Legal History

Equality is easy to grasp in theory but often hard to achieve in reality. In this accessible and wide-ranging work, American University law professor Robert L. Tsai offers a stirring account of how legal ideas that aren't necessarily about equality at all - ensuring fair play, behaving reasonably, avoiding cruelty, and protecting free speech - have often been used to overcome resistance to justice and remain vital today.

An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic chief justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far....

The Words We Live By takes an entertaining and informative look at America's most important historical document, now with discussions on new rulings on hot button issues such as immigration, gay marriage, gun control, and affirmative action. In The Words We Live By, Linda Monk probes the idea...

The true story of the most notorious crime in American nautical history -- a uniquely grotesque triple murder -- and the long journey to truth. The Herbert Fuller, a three-masted sailing ship loaded with New England lumber, left Boston bound for Buenos Aires on July 8, 1896 with twelve people on...

In this Very Short Introduction, Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou uncover the reality of organized crime in our world today. Shining a light on the people involved in organized crime, Antonopoulos and Papanicolaou question whether the term "organized" is used to evoke the image, the operations, and power of a legitimate organization, such as a corporation. Discussing whether there are particular crimes that the label "organized crime" applies to, or if any crime can be organized, they also consider what happens when organized crime extends beyond borders.

When Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968, he promised to change the Supreme Court. With four appointments to the court, including Warren E. Burger as the chief justice, he did just that. In 1969 the Burger Court succeeded the famously liberal Warren Court, which had significantly expanded civil liberties and was despised by conservatives across the country.

In the UK, we have some bizarre laws that have littered the statute books of our sceptred isle throughout history. Not all of them have been repealed over the centuries. Some of them made perfect sense at the time they were introduced but seen through modern eyes, now appear archaic and draconian. Despite the great efforts of the Law Commission in England and Wales to review and recommend reforms for many of these outdated laws, there are centuries of law that must be painstakingly gone through.

In the UK, we have some bizarre laws that have littered the statute books of our sceptred isle throughout history. Not all of them have been repealed over the centuries. Some of them made perfect sense at the time they were introduced but seen through modern eyes, now appear archaic and draconian.

Have you ever heard a bizarre law and thought, that can’t possibly be true? Is it genuine? Was it ever in existence or just an urban myth that became so embellished over time? There are surprisingly, a great many laws still in existence on the statute books today that would make your jaw drop. Whilst bizarre as these laws may now seem to us, it begs the question, are we in fact, unknowingly breaking these laws on a regular basis?

Abby Kelley Foster arrived in Springfield, Illinois, with the fate of the nation on her mind. Her fame as an abolitionist speaker had spread west, and she knew that her first speech in the city would make headlines. One of the residents reading those headlines would be none other than the likely next president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln, lawyer and presidential candidate, knew his chances of winning were good. All he had to do was stay above the fray of the slavery debate and appear the voice of reason until the people cast their votes.

Defeated in a devastating war with China and ravaged by climate change, America is on the brink of a bloody civil war. Seizing power after a controversial election, the ruling regime has begun cracking down on dissidents fighting the nation’s slide toward dictatorship. Donny Kimoe is a lawyer who makes his living defending enemies of the state. His newest client witnessed the murder of an opposition leader and is now accused of terrorism. To save her from the only sentence worse than death, Donny has to extract justice from a system that has abandoned the rule of law.

British special agent Jeremiah Black, an officer of the King’s Guard, lands on a lonely beach in the wee hours of the morning in late November 1780. The revolution is in full swing but has become deadlocked. Black is here to change all that. His mission, aided by Loyalists, is to kidnap George Washington and spirit him back to London aboard the HMS Peregrine, a British sloop of war that is waiting closely offshore. Once he lands, though, the “aid by Loyalists” proves problematic because some would prefer just to kill the general outright.

Un libro narrado como crónica periodística sobre historias donde el Derecho tuvo que reinventarse para poner llevar a cabo juicios. Son 7 casos judiciales que marcaron la historia. Durante décadas, víctimas de desapariciones, torturas y dictaduras han enfrentado un sistema judicial nacional lento, frágil y, muchas veces, indiferente. Pero una ley olvidada de 1789, pensada originalmente para castigar a piratas, fue redescubierta por quienes tenían el coraje de enfrentarse al poder con una nueva arma: la justicia internacional desde territorio estadounidense.

The defense of human rights is often marked by ethical dilemmas, which are especially acute in Israel, where lawyers have for decades sought redress for the abuse of Palestinian rights in the country's High Court - that is, in the court of the abuser. In The Wall and the Gate, Michael Sfard chronicles this struggle - a story that has never before been fully told - and in the process engages the core principles of human rights legal ethics.

Margaret A. Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in harrowing cases between 1920 and 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system of the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the line from slavery to the legal structures of this period—and through to today.

Un libro narrado como crónica periodística sobre historias donde el Derecho tuvo que reinventarse para poner llevar a cabo juicios. Son 7 casos judiciales que marcaron la historia. Es un libro que cuenta cómo 7 casos jurídicos que se dieron en determinados momentos de la historia tenían vacíos legales y eso llevó a crear precisamente leyes y decisiones que pudieran resolver futuros conflictos similares. Son historias amenas, a manera de crónica, que cuentan lo que increíblemente no se podía juzgar cuando todo parecía claro en su momento: desde los juicios de Nuremberg hasta la demanda de indígenas en Ecuador a Chevron.

Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges' bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people.

In the past few years, liberals concerned about the prospect of long-term conservative dominance of the federal courts have revived an idea that crashed and burned in the 1930s: court packing. Today's court packing advocates have run into a wall of opposition, with most citing the 1930s episode as one FDR's greatest failures. In early 1937, Roosevelt—fresh off a landslide victory—stunned the country when he proposed a plan to expand the size of the court by up to six justices.

In Policing the City, Harris seeks to explain the transformation of criminal justice between the 1780s and 1830s in the City of London. As utilitarian legal reformers argued that criminal deterrence ought to be based on certain and rational punishment rather than random execution, they also had to control the discretionary authority of enforcement. This meant in theory and practice the centralization of policing in the 1830s, and the end of local policing, which was seen as corrupt, inefficient, and unsuitable for rational criminal justice.

Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender is a recent invention with a surprisingly contentious history - one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state" but also about the contours and compromises of 20th-century liberalism.