This festive event, features 25 authors, including university faculty H.W. Brands, Don Carleton, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Tiffany Gill, Emilio Zamora, Max Sherman, and Steven Weinberg.

Authors’ books will be for sale and proceeds will benefit two Texas libraries.  Although authors may speak briefly about their books, there is not a formal program scheduled. The event is designed to facilitate book signings and conversations with the public and authors.  Coffee and pastries will be served.

Free parking will be available in the St. Martin’s Lutheran Church lot on the northwest corner of 15th and Rio Grande Street.

In his book, the prominent labor law scholar examines recent developments to demonstrate that a resurgent labor movement is possible. Getman proposes new models for organizing and innovative techniques to strengthen strikes. Above all, he insists that unions must return to their historical roots as a social movement.

In a recent  review, the Austin American-Statesman writes, “The majority of “Restoring the Power of Unions” is taken up with tracing the symmetry between two factors that may revive unions: organizing on the grassroots level — that is, organizing to make the workers themselves organizers of other workers — and the new “comprehensive campaigns” waged by some unions against corporations.”

Getman’s diagnosis and suggested cures for the labor movement leads the reviewer to conclude,  ”Unlike most accounts of the world of American unions, which paint a picture of unadulterated decline and fall, the reader comes away from Getman’s book thinking that unions might yet survive.”

Getman was also recently  interviewed on KUT Radio about “Restoring the Power of Unions” (Yale University Press, June 2010), the scholar’s tenth book.

Huskey, who teaches in the Law School’s National Security Clinic and is a fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, will also talk about the future of Guantanamo; and the current federal policy on preventive detention.

“Justice at Guantanamo” (Lyons Press, June 2009) is a memoir, chronicling Huskey’s personal journey from her native Alaska, to a civil war in Africa, to bartending and modeling in New York City, and ultimately to the law where she found her calling, defending human rights, after practicing for several years at a law firm in Washington, D.C.

Huskey, a 1997 graduate of the Law School who established the National Security Clinic in 2007, began representing Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainees in 2002 as one of a few lawyers willing to challenge the government soon after 9/11. And as she told an audience at the School of Law yesterday, Huskey spent years battling the government before even getting a chance to meet her detainee clients, whose case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

BookPeople is on the corner of West 6th Street and N. Lamar.

Lucas A. (Scot) Powe Jr., a professor of law and government at The University of Texas at Austin, will be at BookPeople this Monday, May 4, at 7:30 p.m. to discuss and sign his lastest book, “The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008″ (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Powe, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1970-71, is a leading historian of the Supreme Court and a First Amendment scholar.

In his new book released this month, Powe provides a revealing look at the history of the Court and the close ties between its decisions and the nation’s politics at the time. He does this by rendering fresh judgments on key decisions, showing how virtually every major Supreme Court ruling suited the wishes of the most powerful politicians of the time. The story begins with the creation of the Constitution and ends with the June 2008 decisions on the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Powe has written three other books including “The Warren Court and American Politics” (Harvard) and was a principal commentator on the 2007 four-part PBS series “The Supreme Court.”

Philip Bobbitt

In the lead essay of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, historian Niall Ferguson called Bobbitt’s book “the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11—indeed, since the end of the Cold War.”

“Terror and Consent” is Bobbitt’s seventh book.

Bobbitt is a distinguished senior lecturer in the Law School and a senior fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, which is hosting the talk in the Law School’s Eidman Courtroom.

Bobbitt also holds the Herbert Wechsler Chair of Jurisprudence at the Columbia University Law School. As one of the nation’s leading constitutional theorists, his interests include not only constitutional law but also international security and the history of strategy.

Copies of Bobbitt’s book may be purchased before the event at the University Co-op East near the Law School.

McGarity, a regulatory law expert, says most consumers would be surprised to learn that the doors to the local courthouses are in jeopardy of being closed to them if they have been injured by a defective product, sickened by contaminated food, or disabled by an inadequately tested drug or medical device.

“The ones responsible for this injustice are not our local judges or legislators. They are faceless bureaucrats in the federal regulatory agencies who are supposed to be protecting us, but in recent years have been more concerned with protecting the industries they regulate,” McGarity said.

At the book signing, McGarity will explain how this has happened and what the Obama administration and Congress can do about it.

The story eventually led McGarity to write “The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries” (Yale University Press, 2008) about the decade-long preemption war in the courts, federal agencies and Congress—an issue he’d worked on as a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform.

While many people are unaware of the preemption war, the outcomes of these court battles will affect everyone, and consumers stand to be the biggest losers, McGarity says.

McGarity recently sat down to talk about his latest book, which hits bookstores on Dec. 2, as well as a high-profile preemption case currently pending at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a nutshell, what is the main claim that you make in the book and why?

The overall thrust of the book is that in our federal system, Congress and the courts should be very cautious about preempting common law claims. State and federal laws and regulations typically provide “protective justice.” They are meant to deter specific conduct.

The common law, on the other hand, provides “corrective justice,” a term that refers to the common law’s goal of forcing wrongdoers to compensate their victims. Since federal law rarely provides corrective justice, federal preemption of common law claims means that deserving victims will not be compensated. In my view, this is usually an unjust outcome.

You discuss many court cases in your book. Which one is going to have the most impact on consumers, depending on how the cases are decided?

The recent case with the greatest potential impact is Wyeth v. Levine, a case that the Supreme Court heard in early November. In that case, the question is whether approval of a drug label by the federal Food and Drug Administration impliedly preempts failure to warn claims at state common law. A broad holding by the Supreme Court will effectively throw out the vast majority of claims by patients injured by drugs because the drug company neglected to warn them and their doctors about adverse side effects.

The Supreme Court has on many cases stated that there is a presumption against preemption, but that presumption is often ignored in practice. One of my suggestions is that we take that presumption seriously. I hope the Supreme Court takes my advice.

In your book, you provide numerous examples and stories of particular battles in the preemption war. Could you describe one for us?

One of the most troublesome examples in the book is the case of Buddy Kuhl, a Kansas City resident whose primary care physician recommended that he see a heart specialist after he suffered a serious heart attack. Two different specialists recommended that Kuhl undergo heart surgery at a St. Louis hospital, but his medical benefit plan’s “utilization reviewer” refused to approve his pre-certification request.

Because he could not afford to pay for the operation out of his own pocket, the surgery was canceled. After a third specialist agreed that surgery in St. Louis was necessary, the plan finally did pre-certify the operation. But Kuhl’s heart had deteriorated by then to the point at which surgery was no longer a feasible option. When the specialist recommended a heart transplant instead, the plan refused to pre-certify that surgery as well.

Kuhl died three months later. His family sued the medical benefit plan for botching the job so badly, but a federal court held that the claim was preempted. (See Kuhl v. Lincoln National Health Plan of Kansas City Inc., 999 F.2d 298 (8th Cir. 1993)).

What do you hope readers will learn from your book?

First, I hope the general reader will take away an understanding of how federal preemption works and the unique status of state common law in the context of preemption. Second, I would like the reader to appreciate how very important these issues are to all of us who purchase products and services in a vigorous national economy.

None of us knows when he or she might be injured by some defective product or negligent practice, and all of us expect justice when that happens. We need to be aware of how federal agency preemption of state common law undermines this expectation.