American Law

From the New York Times bestselling author of Kaikeyi, a galvanizing stand-alone contemporary fantasy following a burnt-out reproductive health care worker as she fights back against escalating attacks on her clinic and the malevolent forces in hot pursuit of her newly acquired power. As a...

Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes.

New York Times bestselling author of Black Klansman, Ron Stallworth, returns with another firsthand account of trailblazing police work in the most unlikely place for a Black cop in the ’90s. Determined to pursue his passion for undercover work wherever it leads, Ron Stallworth finally...

Finalist for 2021 Audie Award in History/Biography The book that inspired the documentary A Crime on the Bayou 2021 Chautauqua Prize Finalist The "arresting, astonishing history" of one lawyer and his defendant who together achieved a "civil rights milestone" (Justin Driver). In 1966 in a small...

Indian peoples made some 400 treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.

Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? May colleges prefer black applicants over white ones? These are among the most bitterly contested issues in the United States today. We answer these questions, and many more, by presenting them to nine lawyers—the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. No other nation commits so many important questions to its highest court. Stuart Banner’s The Most Powerful Court in the World is an authoritative history of the United States Supreme Court from the Founding era to the present.

Frontier Law follows the exploits of Texas Ranger Frank Sirocco when he rides into San Ysidro to investigate the murder of two colleagues. Up against a deadly band of killers, gunfighters and renegades, Sirocco will need all of his wits and guns to survive this one. Fortunately, help arrived from unexpected sources.

"Boys, let us get up a club." Six restless young men raided the linens at a friend's mansion, pulled pillowcases over their heads, hopped on horses, and cavorted through the streets of Pulaski, Tennessee. The six friends named their club the Ku Klux Klan, and, all too quickly, their club grew into the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire with secret dens spread across the South. This is the story of how a secret terrorist group took root in America's democracy.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights.

Joe is a retired Special Forces operative with a bad case of PTSD and some substance abuse issues, moonlighting as a fixer for the most powerful crime families in town. In his newest assignment, Joe is sent to take out a shadowy figure named Zahir, who made the New York crime families' hit list by hijacking heroin shipments bound for US dealers and funneling the money to terror cells. Which means that Gotham's underbelly has brought Joe back to the one place in the world he doesn't want to revisit.

Crimes and violations of the law require punishment, and our legal system is set up to punish, but what if the system was recalibrated to also weigh grounds for forgiveness? What if something like bankruptcy - a fresh start for debtors - were available to people convicted of crimes? Martha Minow explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive.

For the last four decades, John Henry Browne has defended the indefensible. From Facebook folk hero the "Barefoot Bandit" Colton Moore, to Benjamin Ng of the Wah Mee massacre and Kandahar massacre culprit Sergeant Robert Bales, Browne's unceasing advocacy and the daring to take on some of the most unwinnable cases - and nearly win them all - has led 48 Hours' Peter Van Sant to call him "the most famous lawyer in America."

Drawing upon 25 years of experience rep­resenting Black youth in Washington, DC’s juve­nile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young peo­ple and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children.

Thurgood Marshall, the African-American lawyer who successfully argued the Brown v. Board case. Today, Marshall is best known for being the first Black Supreme Court justice, but that history-setting precedent has come to overshadow the instrumental work he did as chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Marshall argued more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone in history and would win nearly 30 of them, including the seminal Brown v. Board case.

A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation's carceral system" (Heather Ann Thompson). Each year, more than half a million Americans are released...

Former ICE Director Tom Homan has been at the forefront of the conservative fight to secure our borders and offers proof that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. Illegal immigration is the most controversial and emotional issue this country faces today. President Trump was elected on...

Though the Constitution was ratified in 1788, its impact on our lives is as recent as today's news. Informed by the latest scholarship and exploring the major themes that have shaped American constitutional history: federalism, the balance of powers, property, representation, equality, rights, and security, this book places constitutional history within the context of American political and social history. As our nation's circumstances have changed, so has our Constitution.

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson received the Coretta Scott King Award for her children’s book Almost to Freedom. Here she relays the extraordinary story of Bass Reeves, a lawman in the Old West who escaped slavery to become one of the most successful U.S. Marshals in history.

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.

This is a collection of stories drawn from many different tribes of Native Americans. Although the different lifestyles of these varied peoples dictate widely different types of story, they are united by a common belief in the spiritual power of the natural world and the magic that inhabits all living things. Stars and animals speak, wizards and giants cast wicked spells and young heroes and heroines brave all dangers to come home safe in the end.