Political Law

Timothy Sandefur's insightful book provides a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law and argues a vital truth: our Constitution was written not to empower democracy, but to secure liberty. Yet the overemphasis on democracy by today's legal community - rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence - has helped expand the scope of government power at the expense of individual rights.

Though the Constitution was ratified in 1788, its impact on our lives is as recent as today's news. Informed by the latest scholarship and exploring the major themes that have shaped American constitutional history: federalism, the balance of powers, property, representation, equality, rights, and security, this book places constitutional history within the context of American political and social history. As our nation's circumstances have changed, so has our Constitution.

The further adventures of "Dr. Gonzo" as he defends the "cucarachas" - the Chicanos of East Los Angeles. Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.

It was a time, much like today, when Americans feared for the future of their democracy, and women stood up for equal treatment. At the crossroads of the Watergate scandal and the women’s movement was a young lawyer named Jill Wine Volner (as she was then known), barely 30 years old and the only woman on the team that prosecuted the highest-ranking White House officials. Called "the mini-skirted lawyer" by the press, she fought to receive the respect accorded her male counterparts - and prevailed.

They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. Scorpions tells the story of four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself.

At the end of the summer of 1859, 22-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than 3,000 cases - including more than 25 murder trials - during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him.

The dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial, which captivated the nation and exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.

When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.

Throughout his presidency, John F. Kennedy was passionate about the issue of immigration reform. He believed that America is a nation of people who value both tradition and the exploration of new frontiers, deserving the freedom to build better lives for themselves in their adopted homeland.

From the moment John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, blundered through the Oath of Office at Barack Obama's inauguration, the relationship between the Supreme Court and the White House has been confrontational. Both men are young, brilliant, charismatic, charming, determined to change the course of the nation - and completely at odds on almost every major constitutional issue. One is radical; one essentially conservative. The surprise is that Obama is the conservative.

From the late 19th century through the 1930s, scholars of politics defined and continually reoriented their field in response to the political imperatives of the racial order at home and abroad as well to as the vagaries of race science. The Gilded Age scholars who founded the first university departments and journals located sovereignty and legitimacy in a "Teutonic germ" of liberty planted in the new world by Anglo-Saxon settlers and almost extinguished in the conflict over slavery.

Rot and Revival is one of the first scholarly works to comprehensively theorize and document how politics make American constitutional law and how the courts affect the path of partisan politics. Rejecting the idea that the Constitution's significance and interpretation can be divorced from contemporary political realities, Anthony Michael Kreis explains how American constitutional law reflects the ideological commitments of dominant political coalitions, the consequences of major public policy choices, and the influences of intervening social movements.

A president, with an election looming as his second term nears an end, conspires with the wealthy and politically powerful Boston Brahmin to bring the country to its knees. While ordinary Americans struggle for survival, others demand answers. A centuries old cadre of Bostonians with roots dating back to the Founding Fathers, are forced to face the tough questions....

Blind Ambition is an autobiographical account of a young lawyer who accelerated to the top of the Federal power structure to become Counsel to the President at 30 years of age, only to discover that when reaching the top, he had touched the bottom. Most striking in this chronicle is its honesty. Dean spares no one, including himself. But, as Time noted, Dean survived, despite the opposition of powerful foe, because he had no false story to protect and he had an amazing ability to recall the truth.

Over the last 30 years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House.

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written - the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states.

Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice". Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past 70 years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy.

Although Montaigne’s writing resists easy analysis, Montaigne includes seven essays before he even explicitly states the purpose of the Essays. Manent finds in it a subtle unity, and demonstrates both the philosophical depth of Montaigne’s reflections and the distinctive and even radical character of his central ideas.

The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, a form of punishment that ruins lives and makes a return to prison more likely. With the authority of a prominent legal scholar and the practical insights gained through on-the-ground work on criminal-justice reform, Rachel Barkow explains how dangerous it is to base criminal-justice policy on the whims of the electorate, which puts judges, sheriffs, and politicians in office.

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