People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure during that time. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same.

But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle 2 and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. First, people may shift to reading existing books on those e-readers. Second, the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting people have many reference works at their fingertips. Third, the shift may change the content of books. And, fourth, the shift may change who publishes books, and sometimes which books are published.

Brave New World, By Aldous Huxley. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1932. (Harper Perennial 2005 ed.). Pp. xxi, 340.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a prescient portrayal of a future dystopia, offering insight into the inherent trade-offs societies make when striving to attain stability and security. We see elements of a similar struggle in present-day society. Politicians routinely invoke traumatic terrorist attacks, including those of September 11th, in an effort to justify ever-larger incursions on our fundamental freedoms. Wholesale changes in our public policy-from the USA PATRIOT Act to our use of torture-have been implemented with little justification beyond fear. Facing an economic crisis, we are told that the government must play a role in its recovery. We blindly pursue economic stability, ignoring the costs-financial or otherwise-and the perverse systems of incentives the expansion creates. Huxley warns that this pursuit of security and stability inevitably causes us to forgo the things that ultimately define mankind: freedom and the pursuit of the unknown.

How Judges Think. By Richard A. Posner. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 2008. Pp. 387. $29.95.

I was eager to enter the judiciary. I liked the title: federal judge. I liked the job security: life tenure. And I could tolerate the pay: the same as Richard Posner's. That, indeed, may have been the most flattering part of the opportunity-that I could hold the same title and have the same pay grade as one of America's most stunning legal minds. Don't think I didn't mention it when I had the chance.

There is so much to admire about Judge Posner-his lively pen, his curiosity, his energy, his apparent understanding of: everything. He has written 53 books, more than 168 articles, thousands of opinions and numerous blog entries with Nobel-prize-winning economist Gary Becker. The output is hard to keep up with, as is the dizzying array of topics he covers-everything from economics to the Clinton impeachment to 9/11 to sex to literature to public health to aging-sometimes directly related to the law, sometimes not.

Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health. By Richard L. Revesz & Michael A. Livermore. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. viii, 254. $34.95.

Although legislative efforts were in the forefront during the first year of the Obama Administration, legislation is not the only way an administration leaves its mark. Since the Carter Administration, White House oversight of regulatory programs has been an important tool that every president has used to advance his policy objectives. Key issues raised by White House oversight and the use of cost-benefit analysis as a guide to regulatory decisions are addressed in Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health, by Richard L. Revesz and Michael A. Livermore (2008). In this Review, Christopher C. DeMuth and Douglas H. Ginsburg, both administrators of the White House regulatory review program during the Reagan Administration, evaluate and criticize Retaking Rationality's arguments in detail. They find that Retaking Rationality fails to support its claim that cost-benefit "fallacies" have been used to block worthwhile regulations, and that the book's authors hold an unrealistic conception of the ability of cost-benefit analysis to settle contentious political questions. Messrs. DeMuth and Ginsburg argue that Retaking Rationality's conception of White House oversight as a neutral policy-optimizing mechanism is also unrealistic: active White House involvement in agency rulemaking is a legitimate and necessary means by which a president pursues his policies, whether they be the policies of a President Reagan or those of a President Obama.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. By Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 282. $26.

In Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler describe how public and private institutions can improve on individual choices by nudging individuals into making selections that are right for them. Rejecting the Econ-101 caricature of the rational utility maximizer as inaccurate, Sunstein and Thaler apply the insights of behavioral economics to show how institutions can improve the delivery of services. Moving beyond attempts to remedy individual cognitive errors, Sunstein and Thaler also argue for "libertarian paternalism"-which they herald as the "Third Way". This Review assesses their claims critically, finding their development of "nudge" and "choice architecture" to be welcome additions to public-policy analysis, but ultimately concluding that "libertarian paternalism" is a politically impoverished vision.

A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Ethics in a Democratic Age. By Daniel Markovits. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 361. $29.95.

The authors argue that Daniel Markovits's recently published book, A Modern Legal Ethics, fundamentally misunderstands what lawyers do on behalf of clients in an adversary system, and how lawyers feel about it.  Freedman and Smith argue that not only is Markovits mistaken about the widespread unhappiness of lawyers, he is also misguided in pointing to "lying" and "cheating" as the source of unhappiness and "guilt."  Moreover, the authors argue that Markovits's proposed "ethic" for rescuing the legal profession is superficial wordplay-ironically derivative of the adversarial advocacy he condemns.

American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War. By Christian G. Fritz. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. xi, 413. Hardcover, $80; paper, $29.99.

In his book American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War, Professor Christian Fritz argues that two very different conceptions of the American people's sovereignty-one broad and one narrow-battled for the nation's allegiance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Under the broad conception, ordinary citizens could take control of the nation's day-to-day governmental affairs whenever they were unhappy with their elected leaders' performance, and could alter their constitutional arrangements by any means they deemed appropriate. Under the narrow conception, citizens could influence day-to-day governmental affairs only through elections and other government-approved mechanisms, and could alter their constitutional arrangements only by those methods that were authorized by the ratified constitutional texts themselves. In Professor Fritz's view, the broad conception faded from view in the years after the Civil War and the narrow conception now firmly prevails.

City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation. By Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2008. Pp. xvii, 260. $35.

Imagine how stunted our understanding of the federal government would be without any detailed scholarly examination of the U.S. Constitution itself. As remarkable as that sounds, that is essentially the problem that Gerald Frug and David Barron have set out to remedy for local governments in their superb City Bound. In the book, Frug and Barron take a comprehensive, empirical look at the legal frameworks under which cities and other local governments operate, providing an invaluable roadmap for understanding the hidden architecture of legal constraints that-largely without notice-are shaping America's urban future.

Why this kind of analysis has rarely been attempted may have something to do with the fact that there are nearly twenty thousand municipalities and nearly ninety thousand local governments all told in the United States today. It likely has even more to do with the fact that, by comparison to the federal or state constitutions, divining the precise nature of local legal power is not as simple as reviewing a municipal charter. As Frug and Barron note, the precise contours of what they call "city structures" must be culled from a detailed examination of the bewildering "mix of grants of, and restrictions on, local power" (p. 3) through which states shape the authority of their localities.

Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law. By Douglas Husak. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 231. $49.95.

Criminal law has long included far too many crimes of questionable merit-crimes of negligible wrongfulness, crimes that cause negligible harm, and crimes that require too little culpability on behalf of offenders. More recently, American criminal law in particular has imposed too much punishment-far more than it used to, far more than any other democratic nation. Douglas Husak's new book Overcriminalization offers an account of the normative parameters that should describe and limit criminal law, as well as a set of doctrines or tests for achieving those constraints. In this Review of Husak's book, I describe Husak's theory and explore why he directs his argument to legislatures, which caused most of the overcriminalization in the first place, rather than to courts. With respect to most pieces of the overcriminalization problem, I suggest he is probably right to do so, but for reasons other than those he implies. Legislatures are poor institutions for acting on principles that conflict with majority sentiments. Yet legislatures have a long track record of reducing overcriminalization as popular views change, and courts have contributed to that project largely only after legislatures have led the way. Moreover, debates leading to changes in criminal law have often occurred partially on terms Husak makes central to his thesis. Nonetheless, courts may be the better-if still faint-hope for moderating policies of overpunishment, which so far legislatures have largely proven unable to address.

Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. By Paul Butler. New York: The New Press. 2009. Pp. ix, 214. $25.95.

Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life without parole for murder while the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the same sentence for possession of a pound and a half of cocaine. Our appetite for vengeance sometimes seems insatiable: politicians make careers out of being tough on crime, only to lose elections to those who are yet tougher; Alabama sheriffs deny food to inmates and make a profit; jokes about raping prisoners are part of popular culture.

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet. By Neil deGrasse Tyson. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co. 2009. Pp. 194. $23.95.

In case you haven't heard, Pluto isn't a planet anymore (and maybe it never was). In grade school, we all memorized the planets, giving little thought to what made something a planet besides revolving around the Sun and being part of some familiar mnemonic. However, scientific discoveries about Pluto and other parts of space led scientists to question Pluto's planetary status and ultimately, to strip Pluto of its standing among the planets. This leads to the inevitable question-what is a planet?-which turns out to be a more difficult and fascinating question than one might think.

The Pluto Files grapples with the question of what it is to be a planet. The book is as much a cultural study as an astrophysical one. "Gathered here in one place is a record of Pluto's rise and fall from planethood, given by way of media accounts, public forums, cartoons, and letters I received from disgruntled schoolchildren, their teachers, strongly opinionated adults, and colleagues" (p. xi). The Pluto Files thus presents the question of the meaning of planet not through rigorous argumentation but through the crosswinds of culture and science.

