Showing titles in History

In this sweepingly ambitious volume, the nation's foremost experts on the American presidency and the US Constitution join together to tell the intertwined stories of how each American president has confronted and shaped the Constitution. Each occupant of the office - the first president to the 44th - has contributed to the story of the Constitution through the decisions he made and the actions he took as the nation's chief executive.

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.  

Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards. Longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian Book Review. In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy...

The classic bestseller from a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist that tells the compelling true story of one man's fight for the right to legal counsel for every defendent. A history of the landmark case of Clarence Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel. Notes, table of...

Today's copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital revolution that has made copyright - and its violation - a part of everyday life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators, Hollywood, and governments against consumers, pirates, Silicon Valley, and open-access advocates. But while the digital generation can be forgiven for thinking the dispute between, for example, the publishing industry and Google is completely new, the copyright wars in fact stretch back three centuries - and their history is essential to understanding today's battles.

Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age. A judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal exponent of the enormously influential law and economics movement, he writes provocative books as a public intellectual, receives frequent media attention, and has been at the center of some very high-profile legal spats. He is also a member of an increasingly rare breed—judges who write their own opinions rather than delegating the work to clerks. Now, for the first time, this fascinating figure receives a full-length biographical treatment.

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.

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.

“Janina Edwards narrates in a compelling tone, a vivid style, and a clear sense of the importance of this action.”—AudioFile The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North. In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a...

*NOW A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* “An expert, extremely detailed account of John Adams’ finest hour.”—Kirkus Reviews Honoring the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre The New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln’s Last Trial and host of LivePD Dan Abrams and David Fisher tell...

Since the Supreme Court's 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, this judicial review has been highly deferential: courts must uphold agency interpretations of unclear laws as long as these interpretations are "reasonable." But the Chevron doctrine faces backlash from constitutional scholars and, now, from Supreme Court justices who insist that courts, not administrative agencies, have the authority to say what the law is. Recognizing that Congress cannot help relying on agencies to carry out laws, Merrill rejects the notion of discarding the administrative state.

In The Free Speech Century, two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars to evaluate the evolution of free speech doctrine since Schenk and to assess where it might be headed in the future. The Free Speech Century will serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in how our understanding of the First Amendment transformed over time and why it is so critical both for the United States and for the world today.

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. The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the most famous shipwreck stories in Great Lakes history. It is also one of maritime lore’s great mysteries, the details of its disappearance as obscure now as on that fateful November day in 1975.

Winner of the 2015 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award: “Horwitz’s dogged reporting…combined with crisp, cinematic writing, produces a powerful narrative…. He has written a book that is instructive and passionate and deserving a wide audience” (PEN Award Citation). Six years...

From 1953 to 1969, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren brought about many of the proudest achievements of American constitutional law. The Warren Court declared racial segregation and laws forbidding interracial marriage to be unconstitutional; it expanded the right of citizens to criticize public officials; it held school prayer unconstitutional; and it ruled that people accused of a crime must be given a lawyer even if they can't afford one. Yet conservative critics have fiercely accused the justices of the Warren Court of abusing their authority....

There are moments in American history when all eyes are focused on a federal court: when its bench speaks for millions of Americans, and when its decision changes the course of history. More often, the story of the federal judiciary is simply a tale of hard work: of finding order in the chaotic system of state and federal law, local custom, and contentious lawyering. The Federal Courts is a story of all of these courts and the judges and justices who served on them, of the case law they made, and of the acts of Congress and the administrative organs that shaped the courts. 

When the U.S. government forced 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps in 1942, it created administrative tribunals to pass judgment on who was loyal and who was disloyal. In American Inquisition, Eric Muller relates the untold story of exactly how military and civilian bureaucrats judged these tens of thousands of American citizens during wartime. Some citizens were deemed loyal and were freed, but one in four was declared disloyal to America and condemned to repressive segregation in the camps or barred from war-related jobs.

Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls barely missed his heart and spinal cord. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age 61, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms.

The "Lackawanna Six" were young men, born of Yemeni families long settled in upstate New York, who took a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan and spent time in an al-Qaeda training camp long before the specter of 9/11, before most people had even heard of Osama Bin Laden, and before the existence of the Homeland Security Act.

Este curso desvenda as raízes das desigualdades sociais e econômicas, focando na questão da “meritocracia hereditária” e nos mecanismos que permitem a reprodução de vantagens entre gerações. Através de uma abordagem teórica e prática, os participantes serão guiados por uma análise aprofundada de como o capital social, cultural e econômico é transferido, cristalizando barreiras e limitando oportunidades. O curso questiona o ideal de meritocracia em contextos de desigualdade e provoca reflexões sobre políticas capazes de promover maior mobilidade social e justiça.