Legal History

A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of 2025 Four men in a lifeboat. Two weeks without food. One impossible choice that would reshape the boundaries between survival and murder. “A perfect enunciation of the classic philosophical conundrum: can you sacrifice one innocent life to save many?"...

An urgent and gripping look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy, told through the stories of 9 Supreme Court decisions—and the next looming case In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting...

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. 

An incisive and comprehensive view of India’s legal process and its key issuesIndia has the second-largest legal profession in the world, but the systemic delays and chronic impediments of its judicial system inspire little confidence in the common person. In India’s Legal System, renowned...

In today's world, we are surrounded by various forms of visual media, such as photo albums, pictures, and videos capturing memories of our loved ones, including children, grandchildren, and friends, that we love to share with others. Similarly, if my beloved heavenly Father had left a photo of His son, Jesus, and His suffering, whom He loved, I would want to see and know everything about it and share it with others.

The gripping story of one American lawyer’s obsessive crusade—waged at any cost—against Big Oil on behalf of the poor farmers and indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest. Steven Donziger, a self-styled social activist and Harvard educated lawyer, signed on to a budding class action...

As government offices, corporations, and campuses dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs amid intensifying political backlash, a new book from Yale University Press argues that public debate has lost sight of DEI’s origins. In The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea, Berkeley Law Professor David B. Oppenheimer reconstructs the two-century history of diversity as an intellectual and institutional principle, one rooted in the origins of the modern research university, the development of free speech doctrine, and the science of decision making.

"The audiobook version includes recorded conversations between the two from the 1990s to the present, delivering a compelling informal profile. As a permanent record of Ginsburg’s voice and fighting spirit, it’s an inspiring listen." — Paste This program includes recorded conversations...

From the New York Times’s Business Investigations Editor and #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers comes a long-overdue exposé of the astonishing yet shadowy power wielded by the world’s largest law firms, following the narrative arc of Jones Day, the firm that represented the Trump campaign...

In the second thrilling novel in New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline s Rosato & Associates series, a successful lawyer now finds herself on the opposite side of the bench when she s framed for murder. Benedetta Bennie Rosato is a maverick lawyer who prosecutes police...

This is the first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have always influenced each other - until recently. In the past few years, the scientific paradigm has shifted dramatically, from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic machine to understanding it as a network of fluidly interacting communities. But law is stuck in a mechanistic, 17th-century view that the world is made up of discrete individual parts.

Racial hatred is one of the ugliest of human emotions. And the United States not only once condoned it, it also mandated it?wove it right into the fabric of American jurisprudence. Federal and state governments legally suspended the free will of blacks for 150 years and then denied blacks equal...

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death...

Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas Award A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book| Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles Times A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in...

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...

The inside story of how one president forever altered the most powerful legal institution in the country—with consequences that endure today By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the...

Eight dramatised documentaries of landmark trials that changed the law What do you do when a judge sentences your child to be beaten? If someone who has been stabbed dies after refusing a blood transfusion, is it a straight case of murder? How did a murder case end up changing the law for...

The French Constitution of 1791 has a major legacy that overturned many centuries of historical tradition but remains little known outside of France. Its powerful impact served as the inspiration for the wave of constitution-making that engulfed Europe during the nineteenth century and expanded...

One of the great ironies of the Enlightenment was that various societies produced the notion of the inalienable rights of man, bequeathed by God, alongside the long-established and deeply entrenched institution of slavery. As fate would have it, the refusal of Northern states to strictly apply the new fugitive slave law would be explicitly cited in several of the Southern states’ articles of secession in late 1860 and early 1861. In that regard, the Fugitive Slave Act ended up being one of the main tipping points that finally split the nation in two.

The American Revolution is replete with seminal moments that every American learns in school, from the “shot heard ‘round the world” to the Declaration of Independence, but the events that led up to the fighting at Lexington & Concord were borne out of 10 years of division between the British and their American colonies over everything from colonial representation in governments to taxation, the nature of searches, and the quartering of British regulars in private houses.