The Book's Authors Both authors have actively participated in grassroots social justice movements from the 1960s to the present. They also have worked for over two decades closely monitoring, critiquing, and sometimes struggling against land-use decisions made by local officials in various towns in the upstate Hudson Valley of New York state. David Porter David Porter studied political science, sociology and economics at Columbia University where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at colleges in Brooklyn, Montreal, and Maryland and for two decades at Empire State College of the State University of New York. Over four decades, he has investigated and written on a variety of grassroots contexts of community participatory empowerment, historically and in the present, in the U.S. and abroad. Chester Mirsky Chester L. Mirsky received his J.D. at New York Law School and is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law. He has researched and written extensively about historical socio-legal contexts of the U.S. criminal justice system, focusing on the role of courtroom actors and the impact they have on the form of law and the method by which law is understood and employed on a day-to-day basis. He is co-author of a forthcoming book on the transformation of criminal justice in the nineteenth century.