Showing titles in History

Autumn 1945 saw the start of the Nuremberg trials, in which high ranking representatives of the Nazi government were called to account for their war crimes. In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.

Now an insider at The People vs. O. J. Simpson reveals the untold story of the most widely followed trial in American history and the indelible impact it has had on the judiciary, the media, and the public. As the Los Angeles Superior Court's media liaison, Jerrianne Hayslett had unprecedented access to the trial - and met with Judge Lance Ito daily - as she attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully, to mediate between the court and members of the media and to balance their interests.

In the context of a clear and bracing legal history of accountability for sexual assault and the legal recognition of sexual harassment, Nussbaum confronts three "citadels of pride" - the judiciary, the arts, and sports. Exposing prideful privilege in the intellectual world, unpunished narcissism in the arts, and toxic masculinity and corruption in American sports, she discusses egregious cases of male entitlement leading to sexual abuse and exploitation.

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.

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. In a rare multifaceted overview of the underground drug market, featuring historical and ethnographic accounts of illegal drug production, distribution, and sales, The War on Drugs: A History examines how drug-war policies contributed to the making of the carceral state, racial injustice, regulatory disasters, and a massive underground economy.

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.

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.

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. Exploring the human stories behind twelve illustrative cases on which Justice Thomas has ruled, he demonstrates the coherence of Thomas’s judicial philosophy and the profound humanity on which it rests.

In A Legacy of Discrimination, leading constitutional scholars Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone trace affirmative action's history and the legal challenges it has faced over the decades. They argue that in order to fully comprehend affirmative action's original intent and impact, we must reacquaint ourselves with the era in which it arose, beginning with the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, 1954's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

On May 3, 1946, in St. Martinsville, Louisiana, a 17-year-old Black boy was scheduled for execution by electric chair. Willie Francis had been charged with murder; his trial had been brief; his death sentence never in doubt. When the executioners flipped the switch, Willie screamed and writhed as electricity coursed through his body. But Willie Francis did not die. Having miraculously survived, Willie was informed that the state would attempt to execute him a second time within a week.

Bizarro is a must-listen tale of the unprecedented prosecution of Burton Ritchie and Ben Galecki, the Florida-based founders of a sprawling "spice" (synthetic cannabinoid) operation. With this book, journalist and former New York City narcotics prosecutor Jordan S. Rubin exposes a Reagan-era law called the Analogue Act, which targets dealers selling drugs that are "substantially similar" to controlled substances—an unwieldy law that produces erratic results in court.

February 26, 1924 was the first day of the greatly anticipated high treason trial that would galvanize Germany - but few in the courtroom that morning anticipated that the leading defendant, General Erich Ludendorff, whose risky offensives during World War I doomed Germany to defeat, would soon be eclipsed by the private first class at his side, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was charged with treason after unsuccessfully trying to seize power in the notorious Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.

You would think that when the United States of America was formed, our citizenry could finally enjoy a plethora of hard-won liberties. But that was not the case. While the new Americans no longer suffered from taxation without representation, many of the liberties we enjoy today were not part of their lives. In Liberty on Trial in America: Cases that Defined Freedom, you will learn how liberty increased in our country when individuals sued for those freedoms, when cases were brought specifically to test the limits of the Constitution with its Amendments....

Stan Moody's meticulous examination of the Brandon Drewry case serves as a stark reminder of the disparities in our criminal justice system. Through Drewry's story, Moody unveils the systemic failures that lead to unjust convictions and disproportionately harsh sentences. Joshua D'Alessio, MHA LADC CCS, Executive Director, Health Equity Alliance A poignant, in-depth study of an individual's struggle for justice. Should be required reading for judges, attorneys, and students of the law.

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.

What explains the insistent pull of Roe v. Wade? Abortion law expert Mary Ziegler argues that the US Supreme Court decision, which decriminalized abortion in 1973 and was overturned in 2022, had a hold on us that was not simply the result of polarized abortion politics. Rather, Roe took on meanings far beyond its original purpose of protecting the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. It forced us to confront questions about sexual violence, judicial activism and restraint, racial justice, religious liberty, the role of science in politics, and much more.

Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice". Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past 70 years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy.

In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a "humane" death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true. Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last 30 years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House.

From her first strokes as a novice, Ginny Gilder found herself in a new world, training with Olympic rowers and participating in the famous Title IX naked protest, which helped define the movement for equality in college sports. Short, asthmatic, and stubborn, Gilder made the team against all odds and for the next 10 years devoted herself to answering a seemingly simple question: how badly do you want to go fast?