Harold Hyman argues that in two cases - In Re Turner (1867) and Texas v. White (1869), Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase combined his abolitionist philosophy with an activist jurisprudence to help dismantle once and for all the deposed machineries of slavery and the confederancy.

Can faith-based counselors be held to the same standard of legal accountability as secular ones? Or does the broad shield of religious freedom protect them absolutely, no matter how incompetent or negligent their actions might be? After Kenneth Nally put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger in early 1979, finding the right answers to those questions became both much more urgent and much more difficult. Mark Weitz shows why.

Following his suicide, Nally's parents filed a wrongful death suit against their son's fundamentalist church, alleging that its pastoral counselors had failed...

Through much of the 1990s, a newly hatched snake wreaked political havoc in the South.

When North Carolina gained a seat in Congress following the 1990 census, it sought to rectify a long-standing failure to represent African American voters by creating, under federal pressure, two "majority-minority" voting districts. One of these snaked along Interstate 85 for nearly two hundred miles--not much wider than the road itself in some places--and was ridiculed by many as one of the least compact legislative districts ever proposed.

From 1993 to 2001, three intertwined cases went before...

Although huge in scope and impact, the 9/11 attacks were not the first threat by foreign terrorists on American soil. During World War II, eight Germans landed on our shores in 1942 bent on sabotage. Caught before they could carry out their missions, under FDR's presidential proclamation they were hauled before a secret military tribunal and found guilty. Meeting in an emergency session, the Supreme Court upheld the tribunal's authority. Justice was swift: six of the men were put to death--a sentence much more harsh than would have been allowed in a civil trial.

Louis Fisher chronicles...

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, sought to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves; but its first important test did not arise until five years later. When it did, it centered on a vitriolic dispute among the white butchers of mid-Reconstruction New Orleans.

The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation nightmare, with the city's many slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into neighboring backwaters. When Louisiana finally authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, many butchers felt...

The Santeria religion of Cuba--the Way of the Saints--mixes West AfricanYoruba culture with Catholicism. Similar to Haitian voodoo, Santeria has long practiced animal sacrifice in certain rites. But when Cuban immigrants brought those rituals to Florida, local authorities were suddenly confronted with a controversial situation that pitted the regulation of public health and morality against religious freedom.

After Ernesto Pichardo established a Santeria church in Hialeah in the 1980s, the city of Hialeah responded by passing ordinances banning ritual animal sacrifice. Although on the...

Few episodes in the modern civil rights movement were more galvanizing or more memorialized than the brutal murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney--idealists eager to protect and promote the rights of black Americans, even in the deep and very dangerous South. In films like Mississippi Burning and popular folk songs, these young men have been venerated as martyrs. Even so, the landmark legal dimensions of their murder case have until now remained largely lost.

Howard Ball reminds us just how problematic the prosecution of the murderers--all members of the...

The history of voting rights in America is a checkerboard marked by dogged progress against persistent prejudice toward an expanding inclusiveness. The Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright is a crucial chapter in that broader story and marked a major turning point for the modern civil rights movement. Charles Zelden's concise and thoughtful retelling of this episode reveals why.

Denied membership in the Texas Democratic Party by popular consensus, party rules, and (from 1923 to 1927) state statutes, Texas blacks were routinely turned away from voting in the Democratic primary in...

Americans value privacy as one of their most cherished rights, yet the word "privacy" isn't even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. It took the Supreme Court's ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) to bestow constitutional protection upon this right. That remains one of the Court's most hotly debated rulings and led directly to an even more controversial decision in Roe v. Wade (1973). John Johnson's masterly critique of Griswold--which observes its 40th anniversary on June 7, 2005--reminds us once again of its crucial impact on both American law and society.

Johnson explores...

Although she came to be known as merely "that girl with the dirty books," Dollree Mapp was a poor but proud black woman who defied a predominantly white police force by challenging the legality of its search-and-seizure methods. Her case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, remains hotly debated and highly controversial today.

In 1957, Cleveland police raided Mapp's home on a tip--from future fight promoter Don "the Kid" King--that they'd find evidence linked to a recent bombing. What they confiscated instead was sexually explicit material that led to Mapp's conviction for...