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression. By Richard A. Posner. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press. 2009. Pp. xix, 346. $23.95.

A Failure of Capitalism by Richard Posner is not a great book, and it does not pretend to be one. Posner summarizes the economic crisis of 2008-09 and considers proposals to reduce current suffering and avoid future recurrence (p. xvi). But when the book's final edits were made in February 2009, it was still too soon for authoritative solutions or full accounts of what had happened. Instead, Posner wrote a conspicuously contemporary-and thus incomplete-description of the crisis as it looked to him at the time (p. xvii).

Now one year later, readers may need a reminder about the value of Posner's quick-baked efforts. His book was one of the first to describe the crisis, and it is a work of fluid prose and potent intellect, written by a scholar with immense personal knowledge and easy access to nationally prominent macroeconomists. In the first wave of academic writing about the crisis, Posner's book is by far the most accessible, and it is also one of the best.

War and Taxes. By Steven A. Bank, Kirk J. Stark, and Joseph J. Thorndike. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press. 2008. Pp. xix, 224. $26.50.

Since 2003, American political leaders and lawmakers have been committed to the simultaneous pursuit of tax cuts and military excursions abroad. Just a few decades ago, when military hawks were also deficit hawks, such a position would have seemed incongruous. This Review examines War and Taxes, a provocative and fascinating new book that seeks to explain the apparent dissonance of recent American wartime tax policy. In contrast to conventional wisdom, which presumes that wartime patriotism has always and everywhere trumped self-interest, War and Taxes shows that the history of U.S. wartime taxation is not quite such a heroic tale. By chronicling the complex and contested political history of wartime tax policy and its links to fiscal citizenship, the book reminds readers that many previous lawmakers and leaders resisted spreading the burden and costs of conflict on to the American people.

In addition to highlighting the main themes of War and Taxes, this Review argues that the authors have provided a judicious, yet ironic, account of the long history of wartime opposition to tax increases. In their careful efforts to provide a balanced and measured history, the authors inevitably, and perhaps inadvertently, draw attention to the ultimately unprecedented fiscal policies recently pursued by American leaders. Although War and Taxes provides a valuable and necessary corrective to the overly romanticized history of wartime sacrifice, its attempts to bracket the highly partisan and ideological aspects of tax cuts during moments of national crisis can be seen as a damning indictment of recent wartime tax policy.

The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It. By Jonathan Zittrain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 342. Cloth, $30; paper, $17.

In brief, the core theory of Jonathan Zittrain's 2008 book The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It is this: good laws, norms, and code are needed to regulate the Internet, to prevent bad laws, norms, and code from compromising its creative capabilities and fettering its fecund flexibility. A far snarkier if less alliterative summary would be "We have to regulate the Internet to preserve its open, unregulated nature."

Zittrain posits that either a substantive series of unfortunate Internet events or one catastrophic one will motivate governments to try to regulate cyberspace in a way that promotes maximum stability, which will inhibit or possibly even preclude future technological innovations that rely on open access to the tools and systems that comprise the Internet. To head this off, he calls for a "transition to a networking infrastructure that is more secure yet roughly as dynamic as the current one," which will be achieved by collaborative efforts, "a 21st century international Manhattan Project which brings together people of good faith in government, academia, and the private sector for the purpose of shoring up the miraculous information technology grid that is too easy to take for granted and whose seeming self-maintenance has led us into an undue complacence."

Understanding Privacy. By Daniel J. Solove. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 2008. Pp. x, 257. Cloth, $45; paper, $19.95.

Conceptualizing privacy has long been a contested endeavor. Some scholars argue that privacy protects important interests. Julie Cohen and Paul Schwartz, for example, view privacy as essential to autonomy and deliberative democracy. Others are skeptical as to whether privacy vindicates interests worthy of discourse at all. Judge Richard Posner, for instance, contends that privacy permits individuals to conceal "discreditable facts" about them to society's detriment. At the heart of this dispute is privacy's protean nature: it means "so many different things to so many different people" that attempts to articulate just what it is, or why it is important, generally have failed or become unwieldy. Without a framework with which to delineate its parameters, privacy remains a conceptual muddle.