Stanford University Press Blog

Healthcare go-to list

If you're baffled by the proceedings in this week's Supreme Court hearings on Health Care, you're not alone, according to almost every major news outlet.  Here are some experts in various fields to shed some light:

  The New York Times reported on March 24that the Supreme Court was being inundated by political pressure from various interest groups: "136 so far." For the low down on how interest groups work and which are the most powerful (guess?), turn to Matt Grossman's The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance.  (Incidentally, Matt's book is also key to understanding the power of special interest groups like ALEC in relation to Florida's "Stand Your Ground Act," which Paul Krugman recently commented on, also in the New York Times.

 On the topic of the Supreme Court and outside pressure,  Keith Bybee's All Judges Are Political--Except When They're Not: Acceptable Hypcrosoes and the Rule of Law speaks to how the politicization of the court might be especially in play, given that the health care law deeply divides democrats and republicans.  And you can decide for yourself whether Justice Antonin Scalia is as immune as he purports to be to all those "amicus curaie" briefs that have been flooding the Court in recent weeks!

For a clear, unbiased look at the fundamentals of the Health Care Act, turn to Professor and former Director of the Graduate Program in Health Sector Management at Boston University, and frequent blogger for the Huffington Post on healthcare issues, Stephen M. Davidson.  His Still Broken: Understanding the US Healthcare System will help readers assess the arguments made by partisans on both sides of the continuing debate; understand why and how President Obama was able to get Congress to pass a comprehensive reform bill even though most of his predecessors tried and failed; and understand why so many Americans are either confused about its value or actually oppose it.

Finally, two issues seem to haunt any of the conversations we've been having about health care reform since Hillary Clinton first ignited the subject almost 2 decades ago:  the economic infeasibility of the status quo and "state's rights."  Two experts, Richard Scheffler and Erwin Chemerinsky, can offer insight into these topics; for more info see their respective books, Is There a Doctor in the House? Market Signals and Tomorrow's Supply of Doctors and Enhancing Government: Federalism for the 21st Century.

New Spring Titles from SUP!

Spring is here, and with it come longer daylight hours (more time for reading), warmer temps (for reading outside) and a fresh crop of new titles from Stanford University Press to seize and hold your attention all season long.  This spring's list caters to every taste, interest, and sensibility and covers topics from politics to film, world events to business, science to literature.  While it's impossible for us to pick our favorites (there are too many, and we like them all!), here is a sampling of our tempting titles to whet your appetite:

Journalists, politicians, scholars and others are marking the one-year anniversary of the "Arab Spring" by re-examining the causes, similarities, and differences between the various protest movements that populated the Middle East in 2011.  Josh Stacher's Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria is a critical comparison of the revolutions in Egypt and in Syria in which Stacher argues that the structural underpinnings of autocracies differ very much from one to another, and these differences have everything to do with how regime change will play out within a state.

 

For the cinéaste (or for anyone who's read Paul Rudnick's latest in the New  Yorker), The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses is SF Chronicle film critic and Bay Area Talking Head Mick La Salle's (very opinionated!) tribute to French film, and in particular to the actresses who make it what it is.  American audiences are hungry for the kind of intelligent, introspective, and thought-provoking films that French actresses are making  throughout their careers.  And yes, throughout: from teenagers to nonagenarians.

 

  This election year, Matt Grossman's The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance will be the guide to understanding why some interest groups are far better than others in gaining access to politicians and getting what they want.  As Publishers Weekly stated in their review, "constituencies that are more engaged with public affairs and their communities, he contends, make their voices heard better through organized representation."  In other words, says PW, "Grossmann’s clear-eyed analysis of who gets a seat at the table suggests that democracy’s faults lie not in our lobbyists but in ourselves."

 

The marketplace is awash in titles that suggest "how to" start a business:  entrepreneurship has been the topic in boardrooms and classrooms across the country.  But say you've started your own business, and you've made it through that first hurdle.  You are a success!    Erm...now what?   Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in Residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business has the answers.  Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Business is for those who want their business to thrive beyond the start-up phase.  He identifies the top ten growth challenges to new businesses and, based on extensive research on more than fifty companies, and offering the lived experiences of eleven entrepreneurs, shows how to overcome them

Be sure to keep checking our website,  blog, Twitter feed (@Stanfordpress) and Face Book Page for more updates as the season rolls on!

