Showing titles in History

From the admired judicial authority, author of Louis D. Brandeis (“Remarkable”—Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books; “Monumental”—Alan M. Dershowitz, The New York Times Book Review), Division and Discord, and Supreme Decisions—Melvin Urofsky’s major new book looks at the role of dissent in the Supreme Court and the meaning of the Constitution through the greatest and longest lasting public-policy debate in the country’s history, among members of the Supreme Court, between the Court and the other branches of government, and between the Court and the people of the United States.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

In Demand the Impossible, Robert L. Tsai traces lawyer Stephen Bright's remarkable career to explore the legal ideas that were central to his relentless pursuit of equal justice. For nearly forty years, Bright led the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that provided legal aid to incarcerated people and worked to improve conditions within the justice system. He argued four capital cases before the US Supreme Court—and won each one, despite facing an increasingly hostile bench.

E Pluribus Unum highlights the political context in which the common law developed, and how it influenced the United States Constitution. In practice, the triumph of the common law over competing approaches gave lawyers more authority than governing officials. By the end of the 18th century, many colonial legal professionals began to espouse constitutional ideology that would mature into the doctrine of judicial review.

Buying the Vote analyzes the rise and decline of campaign finance reform by tracking the evolution of both the ways in which presidential campaigns have been funded since the late nineteenth century. Through close examinations of major Supreme Court decisions, Mutch shows how the Court has fashioned a new and profoundly inegalitarian definition of American democracy.

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.

Few American institutions have inflicted greater suffering on ordinary people than the Supreme Court of the United States. Since its inception the justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps because of their race, and where a woman could be sterilized against her will by state law.

Best known as a monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act also revolutionized the lives of America's working women. Title VII of the law made it illegal to discriminate "because of sex". But that simple phrase didn't mean much until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job - and some took their fights all the way to the Supreme Court.

A whole new take on Holmes' classic study of law and judicial development of rules: "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience." Annotated throughout with straightforward clarifications — decoding and demystifying it for the first time — at long last it's accessible to a new generation of readers. Features 2010 Foreword and extensive notes by Steven Alan Childress, a law professor at Tulane. Active Table of Contents, linked footnotes with correct numbers, and original page numbers for citing. Careful proofreading and formatting, unlike any digital or online version ...

In Breaking In, veteran journalist Joan Biskupic tells the story of how two forces providentially merged - the large ambitions of a talented Puerto Rican girl raised in the projects in the Bronx and the increasing political presence of Hispanics, from California to Texas, from Florida to the Northeast - resulting in a historical appointment. And this is not just a tale about breaking barriers as a Puerto Rican. It's about breaking barriers as a justice.

For the first time, a collection of dissents from the most famous Supreme Court cases. Lively and accessible, I Dissent offers a radically fresh view of the judiciary in a collection that is essential listening for anyone interested in American history.

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government.

What do the thoughts of a ravenous tiger have to do with the evolution of America's legal system? How do the works of Jane Austen and Ludwig van Beethoven relate to corporal punishment? In The Law of the Land, Charles Rembar examines these and many other topics, illustrating the surprisingly entertaining history of US law.

In February 1971, racial tension surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, culminated in four days of violence and skirmishes between white vigilantes and black residents. The turmoil resulted in two deaths, six injuries, more than $500,000 in damage, and the firebombing of a white-owned store before the National Guard restored uneasy peace. Despite glaring irregularities in the subsequent trial, 10 young persons were convicted of arson and conspiracy and then sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison.

For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War as the world's most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others retained much of their previous legal regimes.

In The Majesty of the Law, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explores the law, her life as a Justice, and how the Court has evolved and continues to function, grow, and change as an American institution. Tracing some of the origins of American law through history, people, and ideas, O’Connor sheds new light on the basics, and through personal observation she explores the development of institutions and ideas we have come to regard as fundamental.

The Federalist Papers is a series of 85 articles arguing in favor of ratification of the United States Constitution by the 13 original colonies. Federalist No. 74 discusses the powers of the president as commander-in-chief and to grant pardons and reprieves. Hamilton asserts that the role of commander-in-chief is inherent in the office itself and requires the speed and resolve of a single decision-maker.

Steven Donziger, a self-styled social activist and Harvard educated lawyer, signed on to a budding class action lawsuit against multinational Texaco. The suit sought reparations for the Ecuadorian peasants and tribes people whose lives were affected by decades of oil production near their villages and fields. During twenty years of legal hostilities in federal courts in Manhattan and remote provincial tribunals in the Ecuadorian jungle, Donziger and Chevron's lawyers followed fierce no-holds-barred rules.

John Marshall (1755 - 1835) was arguably the most important judicial figure in American history. As the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1801 to 1835, he helped move the Court from the fringes of power to the epicenter of constitutional government. His great opinions in cases like Marbury v. Madison and McCulloch v. Maryland are still part of the working discourse of constitutional law in America.

Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech - except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.