Books about Arbitrary from Amazon.com

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Inscribed on the walls of the United States Department of Justice are the lofty words: "The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts." Yet what happens when prosecutors, the most powerful officials in the criminal justice system, seek convictions instead of justice? Why are cases involving educated, well-to-do victims often prosecuted more vigorously than those involving poor, uneducated victims? Why do wealthy defendants frequently enjoy more lenient plea bargains than the disadvantaged?
In this timely work, Angela J. Davis examines the expanding power of prosecutors, from mandatory minimum sentencing laws that enhance prosecutorial control over the outcome of cases to the increasing politicization of the office. Drawing on her dozen years of experience as a public defender, Davis demonstrates how the everyday, legal exercise of prosecutorial discretion is responsible for tremendous inequities in criminal justice. Davis uses powerful stories of individuals caught in the system to illustrate how the day-to-day practices and decisions of well-meaning prosecutors produce unfair and unequal treatment of both defendants and victims, often along race and class lines. These disparities are particularly evident in prosecutors' charging and plea-bargaining decisions and in their muddy relationships with victims. Prosecutors not only hold vast power, Davis argues, but they are also under-regulated and lack accountability. The current standards of practice for prosecutors are unenforceable, while the mechanisms that purport to hold prosecutors accountable are weak and ineffectual. Not only does lack of oversight result in injustices, it may even foster a climate tolerant of unfair practices and in some cases, misconduct.
Offering a sensible agenda for comprehensive review and reform, Arbitrary Justice challenges the legal community and concerned citizens to pursue and enact meaningful standards of conduct and effective methods of accountability to help prosecutors serve their communities and the interests of justice..
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In the last two decades, fractional (or non integer) differentiation has played a very important role in various fields such as mechanics, electricity, chemistry, biology, economics, control theory and signal and image processing For example, in the last three fields, some important considerations such as modelling, curve fitting, filtering, pattern recognition, edge detection, identification, stability, controllability, observability and robustness are now linked to long-range dependence phenomena. Similar progress has been made in other fields listed here. The scope of the book is thus to present the state of the art in the study of fractional systems and the application of fractional differentiation.

As this volume covers recent applications of fractional calculus, it will be of interest to engineers, scientists, and applied mathematicians.

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In Questioning the Millennium, Stephen Jay Gould applies his wit and erudition to one of today's most pressing subjects:  the significance of the millennium

In this beautiful inquiry into time and its milestones, he shares his interest and insights with his readers.  Refreshingly reasoned, erudite, and absorbing, the book asks and answers the three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event:
First, what exactly is this concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted?  How did the name for a future thousand year reign of Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history?  

When does the new millennium begin:  January 1, in the year 2000 or 2001?  

Finally, why must our calendars be so complex, leading to our search for arbitrary regularity, including a fascination with millennia?
As always, Gould brings into his essays a wide range of compelling historical and scientific fact, including a brief history of millennia fevers, calendrical traditions and idiosyncrasies from around the world, the story of a sixth-century monk whose errors in chronology plague us even today, and the heroism of a young autistic man who has developed the extraordinary ability to calculate dates deep into the past and the future.

Ranging over a wide terrain of phenomena - from the arbitrary regularities of human calendars to the unpredictability of nature, from the vagaries of pop culture to the birth of Christ - Stephen Jay Gould holds the mirror up to our millennial passions to reveal our foibles, absurdities, and uniqueness - in other words, our humanity..
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Arbitrary Justice documents how detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan are being tried in Afghan courts based on allegations provided by the United States, with little or no evidence At printing, more than 250 persons had been transferred to the Afghan National Detention Facility, 160 have been referred for prosecutions, but over 60 have been convicted in trials that violate fair trial standards. The report, based on trial observations, examination of court documents, and interviews, outlines the problems in these proceedings such as the lack of prosecution witnesses and out-of-court prosecution witnesses to support the charges.It makes specific policy recommendations to both the Afghan and U.S. governments, and provides insights on how to improve the process of transferring detainees from U.S. custody to their home countries for criminal prosecutions, but that any such trials must be in accordance with international fair trial standards..
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Justice Marshall once remarked that if people knew what he knew about the death penalty, they would reject it overwhelmingly Foley elucidates Marshall's claim that fundamental flaws exist in the implementation of the death penalty. He guides us through the history of the Supreme Court's death penalty decisions, revealing a constitutional quagmire the Court must navigate to avoid violating the fundamental tenant of equal justice for all. History amply demonstrates, argues Foley, that capital punishment cannot be fairly and equally implemented, and that it violates the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Nearly 100 influential Supreme Court capital punishment-related cases from 1878-2002 are examined, beginning with Wilkerson v. Utah, which question not the legitimacy of capital punishment, but the methods of execution. Over time, focus shifted from the constitutionality of certain methods to the fairness of who was being sentenced for capital crimes--and why. The watershed 1972 ruling Furman v. Georgia reversed the Court's stand on capital punishment, holding that the arbitrary and capricious imposition of the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. Furman clarified that any new death penalty legislation must contain sentencing procedures that avoid the arbitrary infliction of a life-ending verdict, which led to the current complex tangle of issues surrounding the death penalty and its constitutional viability..
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This digital document is an article from National Right to Life News, published by National Right to Life Committee, Inc. on February 11, 1998. The length of the article is 2371 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: "Arbitrary Legislation" from the Bench -- An Inside Look at the Making of Roe v. Wade.(landmark abortion case)
Publication:National Right to Life News (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 11, 1998
Publisher: National Right to Life Committee, Inc.
Volume: 25 Issue: 3 Page: 26

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
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This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre.

The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.

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