SUP remembers Dr. Robert Hoyk

Everyone at Stanford University Press was saddened to learn of the death of Dr. Robert Hoyk on March 12. Along with colleague Dr. Paul Hersey, Bob authored one of the best selling titles published under our Stanford Business Books imprint. Initially released in cloth in 2008, the book The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior; 45 Psychological Traps that Every One of Us Falls Prey To, was released in paperback in 2010.

With its mix of case studies describing real world ethical traps faced by people at all levels in all types of organization, and practical strategies for avoiding them or coping with them, the book has been extremely successful. This success has been, in large part, due to Bob's two great gifts as an author. First, his engaging and "no frills" writing style made the normally demanding topic of business ethics easily accessible to both business people and college students alike. At one level, The Ethical Executive can be read cover to cover on a transcontinental flight yet, at a deeper level, it can sustain classroom discussion and debate for a semester or more. Second, Bob's tenacity and imagination translated into a constant stream of creative and extremely effective marketing initiatives. As as a result he probably sold as many books himself as did our sales and marketing department!

Bob's book is on track for another very impressive sales year: a tribute to his skills and personal qualities that he'd have appreciated.

Lunar (Chinese) New Year, Chicago Style!

As we ring in the Lunar Year of the Dragon (along with Warren Buffett, who played "I've Been Working on the Railroad" on his banjo (!?) to the Chinese people in honor of), President Obama reminds us that "we are stronger because of our diversity; we are richer because of the different cultures that make up this country."  Having spent some time in Chicago, our President knows more about how the lunar year is celebrated there than most. 

Most of us think of the massive, colorful celebrations on the West Coast or in New York when we think about how the "Chinese New Year" (or the Spring Festival, as it is known in China) is celebrated in the US. Far fewer know about the vibrant community of Chinese Americans that developed around the same time (late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries) as its coastal counterparts.  In Chinese Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community Since 1870, Huping Ling offers the first comprehensive history of Chinese in Chicago, beginning with the arrival of the pioneering Moy brothers in the 1870s and continuing to the present.

Ling focuses on how race, transnational migration, and community have defined Chinese in Chicago. Drawing upon archival documents in English and Chinese, she charts how Chinese made a place for themselves among the multiethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, cultivating friendships with local authorities and consciously avoiding racial conflicts. Ling takes readers through the decades, exploring evolving family structures and relationships, the development of community organizations, and the operation of transnational businesses. She pays particular attention to the influential role of Chinese in Chicago's academic and intellectual communities and to the complex and conflicting relationships among today's more dispersed Chinese Americans in Chicago.

Enjoy, and Happy Lunar New Year!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jason Mazzone, author of Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law, on SOPA

With an estimated 7,000 websites, including Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit and Wordpress, threatening to go dark on January 18 in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, PIPA, we thought now might be a good time to take a a closer look at bills heading to Congress in the new session. 

For that we turn to Jason Mazzone, renowned legal scholar and author of Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property, and a recent piece he wrote for TorrentFreak, which we excert in part here:

"Title I of SOPA (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.

The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed—only the good faith representation of the copyright owner. Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet. The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.

There is also a catch: a site owner who issues a counter-notice automatically consents to being sued in U.S. courts (a strong disincentive for sites based abroad). With few checks at all, SOPA gives copyright owners a sharp tool to disrupt and shut down websites. Based on their past conduct, there is no reason to think that copyright owners will use this tool with any measure of restraint."

Jason Mazzone, author of Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law, on SOPA

With an estimated 7,000 websites, including Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit and Wordpress, threatening to go dark on January 18 in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, PIPA, we thought now might be a good time to take a a closer look at bills heading to Congress in the new session. 

For that we turn to Jason Mazzone, renowned legal scholar and author of Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property, and a recent piece he wrote for TorrentFreak, which we excert in part here:

"Title I of SOPA (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.

The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed—only the good faith representation of the copyright owner. Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet. The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.

There is also a catch: a site owner who issues a counter-notice automatically consents to being sued in U.S. courts (a strong disincentive for sites based abroad). With few checks at all, SOPA gives copyright owners a sharp tool to disrupt and shut down websites. Based on their past conduct, there is no reason to think that copyright owners will use this tool with any measure of restraint."