Douglas Baird
Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.
This book examines patterns of migration from England to this country in the 17th and 18th centuries. It argues that four waves of migration from different areas of England to various parts of North America are responsible for the regional differences in architecture, manners, food, and speech that exist in the United States today. The book is both readily accessible cultural history and a fine example of path dependence.
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Douglas Baird
Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law
At the recommendation of Chris Klein, ’76, I am currently reading Roy Jenkins's Churchill. It is a one-volume biography of Churchill that focuses primarily on Churchill’s 62-year career in the House of Commons. It is not so much a biography proper as a window into Parliament during the first half of the 20th century. Strongly recommended to any Anglophile who liked Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate.
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William Baude
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law
Daniel Abraham, The Dagger and the Coin series.
This is a series of fantasy novels that plays with many of the classic tropes—the reluctant warrior, long-lost deities and dragons, etc.—but it has a sort of law-and-economics twist. The principal/agent problems in governing a kingdom are quickly made obvious and are the source of key plot twists. And it also turns out that the world's monetary system and its bankers are at least as important as the warriors (hence the "and the Coin" in the title). The place to start is with the first book, The Dragon's Path; I recently finished the fourth, The Widow's House. The whole series is excellent.
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William Baude
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law
John McGinnis & Michael Rappaport, Originalism and the Good Constitution.
This is the latest important book on originalism in theory and practice. McGinnis and Rappaport introduce at least three important claims: First, that originalism is normatively valuable because of its connection to the supermajoritarian process used to enact and amend the Constitution. Second, that originalists should use the “original methods” of legal interpretation. And third, that we should imagine a culture of originalism, in which people took the constitutional amendment process seriously, rather than relying on judges to update the Constitution. In my view, the second and third claims are more powerfully demonstrated than the first, but it is a strength of their book that one can engage separately with each claim.
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Omri Ben-Shahar
Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law and Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics
11-22-63, by Stephen King
My favorite Stephen King book, about time travel to the years leading to Kennedy’s assassination. A simple and brilliant science fiction page-turner with a humane touch, but at the same time deeply thought provoking. A book one cannot forget.
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Lisa Bernstein
Wilson-Dickinson Professor of Law
The Children Act, by Ian McEwan, explores the life and daily work of a family court judge in England as she is confronted by a myriad of difficult cases and the disintegration of her own marriage. The book is, by turns, an exploration of how the legal and the personal meld, both consciously and unconsciously, in the making of judicial decisions. While pleasantly devoid of preachy philosophical pronouncements or theories of any kind, the moving story and its many twists and turns as characters change and grow, raise profound questions about whether the types of issues that arise in family court can ever really be objectively decided.
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Adam Chilton
Assistant Professor of Law
I’d recommend The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. The first is a novel and the second is nonfiction, but both provide fascinating accounts of what it’s like to live under extreme oppression in North Korea.
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Kenneth W. Dam
Max Pam Professor Emeritus of American & Foreign Law and Senior Lecturer
I recommend Alan S. Blinder's After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and Work Ahead. This is the book for anyone who wants to know what caused the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and would like to gain the analysis and facts necessary to have an informed view of what needs to happen to prevent such a financial crisis in the future. The author is a highly respected Princeton economics professor but perhaps more importantly is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. Unlike most books on economic policy, it's a great read.
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Justin Driver
Professor of Law and Herbert and Marjorie Fried Research Scholar
Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books
Claudia Roth Pierpont offers an excellent overview of the life and work of Philip Roth, the greatest novelist this nation has yet produced during the post-World War II era. Revisiting Roth’s oeuvre in a single volume underscores how rich, varied, and prolific Roth was during his lengthy and frequently contentious career. Proceeding through Roth’s books in chronological order highlights both the frequency of the misfires that occurred relatively early in his career, and the late run of dominance that he enjoyed late in his career. Pierpont provides steady guidance throughout, offering her own insights into Roth’s works, and also helpfully reporting the critical reception that his books initially received. Unlike many writers, moreover, Roth has led a truly fascinating life, including not least the tumultuous period he spent at the University of Chicago.
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Tom Ginsburg
Deputy Dean, Leo Spitz Professor of International Law, Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, and Professor of Political Science
I am re-reading Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, in light of the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. Arendt’s concern was the 1960s when many on the left celebrated violence as a means to bring about a new order. She thought this was totally misguided, and develops an interesting framework for thinking about violence, authority, and power. Violence, she writes, "can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it." I hope she is right.
