A New Video: German & EU Legal Buildings

Here’s my latest mini-documentary from my recent trip to Europe—it’s called “Law in Stone & Glass,” and it’s about German and EU legal architecture. I hope you all enjoy it.

Thanks for all your recent emails. Please know how much I enjoy hearing from you!

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Update 5/10/13. Here is a videotaped lecture by anthropologist Alan Macfarlane that provides a broad historical context—the social history of glass—for the themes I explore in the video. I’m also looking forward to reading his book (with Gerry Martin) The Glass Bathyscaphe. HT: Breviosity.

“A full-throated defense of the state”: Publishers Weekly on The Rule of the Clan

Publishers Weekly has released this review of my forthcoming book The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals about the Future of Individual Freedom. The review calls the book “a full-throated defense of the modern centralized state” (I would have left off the adjective “centralized,” but in substance that’s absolutely right). The review also describes the book as a “sociological history and political treatise” and praises it for providing “a nuanced view of clan-based societies” through “an entertaining mix of anecdote and ethnography.”

I’m expecting to post my next video later today. In the meantime, I met yesterday with my agent to talk about my next book. Stay tuned!

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Update (1/24): For a review of The Rule of the Clan by Kirkus Reviews, see here. For other endorsements and purchasing information, see here.

Update (1/25): My new video, about German and EU legal architecture, is available here.

Law Made in Germany

As promised some weeks ago, here is my interview with the German Minister of Justice, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. In our conversation, I asked the minister about the export of German law overseas, internet privacy and European Union legal harmonization, German law school tuition, and the recent controversy surrounding circumcision in Germany. If you’re reading this blog in the three-column format and would like a larger version of the embedded YouTube video, click here.

For those who are interested in reading the booklet “Law Made in Germany,” click here.

What it Means to be Home—with Deanna Durbin

After many weeks abroad, I’m back in the United States, and by coincidence this weekend I watched a movie that reminded me of just what it means to be home. The reminder came in the unexpected form of Deanna Durbin, the girl-next-door Hollywood star of the 1930s and 1940s. I didn’t anticipate that her last film, the romantic comedy For the Love of Mary (1948), would have so much to say about the culture of American constitutional law.

As readers of this blog and subscribers to my Facebook page know, in mid-November I flew to Europe to speak about The Rule of the Clan (which will be released in just two months by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), to teach some intensive seminars about the American constitution to European students, and most of all to begin research on my next book.

In the spirit of Jules Verne, the working title of Book #4 is Around the World in Eighty Laws. I’m hoping to reveal some of the beauty, complexity, and fragility of our world through a portrait of its diverse legal systems. I want to show the fundamentally different ways people understand the meaning and purpose of law. I’m also hoping that in the process I’ll be able to raise some basic, hard questions about our ability to get along with one another and with other nations as we respond to globalization.

My travels began at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and ended in Vienna. In between, with Eurail Pass in hand, I visited Maastricht, Tilburg, Luxembourg, Brussels, Würzburg, Hannover, and Salzburg, taking pictures and conducting interviews as I went—trying to channel the spirit of one of my heroes, David Attenborough. It was grand. I also found that I could easily continue an itinerant life indefinitely.

I’ll be posting reflections on my travels and excerpts from my interviews in the coming weeks, especially once I return to my desk in Connecticut.

My European travels naturally got me thinking about what it was I left behind. And that’s why I was so taken with For the Love of Mary. In its lightness of spirit—and in Durbin’s unpretentious style and clear soprano—it captures something essential about the legal self-understanding of my country.