History

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared....

What do the thoughts of a ravenous tiger have to do with the evolution of America's legal system? How do the works of Jane Austen and Ludwig van Beethoven relate to corporal punishment? In The Law of the Land, Charles Rembar examines these and many other topics....

The definitive account of the O. J. Simpson trial, The Run of His Life is a prodigious feat of reporting....

How and why Australia's legal system fails Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people....

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America....

The Nuremberg Trials were the most important criminal proceedings ever held. They established the principle that individuals will always be held responsible for their actions under international law....

A comprehensive analysis of Donald Trump's legal history reveals his temperament, methods, character, and morality....

A 16-part dramatised reconstruction of a landmark moment in history—the groundbreaking trial of the 22 most notorious Nazi war criminals....

Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes....

This riveting biography from the American Bar Association visits the spectacular life of Edwin Land, breakthrough inventor....

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before....

The intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, America’s first female Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time access to Justice O’Connor’s archives....

Scorpions tells the story of four great justices: their relationships with FDR, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War....

A growing chorus of officials and commentators argues that the Supreme Court has become too political. On this view, the confirmation process is just an exercise in partisan agenda-setting, and the jurists are no more than “politicians in robes”....

Why does fear of crime dominate modern politics? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over 3,000 years....

The fascinating true story of how a group of visionary attorneys helped make American business synonymous with big business and Wall Street the center of the financial world....

Course Correction recounts the physical and psychological barriers Ginny Gilder overcame as she transformed into an elite athlete who reached the highest echelon of her sport....

No Supreme Court justice has come from humbler circumstances than Clarence Thomas, yet critics denounce him as the "cruelest justice," a heartless traitor to his race who cynically sacrifices justice to ideology. In this provocative new book, Judge Amul Thapar demolishes that caricature....

In 1972 President Richard M. Nixon learned that John Lennon was visiting the United States. Nixon was told that Lennon's continued presence here could be catastrophic to his plan for reelection....

On a Friday night in March 1981, Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man....

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....

Fifty years after President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs", the United States government has spent more than a trillion dollars fighting a losing battle....

The bestselling historian and journalist James Rosen provides the first comprehensive account of the brilliant and combative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whose philosophy and judicial opinions defined our legal era....

In The Words That Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered....

A documentary drawn from testimony at the Coast Guard’s official inquiry looks anew at one of the most storied, and mysterious, shipwrecks in American history....