Kategoria BISAC: Law >> Legal History

Published to glowing reviews, The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys tells the riveting story of a nine-man American bomber crew after they were forced to bail out over Germany in August, 1944. Quickly taken prisoner by a mob of angry farmers, shopkeepers, railroad workers, women, and children, the soldiers were marched into the nearby town of Russelsheim and assaulted with stones, bricks, and wooden clubs before being left for dead at the nearby cemetery. Drawing from trial records, government archives, interviews with family members, and personal letters, author Gregory A. Freeman...

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards--committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man...

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the center of a global cause celebre that shook public opinion and transformed America's relationship with the world.

Drawing on extensive research on two continents, and written...

"Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell -- the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm's admirers (and I am one) have become addicted."--Dwight Garner, New York Times

"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin...

While innovative ideas and creative works increasingly drive economic success, the historic approach to encouraging innovation and creativity by granting property rights has come under attack by a growing number of legal theorists and technologists. In Laws of Creation, Ronald Cass and Keith Hylton take on these critics with a vigorous defense of intellectual property law. The authors look closely at the IP doctrines that have been developed over many years in patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law. In each area, legislatures and courts have weighed the benefits that...

Long ignored by historians and repudiated in their time, practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan s legal modernity. From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period (1600 1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun s law to suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the...

Every legal system must decide how to distinguish between agreements that are enforceable and those that are not. Formal bargains in the marketplace and casual promises in a social setting mark the two extremes, but many hard cases lie between. When gaps are left in a contract, how should courts fill them? What does it mean to say that an agreement is legally enforceable? If someone breaks a legally enforceable contract, what consequences follow?

For 150 years, legal scholars have debated whether a set of coherent principles provide answers to such basic questions. Oliver Wendell...

In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers.

For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to...

Justice among Nations tells the story of the rise of international law and how it has been formulated, debated, contested, and put into practice from ancient times to the present. Stephen Neff avoids technical jargon as he surveys doctrines from natural law to feminism, and practices from the Warring States of China to the international criminal courts of today.

Ancient China produced the first rudimentary set of doctrines. But the cornerstone of later international law was laid by the Romans, in the form of natural law--a universal law that was superior to early laws and...

How did the federal judiciary transcend early limitations to become a powerful institution of American governance? How did the Supreme Court move from political irrelevance to political centrality? Building the Judiciary uncovers the causes and consequences of judicial institution-building in the United States from the commencement of the new government in 1789 through the close of the twentieth century. Explaining why and how the federal judiciary became an independent, autonomous, and powerful political institution, Justin Crowe moves away from the notion that the judiciary is...

Simpson argues...

A fast-growing legal system and economy in medieval and early modern Rome saw a rapid increase in the need for written documents. Brokers of Public Trust examines the emergence of the modern notarial profession--free market scribes responsible for producing original legal documents and their copies.

Notarial acts often go unnoticed, but they are essential to understanding the history of writing practices and attitudes toward official documentation. Based on new archival research, Brokers of Public Trust focuses on the government officials, notaries, and consumers who...