Convictions is a spellbinding story from the front lines of the fight against crime. Most Americans know little about the work of assistant United States attorneys, the federal prosecutors who possess sweeping authority to investigate and prosecute the nation's most dangerous criminals. John Kroger pursued high-profile cases against Mafia killers, drug kingpins, and Enron executives. Starting from his time as a green recruit and ending at the peak of his career, he steers us throu...

Drawing on untapped archives and full of fresh revelations, here is the definitive biography of America’s legendary defense attorney and progressive hero.Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, played by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind. His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang.Darrow left a promising career as ...

A hero in America's war against British tyranny, John Marshall with his heroics as Chief Justice turned the Supreme Court into a bulwark against presidential and congressional tyranny and saved American democracy.In this startling biography, award-winning author Harlow Giles Unger reveals how Virginia-born John Marshall emerged from the Revolutionary War's bloodiest battlefields to become one of the nation's most important Founding Fathers: America's greatest Chief ...

For thirty years, lawyers, pundits, professors, and politicians had said that section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canadathe criminal prohibition of polygamywas unconstitutional, a Victorian anachronism that, in a modern rights-based democracy, deserved to be swept aside in the name of individual liberty and religious freedom. Polygamy per se, it was argued, was harmless. Beginning in 2009 in Vancouver, a small team of lawyers from the federal and provincial governments, along with a handf...

"Will likely be the definitive biography. . . . a detailed and fascinating account of how the Supreme Court functioned during Brennan's long tenure." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)This is a compelling inside look at the life of William Brennan, a champion of free speech who is widely considered the most influential Supreme Court justice of the twentieth century. Before his death, Brennan granted Stephen Wermiel access to volumes of personal and court ...

Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York's chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him—bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse....

Whenever governments change policies--tax, expenditure, or regulatory policies, among others--there will typically be losers: people or groups who relied upon and invested in physical, financial, or human capital predicated on, or even deliberately induced by the pre-reform set of policies. The issue of whether and when to mitigate the costs associated with policy changes, either through explicit government compensation, grandfathering, phased or postponed implementation, is ubiquitous acr...

Adjudication in Action describes the moral dimension of judicial activities and the judicial approach to questions of morality, observing the contextualized deployment of various practices and the activities of diverse people who, in different capacities, find themselves involved with institutional judicial space. Exploring the manner in which the enactment of the law is morally accomplished, and how practical, legal cognition mediates and modulates the treatment of cases dealing with sexu...

The icons of contemporary culture finally find a forum in Italian Sketches: the faces of modern Italy, a book that dares to investigate the whos and whys behind one of the world’s most-loved countries. Drawn from Pirro’s column in The Florentine, Tuscany’s English-speaking newspaper, Italian Sketches portrays a nation whose modern cultural landscape remains largely undiscovered.

Most philosophers still like to feel that they have a special subject matter, well insulated from anything that the social scientists, and scientists in general, have to tell them. That is not healthy for philosophy; and it is all too likely to lead to an ethics that continues, as of old, to plead for its ultimates-the fact that one is totally ineffectual being decently concealed by an impressive terminology. (Stevenson 1963, pp. 114–5) Many so-called moral theories do not even attempt to ...

Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama is the first comprehensive biography of a key Alabama politician and federal jurist whose life and times embody the conflicts and transformations in the Deep South between the Civil War and World War I.A man who both represented and differed from his class, Thomas Goode Jones offers contemporary readers and scholars an ideal subject of study to understand a period of southern history that still shapes American life today. Ofte...

The recognition and enforcement of legitimate expectations by courts has been a striking feature of English law since R v North and East Devon Health Authority; ex parte Coughlan [2001] 3 QB 213. Although the substantive form of legitimate expectation adopted in Coughlan was quickly accepted by English courts and received a generally favourable response from public law scholars, the doctrine of that case has largely been rejected in other common law jurisdictions. The cen...