Government Law

From the moment of its publication in 1748, The Spirit of the Laws proved to be a controversial work provoking widespread interest. Within three years it had been translated into various European languages - and was swiftly added to the List of Prohibited Books by the Roman Catholic Church. It is a remarkable book, a potpourri of observations and comments ranging far and wide over the social activities of mankind and it exerted a great influence on political leaders in the following decades.

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.

"The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat is a seminal work in political philosophy and economics, offering a robust defense of individual liberty and property rights against the encroachments of government.

The Fall of the House of Zeus tells the story of Dickie Scruggs, arguably the most successful plaintiff's lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against "Big Tobacco" and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter-day Robin Hood and portrayed in the movie The Insider as a dapper aviator-lawyer.

Over just the last few decades, laws in this nation have exploded in number; they are increasingly complex; and the punishments they carry are increasingly severe. Some of these laws come from our elected representatives, but many now come from agency officials largely insulated from democratic accountability. In Over Ruled, Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze explore these developments and the human toll so much law can carry for ordinary Americans.

Can the president launch a nuclear attack without congressional approval? Is it ever a crime to criticize the president? Can states legally resist a president's executive order? Corey Brettschneider takes us on a deep dive into the US Constitution to answer questions that, in our tumultuous era, Americans are asking more than ever before. From the document itself and from history's pivotal court cases, we learn why certain powers were granted to the presidency, how the Bill of Rights limits those powers, and what "we the people" can do.

Named “Ketanji Onyika,” meaning “Lovely One,” based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams.

The author of the celebrated Victory tells the fascinating story of the intertwined lives of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first and second women to serve as Supreme Court justices.

Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights.

Will Johnnie Veal—convicted of the murder of two police officers in 1970—be granted parole after 50 years in prison? How can he convince the parole board he’s reformed when he insists he’s innocent? What is prison time even supposed to accomplish? These are the questions that propel The Parole Room forward as it builds toward Johnnie’s 20th parole hearing—after 19 rejections.

From 2001 to 2013, Michael Vecchione was chief of the Rackets Division in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, which was the largest urban prosecution agency in the country. Vecchione grappled with organized crime and dirty politicians, during which he supervised, investigated, and prosecuted major felony cases. Crooked Brooklyn is a gritty story of corruption, greed, and law enforcement.

Concealed Carry, Stand Your Ground Laws, and the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms will teach you everything you need to know about your rights as a proud American citizen and how you can carry without concern. Many are not fully aware of the laws surrounding our rights. Don’t worry. We are here to help. The goal of this reading is to arm you with the confidence and knowledge you need to keep you well within your rights to not only conceal carry, but to be prepared for almost any situation and scenario when you do.

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President - policies such as President Obama protecting Dreamers from deportation and President Trump banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth.

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.

Richard Painter and Peter Golenbock present a clear description of rule of law - arguably the single most important principle underlying our civilization. They also describe the abuses of power that have occurred throughout our nation's history. Beginning in Puritan New England with the infamous Salem Witch Trials, American Nero makes vivid stops at The Red Scare of the 1920s, Japanese-American internment, the McCarthy Era, and, much more recently, President Trump's attempt to violate the First Amendment by banning Muslims from entering the US.

More than 40 years after President Johnson signed the landmark Fair Housing Act into law, residential segregation in America remains unresolved. Designed to help dismantle the nation’s racially divided housing patterns, the act has gone largely ignored by every presidential administration - Democrat and Republican alike - since 1968. In Living Apart, ProPublica investigates this failing.

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses.

This book consists of two parts: the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" and "The Law of Peoples", a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than 50 years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times.

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) is generally considered one of the two greatest justices of the United States Supreme Court. In more than 2000 opinions, he delineated an impressive legal philosophy that profoundly influenced American jurisprudence, particularly in the area of civil liberties and judicial restraint. In The Common Law, derived from a series of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Holmes systematized his legal doctrines.