Government Law

International law governing the use of military force has been the subject of intense public debate. Under what conditions is it appropriate or necessary for a country to use force when diplomacy has failed? Michael Byers, a widely known world expert on international law, weighs these issues in War Law. Byers examines the history of armed conflict and international law through a series of case studies of past conflicts, ranging from the 1837 Caroline Incident to the abuse of detainees by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, he argues, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws both in our justice system and in human nature. Bharara uses the many illustrative anecdotes and case histories from his storied, formidable career - the successes as well as the failures - to shed light on the realities of the legal system and the consequences of taking action.

Do you need to make health care decisions for an aging parent but are unsure where to start? Are you at crossroads in your career and don’t know how to move forward? Have you ever been on a jury trying to understand confusing legal instructions? How to Think Like a Lawyer has the answers to help you cut through the confusion and gain an advantage in your everyday life. Kim Wehle identifies the details you need to pay attention to, the questions you should ask, the responses you should anticipate, and the pitfalls you can avoid.

The concept of law lies at the heart of our social and political life. Legal philosophy, or jurisprudence, explores the notion of law and its role in society, illuminating its meaning and its relation to the universal questions of justice, rights, and morality. In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Raymond Wacks analyzes the nature and purpose of the legal system and the practice by courts, lawyers, and judges.

From the New York Times’s Business Investigations Editor and #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers comes a long-overdue exposé of the astonishing yet shadowy power wielded by the world’s largest law firms, following the narrative arc of Jones Day, the firm that represented the Trump campaign and much of the Fortune 500, as a powerful encapsulation of the changes that have swept the legal industry in recent decades.

Cobalt Red is the searing first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.

The preamble to the United States Constitution lays out the mission of the Constitution. By briefly looking at each clause of the preamble individually, we can glean insight into the minds of the authors. The preamble states what the authors hoped to accomplish and to avoid. This book is a phrase-by-phrase explanation of the preamble.

Americans often describe their rights in terms of numbers derived from amendments in the federal Bill of Rights, an unambiguous set of limitations on government. Despite this tendency, most do not realize that such amendments were never designed to inhibit local authorities. Nevertheless, during the Progressive Era the federal courts began to claim that the 14th Amendment had “incorporated” federal Bill of Rights restrictions against the state governments. Ever since, this outlook has provided the basis upon which the federal judiciary overturns state laws deemed to be unsavory. As ...

Silent Spring meets Erin Brockovich in this eye-opening, riveting true story of the lawyer who spent two decades building a case against DuPont for its use of the hazardous, unregulated chemical PFOA, uncovering a history of environmental contamination that affects virtually every person on the planet, and the heartless behavior that kept it a secret for 60 years.

Understanding John Locke is the second book in a series of books on the classical philosophers. Other books in the Smart Student's Guide series are: Understanding Plato: The Socratic Dialogues and the Republic; and Understanding John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism and On Liberty. The series is designed for beginning and intermediate philosophy students who would like more depth than they would ordinarily get from books that only give outlines of the philosopher's thoughts and theories. At the same time, the books do not delve so deeply and critically into the philosopher's ideas that they ...

After years of prosecuting hard-core criminals, rising legal star Alan Bell took a private sector job in South Florida's newest skyscraper. Suddenly, he suffered such bizarre medical symptoms, doctors suspected he'd been poisoned by the Mafia. Bell's rapidly declining health forced him to flee his glamorous Miami life to a sterile "bubble" in the remote Arizona desert.

Carol Leonnig has been reporting on the Secret Service for The Washington Post for most of the last decade, bringing to light the secrets, scandals, and shortcomings that plague the agency today - from a toxic work culture to dangerously outdated equipment to the deep resentment within the ranks at key agency leaders, who put protecting the agency’s once-hallowed image before fixing its flaws. But the Secret Service wasn’t always so troubled.

Judge, jury, and executioner, Judge Dredd is the brutal comic book cop policing the chaotic future urban jungle of Mega-City One, created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra and launching in the pages of 2000 AD in 1977. But what began as a sci-fi action comic quickly evolved into a searing satire on hardline, militarized policing and "law and order" politics, its endless inventiveness and ironic humor acting as a prophetic warning about our world today—and with important lessons for our future.

This book explores the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 from the end of the Second World War to 1964. It argues that MI5 acted with neither statutory authority nor statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources.

According to most economics textbooks, human beings are super-rational creatures who know what is in their own best interests and always act accordingly. When making a decision to purchase, the rational consumer would not buy something on the spur of the moment, or on the recommendation of a friend. Sound realistic?

In Migrating to Prison, leading scholar Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernández takes a hard look at the immigration prison system's origins, how it currently operates, and why. He tackles the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s, with enforcement resources deployed disproportionately against Latinos, and he looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.

Originally published in 1748, this is possibly the most masterful and influential book ever written on the subject of liberty and justice. Accordingly, it is a work that profoundly influenced America’s Founding Fathers. Its success was due partly to the fact that it was the first systematic treatise on politics, partly to Montesquieu’s championship of the nobility and the Parlements, but above all, to the brilliant style of his prose.

Blending cutting-edge legal strategies for winning justice at work with a theory of dramatic, bottom-up social change, this practical audio guide to workers’ rights aims to make work better while reinvigorating the labor movement.

The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights.

Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek. Get Trump makes clear that unconstitutional efforts to stop Trump from retaking the presidency challenge the very foundations of our liberty: due process, right to counsel, and free speech.