it is a outstanding book lots of imfomatio

The title of this book may be a bit misleading to some hoping to read a book about the formation of a single American Orthodox Church. I thought it would be much more about ways to go about achieving that goal, and to a certain extent, it is. The thing that I didn't realize was that the book is largely comprised of long quotations from canon law as well as from civic court rulings about church administration. The last several chapters were quite interesting, but the rest of the book will not be appealing to most readers.

This book probably wouldn't even be interesting to most Orthodox Christians since it primarily involves the Orthodox in North America (about 5 million people.) This is a very scholarly book (and quite an excellent one for what it is), but I just think that this isn't what most people will expect. It is worthwhile to read if you are interested in canon law, but probably not interesting to you if you are not. As good as this is about its subject, it is DEFINATELY not the place to start reading about the Orthodox Church.

This is an interesting,informative and useful book. I used it for school and it will be one book that I keep. Great case studies.

I think the book is so liberal and it advocate large government. Freedom is not through following the forced laws like affirmative action, ADA, etc. but having a choice especially in employment. Employer should have the say on what they want and who they want to work and not work. The book pretty much tells you that this is the law and its good for you ,so follow or else.
That is socialistic.
We are giving more power to the government to tie us down with more laws and regulation. Their responsibility is to protect the citizens and not to do business. That's for the private sector.

This book gives a good comprehensive look at the mountain of law and regulations encountering employees in both the public and private sector. The examples in the beginning of each chapter are very useful as well as the actual cases used to exemplify how the law has been applied to real-world situations.

Alexander's book reads like a standard history of property law turned upside down; it is as if the footnotes and text had been reversed. He glorifies obscure, minor, and in many cases simply bizarre theorists of American property law. Conventional wisdom holds that the winners write the history; in this case Alexander not only writes the losers' version of history but argues that they haven't even lost. To understand the thrust of the book, consider that although it contains 386 pages of text and another 82 pages of endnotes, it presents no substantive discussion of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, despite (or perhaps because of) that clause's seemingly unambiguous constitutional affirmation of the "property as commodity" view (Richard A. Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain). John Locke gets only a handful of passing mentions. By contrast, the views of many obscure and long-forgotten theorists receive extended discussion.

In many cases when Alexander actually does discuss major historical figures, his interpretations of their views are incorrect. For instance, Alexander reprises the old story that Thomas Jefferson was actually a "civic republican," rather than a believer in the liberal theory of property (chap. 1). He rejects the contrary opinion of the historian Joyce Appleby ("What Is Still American in Jefferson's Political Philosophy?" in her Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination) because--you guessed it--she does not think dialectically: "I view Jefferson's writing as consistently preoccupied with the same basic dialectic, a dialectic of stability and dynamism. Professor Appleby's commitment to a linear framework prevents her from seeing it dialectically" (p. 392 n. 12). Subsequent historical research has tended to confirm Appleby's understanding of Jefferson and to cast further doubt on Alexander's characterization of Jefferson as a civic republican (see John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War).

In the end, Alexander's attempt to construct a dialectic between his two visions of property fails. He has written a book describing the views of some dissenters from the dominant American view of property as commodity. A dialectic requires two evenly balanced and coherent positions. The thinkers described by Alexander are an incoherent grab-bag of minor and uninfluential thinkers of varying quality who do not constitute a coherent philosophical or legal tradition, but rather a desire to justify governmental incursions on liberty and private property rights. Some actually may have been sincere civic republicans; most simply mouthed republican jargon as a cover for private rent-seeking. Few of them added anything valuable to the historical and contemporary debate over property. Send these guys back to the footnotes, where they belong.

naming this book "gun violence in america" distracts from the real problem, which is violence: why are some americans so full of hate and rage toward other americans that they act violently toward them?
The instrument these enraged individuals use is not the issue - the issue is why they are driven to hurt, maim, injure and kill.
This is very much like blaming the car for accidents rather than the agressive risk-taking drivers.