain qualities no matter what countries they separate.
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