American Law

Blending history and memoir, retired U.S. Marshal Mike Earp - a descendant of the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp - offers an exclusive and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the most storied law enforcement agency in America, illuminating its vital role in the nation's development for more than two hundred years. Setting his own experiences within the long history of the U.S. Marshals service, Earp offers a moving and illuminating tribute to the brave marshals who have dedicated their lives to keeping the nation safe.

Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal", created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the 19th century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the 21st. Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours - race and equality.

Rot and Revival is one of the first scholarly works to comprehensively theorize and document how politics make American constitutional law and how the courts affect the path of partisan politics. Rejecting the idea that the Constitution's significance and interpretation can be divorced from contemporary political realities, Anthony Michael Kreis explains how American constitutional law reflects the ideological commitments of dominant political coalitions, the consequences of major public policy choices, and the influences of intervening social movements.

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.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of one of America's icons in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This volume features Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court Justice.

Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration. Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people", however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets.

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.

Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice". Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past 70 years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy.

Mission at Nuremberg is Tim Townsend's gripping story of the American Army chaplain sent to save the souls of the Nazis incarcerated at Nuremberg, a compelling and thought-provoking tale that raises questions of faith, guilt, morality, vengeance, forgiveness, salvation, and the essence of humanity.

The fascinating true story of how a group of visionary attorneys helped make American business synonymous with big business and Wall Street the center of the financial world.

Since age eighteen, twin sisters Wyld and Allure Flowers have dominated the charts. With sultry voices belting out gems that turn into platinum plaques, The Soprano Girls have lived a life many couldn't fathom experiencing. World travel, finessing sold-out crowds, and receiving accolades fuel their passion. However, once bad news about them spreads like wildfire, the allure of the fast life becomes an afterthought. Together, the twins agree to join Better Days Rehab Center and make their health a priority until fate plays her card and grief has now entered the arena.

It is 1942, and World War II is raging. In the months since Pearl Harbor, the US has plunged into the war overseas—and on the home front, it has locked up tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans in concentration camps, tearing them from their homes on the West Coast with the ostensible goal of neutralizing a supposed internal threat. At each of these camps the government places a white lawyer with contradictory instructions: provide legal counsel to the prisoners, and keep the place running.

Eminent scholar Peter Irons makes a powerful and persuasive case that Blacks have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions that can hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children, this searing and sobering account of legal and extra-legal violence against Blacks peels away the fictions and myths expressed by White racists.

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.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.

When the death of Isaiah “Zay” Turner awakens controversy in the Midwest, Jennifer Davis and attorney Marcus Brown band together to bring the Turner family their deserved justice. They work closely as a team to conquer allyship, defeat agenda-setting narratives, and decriminalize Isaiah’s name--alongside his mother, uncle, and girlfriend Tiara.

From prosecuting murderers in Chicago, to arguing before the Supreme Court, to authoring more than a dozen books, Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett has played an integral role in the rise of originalism—the movement to identify, restore, and defend the original meaning of the Constitution. Thanks in part to his efforts, by 2018 a majority of sitting Supreme Court justices self-identified as "originalists."

When the U.S. government forced 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps in 1942, it created administrative tribunals to pass judgment on who was loyal and who was disloyal. In American Inquisition, Eric Muller relates the untold story of exactly how military and civilian bureaucrats judged these tens of thousands of American citizens during wartime. Some citizens were deemed loyal and were freed, but one in four was declared disloyal to America and condemned to repressive segregation in the camps or barred from war-related jobs.

Law has played a central role in American history. From colonial times to the present, law has not just reflected the changing society in which legal decisions have been made - it has played a powerful role in shaping that society, though not always in positive ways. Eminent legal scholar G. Edward White offers a compact overview that sheds light on the impact of law on a number of key social issues.

Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country....