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Tom Ginsburg
Deputy Dean, Leo Spitz Professor of International Law, Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, and Professor of Political Science
After a visit to Budapest in July, I read Fatelessness by Imre Kertész, a Hungarian who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002. His novel is a memoir of his time in a concentration camp, and was described by the Nobel Committee as “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” By describing everyday life in the camps in the most human terms, Kertész captures what I suspect Arendt might have called “the mundanity of suffering”.
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R. H. Helmholz
Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law
I am reading the following at the moment:
F. Donald Logan, The Vikings in History
Mariken Lenaerts, National Socialist Family Law: The Influence of National Socialism on Marriage and Divorce Law in Germany and the Netherlands
The author of the first is a friend, and I am curious about the various expeditions of the Vikings, having gotten interested in the Viking Ship expedition that came to Chicago from Norway for the Columbian Exposition. The second was sent to me by the publishers, and I have always been curious to discover if there were major changes in private law caused by the Nazi takeover of power.
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Mark J. Heyrman
Clinical Professor of Law
Unhinged by Daniel Carlat, MD
Daniel Carlat, an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts, gives a highly readable and critical but balanced account of the ways in which our reliance on psychotropic medication as the primary treatment for mental illnesses has changed the treatment of mental illnesses and the practice of psychiatry for better and worse.
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M. Todd Henderson
Michael J. Marks Professor of Law and Aaron Director Teaching Scholar
I just finished Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, by Mother Jones reporter Daniel Schulman. It is a fascinating case study of a privately held business, an American family, the libertarianizing of the Republican party, and of our modern electoral system. Given the author and the topic, I expected a hit piece, but I found it to be relatively even-handed in its treatment of the issues.
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Dennis J. Hutchinson
Senior Lecturer in Law and William Rainey Harper Professor in the College, Master of the New Collegiate Division, and Associate Dean of the College
I am rereading, both for pleasure and for my Winter Quarter course, Lord Charnwood’s 1917 biography of Abraham Lincoln. It is the best one-volume study of Lincoln, unless the reader is more interested in day-to-day facts, and for that, David Herbert Donald is unexcelled. Lord Charnwood (Godfrey Rathbone Benson, 1st Baron Charnwood [1864-1945]), who served in parliament, is unexcelled in two respects: he explains the historical and political context of Lincoln’s time (see David Potter work for more detail), and he limns Lincoln as a practical statesman in practical terms with no hagiographic overtones. More than one of my colleagues in the Law School have found this work more than illuminating when asked for a good read. BTW: I recommend the 2009 paperback edition; there are many editions now.
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Alison LaCroix
Professor of Law, Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar, and Associate Member, Dept. of History
I recommend All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. This beautiful, sweeping, heart-rending novel takes place in France and Germany during World War II, with most of the key events set in the walled Breton city of Saint-Malo. The story unfolds in cross-cutting chapters, with bold and gripping time shifts, that trace the background of a young German soldier and a sightless French girl from the 1930s until the outbreak of war and beyond. The history of radio, the geography of Brittany, the rise of Hitler, mid-twentieth-century museum culture, and the connections among science, time, and human emotions are all beautifully rendered. You will stay up far later than you had planned in order to finish the final hundred or so pages.
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Alison LaCroix
Professor of Law, Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar, and Associate Member, Dept. of History
For nonfiction, I recently read and enjoyed Eric Ives’s Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, a great contribution to Tudor historiography that also reads like a novel. Ives's descriptions of the trials and executions of Anne and her alleged co-conspirators, and his psychologically acute reading of the principal players’ motivations, continue to haunt the reader long after the famous Calais sword has done its work.
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Brian Leiter
Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director, Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values
Frederick Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840-1900
Beiser, who is one the greatest living historians of German philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries, here recaptures an important period in the history of modern philosophy largely overshadowed by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. What is the relevance of philosophy in a world in which the sciences seem to make all the progress? That central question, one still debated today, was a lively point of contestation after the collapse of Hegel’s idealist metaphysics. The book is highly readable and does not presuppose significant technical knowledge of philosophical debates. But for those with an interest in contemporary philosophy, one will have a remarkable sense of déjà vu reading Beiser’s well-informed account of the debates that occupied German philosophers in the mid-to-late 19th-century.
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Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes
A novel that is full of grime and human bonding (and hatred). I had recently traveled to Vietnam, and the book helped me think through the errors and mystery of war-making.
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Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, by George Vaillant
For me, it was a good preparation for working on a book (with Professor Nussbaum) about aging. It is full of surprise about how lives can end up so far from where they were in their supposed primes. It is also a fascinating example of the changing norms in social science research, as the study began in the 1930s and continues on.
