What University of Chicago Law Profs are Reading and Recommending

Just in time for the holidays, Dean Saul Levmore of the University of Chicago Law School has sent alumni a list of the books that law profs there are reading and recommending.

In an e-mail to alumni asking that they consider contributing to the law school, Levmore offers the list as a "small, if unusual, gift."

Although perhaps suitable for gift-giving to friends and family with a taste for intellectual pastimes, none of the faculty's recommended reading appears to be destined for the beach for those taking winter vacations in warmer climes:

Former dean Douglas Baird says Michael Dobbs' One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War is "a gripping minute-by-minute account of the Cuban Missile Crisis that takes advantage of archival materials from the United States and Russia that have only come to light recently."

Martha Nussbaum suggests Jerusalem, a 1783 tome by philosopher Moses Mendelssohn that she describes as "one of the most significant works about the relationship between religion and the state in the European tradition of political philosophy."

And senior lecturer Frank Easterbrook (whose day job is as a judge for the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) points alumni to Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music, by Jane Glover.

While the book has nothing to do with the law, Easterbrook says, "writing is a lawyer's stock in trade, and the best way to learn how to write well is to read well-written literature."

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University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog