United States Law

As a practicing immigration attorney for many years, I have had to help many clients solve some of the most common problems simply because they had no knowledge of the immigration laws of the United States. Whether you were born in the US, are currently in the US, or even are planning to come to America, this book is for you.

New Deal Law and Order follows President Franklin Roosevelt, Attorney General Homer Cummings, and their war on crime coalition, which overcame the institutional and political challenges to the legitimacy of national law enforcement. Promises of law and order helped to manage tensions among key Democratic Party factions—organized labor, Black Americans, and white Southerners. Their anticrime program, featuring a strengthened criminal code, an empowered FBI, and the first federal war on marijuana, was essential to the expansion of national authority previously stymied on constitutional grounds.

How does the U.S. House of Representatives work? Discover who can be a representative, what they do, where they work, and more.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Joseph J. Ellis, the unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew.

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.

While portraying life in a new settlement on New York's Lake Otsego in the final years of the 18th century, Cooper deftly explores the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the American experience. He contrasts the natural codes of the hunter and woodsman, Natty Bumppo, and his Indian friend John Mokegan with the more rigid structure of law required by a more complex society.

This concise, accessible text provides students with a history of American constitutional development in the context of political, economic, and social change. Constitutional historian Michael Benedict stresses the role that the American people have played over time in defining the powers of government and the rights of individuals and minorities. He covers important trends and events in US constitutional history, encompassing key Supreme Court and lower-court cases.

In this landmark work, Kaplan describes her strategy in the lower courts and her preparation and rehearsals before moot courts, and she shares insights into the dramatic oral argument before the Supreme Court justices. Then Comes Marriage is the story of the relationship behind the watershed case, Kaplan's own difficult coming-out journey, and the fascinating unfolding of United States v. Windsor.

Lawrence M. Friedman is Professor of Law at Stanford University and author of 23 books about law and legal history. Hailed as American law's greatest living historian, Friedman traces the evolution of America's legal system from the colonial period to the present. A Modern Library Chronicle, this book is concise, insightful, and graced with wit.

Authored with uninhibited candor and manic energy, this audiobook is Acosta's own account of coming of age as a Chicano in the psychedelic '60s, of taking on impossible cases while breaking all tile rules of courtroom conduct, and of scrambling headlong in search of a personal and cultural identity. It is a landmark of contemporary Hispanic American literature, at once ribald, surreal, and unmistakably authentic.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: The country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment.

From America’s foremost constitutional scholar, the definitive history of how the ideal of birth equality reshaped the American Constitution, from antebellum debates over slavery and secession, to the Civil War and emancipation, to women’s suffrage In 1840, millions of Black Americans...

In The Hundred Years' Trial, Alexander and Harold Gouzoules explore the century-long impacts of the historic 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," starting with the development of evolutionary theory and charting the resulting cultural and legal conflicts over evolution in the United States. Through a blend of legal history, scientific exploration, and cultural analysis, the authors reexamine how this landmark trial remains a pivotal moment in shaping modern debates on science, religion, and education.

In 1856 Abraham Lincoln was a former congressman who had grown bored with his work as a lawyer, until he was drawn into the murder case that would define his career. This book reveals not only the mystery of the murder case as investigated by Lincoln but also the mystery of Abraham Lincoln as investigated by the author.

The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the national frame and constraints of government.

Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on elements of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth - a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world.

A powerful debunking of First Amendment orthodoxy that critiques "reckless speech," which endangers vulnerable groups, and elevates "fearless speech," which seeks to advance equality and democracy. Freedom of speech has never been more important—or more controversial. From debates about what's...

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.

Chief Justice Rehnquist's engaging writing illuminates both the high and low points in the Court's history, from Chief Justice Marshall's dominance of the Court during the early 19th century through the landmark decisions of the Warren Court. Citing cases such as the Dred Scott decision and Roosevelt's Court-packing plan, Rehnquist makes clear that the Court does not operate in a vacuum, that the justices are unavoidably influenced by their surroundings, and that their decisions have real and lasting impacts on our society.

We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products - Coca-Cola and cocaine - this audiobook situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.

The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.