Law Biography

From 2001 to 2013, Michael Vecchione was chief of the Rackets Division in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, which was the largest urban prosecution agency in the country. Vecchione grappled with organized crime and dirty politicians, during which he supervised, investigated, and prosecuted major felony cases. Crooked Brooklyn is a gritty story of corruption, greed, and law enforcement.

Sir Isaac Newton changed the world with his many discoveries and inventions about mathematics, science, optics, and physics. Although he was brilliant, Newton felt no need to publish his ideas or to inform his fellow scientists of the amazing discoveries he made. Because of this, his discoveries were often disputed. Despite the controversy that often surrounded him, Newton made astounding advances in his efforts to understand how nature worked. His legacy lives on through inventions such as microscopes, eyeglasses, telescopes, and cameras.

In 1989, Eileen Franklin, a young California housewife, claimed to recover a repressed memory of her father killing her playmate 20 years earlier. In a landmark trial, the father was charged and convicted of first-degree murder, based solely on his daughter's testimony. This book chronicles the trial, explores the remarkably dysfunctional Franklin family and delves into the credibility of repressed memories as evidence....

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.

VEM FAN ÄR DU? skildrar Peter Althins resa från uppväxten och ungdomsåren i Lund till livet som en av Sveriges mest omskrivna och anlitade brottmålsadvokater. Vi får följa några av vår tids mest uppmärksammade rättegångar och ta del av kampen för rättvisa i såväl domstolar som i den kriminalpolitiska debatten. Men här finns också en annan och hittills okänd kamp. I boken berättas hur den framgångsrika advokatens rädsla för att misslyckas blev så stark att den fick honom att avsluta sin karriär.

The conventional wisdom about Felix Frankfurter―Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice―is that he struggled to fill the seat once held by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scholars have portrayed Frankfurter as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and the Warren Court’s principal villain. And yet none of these characterizations rings true.

Widely known as the "poor man's lawyer" in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818-1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. In this revealing and accessible biography, Stephen D. Engle traces Andrew's life and legacy, giving this important, but largely forgotten, figure his due.

When I attended Jefferson Elementary School in Charlottesville in 1960, I was selected to recite the poem "The Path" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the noted black poet. That poem captured the story of my life. I had no idea when I first learned it by memory and recited it many times before the class that it would later have such a direct and dramatic application to my life. I recited the words not knowing their true meaning back then, but I know what they mean now, and who would have imagined how appropriate they would be.

Boulin, Urba, Elf, les frégates de Taïwan, Clearstream, Kerviel, Cahuzac, Karachi, Balkany... Le juge Van Ruymbeke a instruit pendant plus de quarante ans les grandes affaires financières qui ont secoué notre République. Tenace et libre, il est la figure emblématique de la lutte anticorruption. Dans ces mémoires vibrantes, animé par sa si chère indépendance, il raconte la manière dont il s'est attaqué aux sphères du pouvoir et au financement illégal des partis politiques.

A dubious distinction belongs to Mary Surratt: On July 7, 1865, she became the first woman to be executed by the United States government, accused of conspiring in the plot to assassinate not only President Abraham Lincoln, but also the vice president, the secretary of state, and General Grant.

Shankar Mahadev Bidari is one of India's most capable and daring police officers. His autobiography, "Satyameva Jayate," narrates his life's journey with simplicity and honesty. Despite limited early education and starting work young, he graduated as an external student without guidance and became an Assistant Commissioner. He later joined the Indian Police Service, embracing each role with enthusiasm and bravery. Overcoming numerous challenges, Bidari earned the highest cash rewards in Indian police history. "Satyameva Jayate" chronicles his professional adventures and dedication.

Written as a primer for the uninitiated as well as those with some familiarity with the American judicial system, Saving the World One Case at a Time is a book about real people: the plaintiff-victims, the lawyers, the judges, and other participants in the legal system. It goes beyond the headlines and shows how the right of ordinary citizens to pursue justice in a court of law is a precious right worth fighting for.

Bruce Sterling delves into the world of high-tech crime and punishment in one of the first books to explore the cyberspace breaches that threaten national security. From the crash of AT&T’s long-distance switching system to corporate cyberattacks, he investigates government and law enforcement efforts to break the back of America’s electronic underground in the 1990s.

In 2014, Chessy Prout was a freshman at St. Paul's School, a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, when a senior boy sexually assaulted her as part of a ritualized game of conquest. Chessy bravely reported her assault to the police and testified against her attacker in court. Then, in the face of unexpected backlash from her once-trusted school community, she shed her anonymity to help other survivors find their voice.

The "Lackawanna Six" were young men, born of Yemeni families long settled in upstate New York, who took a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan and spent time in an al-Qaeda training camp long before the specter of 9/11, before most people had even heard of Osama Bin Laden, and before the existence of the Homeland Security Act.

Working at the CIA changed author Michael Garner forever. During his 3-year stint at the Agency, Garner experienced what appeared to be a mélange of surveillance in which the US government or another entity penetrated every aspect of his professional and private life. He watched words change on his screen in real time on his personal computer at home, and items in his apartment were altered while he was in another room. When he described what appeared to be happening to a senior CIA manager, she said it was “plausible” that the Agency was responsible.

When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010, he left a legacy of service unequaled in the history of the Court. During his 34-year tenure, Justice Stevens was a prolific writer, authoring in total more than 1,000 opinions. In The Making of a Justice, John Paul Stevens recounts the first 94 years of his extraordinary life, offering an intimate and illuminating account of his service on the nation's highest court.

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.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.

In 2009, Jared Fishman was a young prosecutor working on low-level civil rights cases in the justice department when a file landed on his desk. That folder contained two items: a story from The Nation magazine looking into mysterious deaths in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an autopsy report for a man named Henry Glover, whose charred remains were found in a burned-out car two weeks after the storm. The autopsy report, bafflingly, listed no cause of death.