Showing titles in History

 Nobody's Child traces the legal definition of "insanity" back to its inception in Victorian Britain nearly 200 years ago, from when our understanding of the human mind was in its infancy, to today, when questions of race, class, and ability so often determine who is legally "insane" and who is criminally guilty. Vinocour explains how "competency" and "insanity" are creatures of a legal system, not of psychiatric reality, and how, in criminal law, the insanity defense has too often been a luxury of the rich and white. 

Historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court's race record - a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the 19th-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the 21st century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights.

For most of the 20th century, the American founding has been presented as a struggle between social classes over issues arising primarily within, rather than outside, the United States. But in recent years, new scholarship has instead turned to the international history of the American union to interpret both the causes and the consequences of the US Constitution. Max M. Edling argues that the Constitution was created to defend US territorial integrity and the national interest from competitors in the western borderlands and on the Atlantic Ocean.

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.

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.

In The Free Speech Century, two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars to evaluate the evolution of free speech doctrine since Schenk and to assess where it might be headed in the future. The Free Speech Century will serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in how our understanding of the First Amendment transformed over time and why it is so critical both for the United States and for the world today.

Since America's founding, the US Supreme Court had issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. And hundreds of judges have occupied the bench. Yet as Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge, points out, almost every one of the Justices fits into a very small number of types regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute.

A withering and witty examination of how the American legal system, burdened by complexity and untrammeled growth, fails Americans and threatens the rule of law itself, by the acclaimed author of A Generation of Sociopaths. Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do...

Racial hatred is one of the ugliest of human emotions. And the United States not only once condoned it, it also mandated it?wove it right into the fabric of American jurisprudence. Federal and state governments legally suspended the free will of blacks for 150 years and then denied blacks equal...

When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept - and expect - pervasive police power. As Policing the Open Road makes clear, this radical transformation in the nature and meaning of American freedom has had far-reaching political and legal consequences.

A concise, accessible, and engaging guide to the law of treason, written by the nation’s foremost expert on the subject The only crime defined in the United States Constitution, treason is routinely described by judges as more heinous than murder. Today the term is regularly thrown around by...

Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America's moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation's racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early anti-drug laws in the United States arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how United States drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity.

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so...

With more than 500 fascinating facts about law through the ages and colorful characters in courtroom history, Dracula Was a Lawyer is filled with compelling quips and stories about lawyers we love to hate (until we need one!), the pitfalls in our legal system, celebrity attorneys, wild trials, and bizarre battles between opposing parties.

The first authorized biography of Soli Sorabjee ‘A gripping life story of a Goliath who strode the Indian legal canvass for nearly seventy years.’ – Mukul Rohatgi, former Attorney General of India ‘Superbly researched, this book by Abhinav Chandrachud is a must read. ‘ – Madhavi...

In 1974, Pan American Flight 806 was hoping to land safely in Pago Pago, Samoa, but instead plummeted at 140 miles per hour into the jungle floor. The 101 passengers and crew members all survived this devastating crash. Unfortunately, only four of them escaped the wreckage before the ensuing fire that followed and lived to tell their story. After the disaster, Pan American was found guilty of "willful misconduct" after the longest and most expensive trial in aviation history.

The intrigue began with a triple homicide in a luxury apartment building just steps from the Champs-Elyseés, in March 1887. A high-class prostitute and two others, one of them a child, had been stabbed to death. Aaron Freundschuh's account of the "Pranzini Affair" recreates not just the intricacies of the investigation and the raucous courtroom trial, but also the jockeying for status among rival players who all stood to gain professional advantage and prestige.

The strife and horrors of the Civil War in America were raw with the wounds of the war lasting for decades; and affecting those who lived in both the North and the South. As the nation struggled to find unity, the forces of darkness and of those who wished to rule through intimidation and terror, spread their wicked ways under the cover of white sheets. This is the story of the Ku Klux Klan and their chief brand: Lynchings, as told in the original newspaper stories from journals across the nation.

Pirates plundered other ships on the high seas while on the brig Crawford a cunning act of piracy was perpetrated by a veteran pirate leader. He slit his own throat to escape justice while three Spaniards he recruited stood trial with the esteemed Chief Justice John Marshall presiding over the federal court in Richmond, Virginia, in 1827, a rare trial. Follow the action in a blow-by blow description of the murder and mayhem right into the courtroom.

Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class Black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest. As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial - which spanned several months - were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the Black community to public attention.