- Justice in Blue and Gray
- Stephen Neff offers the first comprehensive study of the wide range of legal issues arising from the American Civil War, many of which resonate in debates to this day. This book not only provides an accessible and informative legal portrait of this critical period but also illuminates how legal issues arise in a time of crisis, what impact they have, and how courts attempt to resolve them.
- Hardcover February 2010
- The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence
- Essential reading for lawyers, judges, and expert witnesses in DNA cases, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence is an informative and provocative contribution to the interdisciplinary study of law and science. Bridging law, genetics, and statistics, this book is an authoritative history of the long and tortuous process by which DNA science has been integrated into the American legal system.
- Hardcover January 2010
- Settler Sovereignty
- In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.
- Hardcover January 2010
- The Lost Promise of Civil Rights
- Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law long dominated by Brown v. Board of Education. Since 1954, generations have viewed civil rights as a matter of breaking down formal legal barriers to integration, especially in public education. By uncovering the challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, when civil rights were legally, conceptually, and constitutionally up for grabs, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the lost promise of civil rights.
- Paperback October 2009
- John Brown's Trial
- Mixing idealism with violence, abolitionist John Brown cut a wide swath across the United States before winding up in Virginia, where he led an attack on the U.S. armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Supported by a “provisional army” of 21 men, Brown hoped to rouse the slaves in Virginia to rebellion. But he was quickly captured and, after a short but stormy trial, hanged on December 2, 1859. Brian McGinty provides the first comprehensive account of the trial, which raised important questions about jurisdiction, judicial fairness, and the nature of treason under the American constitutional system.
- Hardcover October 2009
- Lincoln and the Court
- In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict.
- Paperback June 2009
- The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008
In this engaging—and disturbing—book, a leading historian of the Court reveals the close fit between its decisions and the nation’s politics. Drawing on more than four decades of thinking about the Supreme Court and its role in the American political system, this book offers a new, clear, and troubling perspective on American jurisprudence, politics, and history.
- Hardcover April 2009
- The Common Law
Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court. The John Harvard Library presents a text that is, with occasional corrections of typographical errors, identical to that found in the first and all subsequent printings by Little, Brown.
- Paperback April 2009
- Transformations in American Legal History
During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. In this book, Horwitz’s students re-examine legal history from America’s colonial era to the late twentieth century. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.
- Hardcover March 2009