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Jonathan Masur
John P. Wilson Professor of Law and David and Celia Hilliard Research Scholar
It feels a bit silly to be “recommending” this book, because I’m probably the last person to discover it, but by far the best book I read this year was Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. It’s a story about identity and about growing up in an immigrant family with one foot in the old world and one foot in the new. The book is set mostly in Detroit in the late 1960s, at a time when the United States was undergoing an identity crisis of its own. Eugenides adroitly weaves together the tale of his protagonist’s crisis of identity with his family’s similar struggle and the story of America’s very public turmoil. Eugenides’ suggestion, unstated but evident, is that the upheaval that the protagonist, his family, and the country all face are one and the same.
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
I recently read James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which moved briskly for a two-volume history, there being so much to say about the period leading up to and including the Civil War. Beyond the battles, famous and obscure, there are internal and international politics, dramatic economic and social change, insurgency, and murder. I had not known of the South’s extensive pre-War efforts to expand slavery southward via military adventurism and colonialism. And I came away with a surprisingly strong sense of how much the outcome of the war and the use of the war to end slavery were not remotely inevitable. The book is volume 6 in the Oxford History of the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1988.
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
I confess to being a science-fiction fan. I generally recommend the work of John Scalzi, a graduate of the College, and I recently enjoyed his most legally themed novel, Fuzzy Nation. I recently finished Margaret Atwood’s grand dystopian MaddAddam trilogy. I don’t entirely know what to make of the fact that so much science fiction these days is about the end of our civilization. I thoroughly enjoyed the engineering survivalist thriller The Martian, by Andy Weir.
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Richard H. McAdams
Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar
Finally, I am reading Graham Greene’s 1951 novel The End of the Affair. This is said to be one of Greene’s “Catholic novels.” As a non-Catholic, I find it superbly introspective and riveting. The writing is brilliant.
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Joan E. Neal
Class of 1949 Lecturer in Law
An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris
This is historical fiction regarding the Dreyfus affair in France, and is incredibly well researched (with lots of legal details regarding the evidence). The story is largely told from the perspective of a military officer who originally believed that Dreyfus was guilty, but as the officer became privy to additional information and evidence, he became convinced that the real spy was still out there and that Dreyfus was innocent. But this wasn’t what his superiors and the government wanted to hear, and he had to decide what to do with the evidence he uncovered.
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Joan E. Neal
Class of 1949 Lecturer in Law
Time Present and Time Past, by Deirdre Madden
Madden is my new favorite Irish author. This book is a beautifully written portrait of an ordinary man in an ordinary family, their relationships, and the role of memory. Nothing much happens in terms of plot, but the language is so beautiful and the characters so realistic that I enjoyed every word – so much so that I’m reading a second book of hers now, Authenticity. Authenticity is the story of two artists in Ireland and a “wannabe” artist one of them encounters. The relationships are very authentic, and the book is also a meditation on what it means to be an artist. I’m not done yet, but enjoying it very much as well.
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Jennifer Nou
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law
American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer—a brilliant and complicated theoretical physicist who led the U.S. effort to construct the atomic bomb. His story illustrates the historically tense relationship between scientists and the government. In Oppenheimer’s case, he was persecuted for his previous political leanings and ultimately exiled from the highest reaches of nuclear policymaking. While Oppenheimer has largely since been vindicated, his treatment continues to serve as a reminder of the need to protect scientific judgment in an era of increasing political polarization.
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Martha Nussbaum
Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics
For a class I'm teaching next quarter, and also because Saul Levmore and I are working on a joint collection of essays on aging, I've been reading Cicero's On Old Age (De Senectute) and its companion work On Friendship (De Amicitia). Both of these works, written in 44 BCE, were real favorites for many centuries, but they are less often read today. You can find a decent translation in the Loeb Classical Library. Both works are dedicated to Cicero's best friend Atticus, and Cicero says that their aim is to distract Atticus from the dangerous and difficult political situation. (Julius Caesar had just been assassinated, and Cicero, who sympathized with the conspirators, soon found his life in danger. He was assassinated himself less than a year later. Atticus, a wealthy and rather apolitical banker, survived the upheavals and died of colon cancer many years later, in his early eighties.) On Old Age is pretty much the only serious philosophical work on this topic, and it is a gem. Cicero tells Atticus that the two of them are not really old yet (they are 65 and 62 at the time), but they should look ahead and think about it. In this stylish dialogue, Cicero brings in a protagonist who is a well-known politician, Cato age 84 at the time the dialogue is set, and Cato proceeds to puncture all the stereotypes about old age, which are pretty much the same ones we deal with: old people are useless and can't do their work; their bodies are decrepit; they can't have sexual pleasure; etc. He documents the productivity of older people, noting that the Roman Senate is named after the "oldsters" or "senes" who serve there. About the body, he says that some feats may not be possible any longer, but a lot of things are possible so long as one exercises regularly. And if one can no longer indulge in some taxing activity, one can always teach it to others! As for sex, in that pre-Viagra era, Cato concedes the point, but he says it's not a bad thing, and aging politicians are much less likely to give rise to scandal and broken families. (Rome was a divorce culture that seems quite familiar today.) One especially interesting thing, as he lists the ages of outstanding people, is to see that in that salubrious climate, with that good diet and a regular need to walk, and of course no tobacco, people regularly lived into their eighties and above.
On Friendship is a beloved work, but to me it is too high-mindedly abstract, lacking the texture of a real-life friendship, with its jokes, its differences, its intimate knowledge of each one's history and character. So, when you read that one, also read some of Cicero's real letters to Atticus, hundreds of which survive, and which have been splendidly translated in the Loeb Library by David Shackleton Bailey.
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Randal C. Picker
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law; Senior Fellow, the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
I have been doing background reading on computer history for my upcoming law and technology MOOC (massive open online course in the current academic name for these). First read George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral, which covers the key early period in the creation of the computer during and after World War II. Computing power was necessary for figuring out how to fire guns at a distance, but also for building atomic and nuclear weapons and so computers and new weapons rose together. And Walter Isaacson, author of the recent biography on Steve Jobs, has returned to the field with his just-out The Innovators. This is wide-sweeping starting with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, but moving forward innovation (and innovator) by innovation, including the creation of the transistor, the microprocessor, and the personal computer. Neither of those are law books, and as lawyers, we should be interested in the intersection of law and technology, and for that, come take my online course on law and tech next summer.
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Randal C. Picker
James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law; Senior Fellow, the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
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Eric Posner
Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law
I recently reread Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, a short story (it can be found in several collections) that describes a library that contains books consisting of 400 or so pages of every possible permutation of the alphabet, spaces, and punctuation marks. As Borges points out, the library contains every knowable truth but also a huge number of falsehoods as well as an immense amount of gibberish. Since the library is necessarily quite large (larger than the universe), it takes quite a while to find the truths. It’s an off-the-rack metaphor for all kinds of things, and not just the Internet.
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Michael H. Schill
Dean and Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs
This book presents more questions than it answers as it describes the tragic life of an young, African-American man who grew up in the inner city, went to Yale, and then was killed in a drug deal gone bad back home. The book, written by his Yale roommate, is a troubling commentary on race, class, the promise of higher education, and the challenges of urban America.
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Nicholas Stephanopoulos
Assistant Professor of Law
I recently finished Hilary Mantel's spellbinding book about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. Three of the Revolution's central figures — Danton, Desmoulins, and Robespierre — are her main characters, and she tracks their lives (and hopes and fears) through the storming of the Bastille, the drafting of the first constitution, the execution of Louis XVI, the Terror, etc. This is historical fiction at its finest. I learned a great deal about one of history's most interesting periods, while losing myself completely in the tale that Mantel wove.
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Geoffrey R. Stone
Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law
I recently re-read The Idea of the University of Chicago, edited by William Murphy and D.J.R. Bruckner and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1976. This is a collection of excerpts from speeches and other statements by the first eight presidents of the University of Chicago. The work offers wonderful insight into the history, conflicts, and values of The University and shows why it is such a special institution.
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Randolph N. Stone
Clinical Professor of Law
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs is on the surface about how and why someone who grew up in poverty in Newark, New Jersey, can complete a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University, and yet succumb to an early death. Like Peace's life, the story is compelling and confounding. A great read for those of us who like to be haunted by a book.
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David A. Weisbach
Walter J. Blum Professor of Law and Senior Fellow, the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
The book is about the U.S. system for end-of-life care. While it focuses on the problems with the medicalization of the end of life, it is also a philosophical reflection on life, death, and how to think about mortality. It is not an uplifting book, but it will make you think about the meaning of your life and how to use the time that you have.
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David A. Weisbach
Walter J. Blum Professor of Law and Senior Fellow, the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Good for everyone but especially good for people who write for a living. Can we write in a way that is clear and conveys our meaning without being cumbersome?
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Erica Zunkel
Clinical Instructor and Acting Associate Director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic
I spent a good chunk of my summer vacation reading The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. This book has received much acclaim—all deserved in my opinion. Tartt swept me away to a totally engaging and absorbing world that I did not want to leave, even after 800 plus pages! The richly-written characters anchor the book, and it’s those characters who I missed when I had turned that last virtual page on my Kindle. I still think about Boris, Theo, Pippa, and Hobie months later.
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