Law Biography

How much do you really know about the FBI? Do you know who the FBI is? Do you know what the FBI does? This manual debunks FBI myths and misconceptions for those who read, watch, and write crime dramas about the FBI or have always wanted to be a Special Agent. Like most people, you've probably learned about the FBI from popular culture - reading books and watching TV shows and movies, along with, of course, the news. You might be surprised to learn that a lot of what you've been reading and watching is inaccurate.

Criminal Trial Lawyer… Memoirs of Managing Chaos and embracing it. The book, sometimes humorously, describes my memoirs and adventures as a successful criminal trial lawyer both as Prosecutor and Defense Counsel. It begins as a child and explains the influences which made me a criminal trial lawyer driven by my desire to serve The Lady of Justice, Justicia. I fell in love with her and lived a Samurai of Justice love story. Beginning with a Trial Lawyers philosophy, I describe the entire chaotic thinking and acting process from meeting the client and trial preparation, through actual ...

In Demand the Impossible, Robert L. Tsai traces lawyer Stephen Bright's remarkable career to explore the legal ideas that were central to his relentless pursuit of equal justice. For nearly forty years, Bright led the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that provided legal aid to incarcerated people and worked to improve conditions within the justice system. He argued four capital cases before the US Supreme Court—and won each one, despite facing an increasingly hostile bench.

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.

In August 2009 former madam Dalia Dippolito conspired with a hit man to arrange her ex-con husband's murder. Days later it seemed as if all had gone according to plan. The beautiful young Dalia came home from her health club to an elaborate crime scene, complete with yellow tape outlining her townhome and police milling about. The only thing missing from the murder scene was an actual murder.

In the summer of 1937, a California crime stunned an already grim nation. Three little girls were lured away from a neighborhood park to unthinkable deaths. After a frantic week-long manhunt for the killer, a suspect emerged. Justice was swift, and the condemned man was buried away with the horrifying story. But decades later, Pamela Everett, a lawyer and former journalist, starts digging, following up a cryptic comment her father once made about losing two of his sisters. Everett unearths a truly historic legal case that included the genesis of modern sex offender laws and the last man sentenced to hang in California.

An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic chief justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far.

On January 21, 1998, the night before his 38th birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car full of gun-toting thugs. Hoping to make a large withdrawal with his ATM card, they took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, and improvised. All night, his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and even offered him sexual favors from their prostitute girlfriends as a "birthday present."

As an accomplished Microsoft executive, Bruce Jackson handles billions of dollars of commerce as its associate general counsel while he plays a crucial role in the company’s corporate diversity efforts. But few of his colleagues can understand the weight he carries with him to the office each day. He kept his past hidden from sight as he ascended the corporate ladder but shares it in full for the first time here. Never Far from Home reveals the ups and downs of an incredible journey and the valuable lessons learned along the way.

After retiring from twenty-five years on the bench, former chief judge Belvin Perry Jr. reveals a rare and disturbingly vivid firsthand perspective of the most gruesome death penalty cases in which he played a key role, including the infamous Casey Marie Anthony, who was dubbed “America’s Most Hated Mom” after her shocking acquittal.

Tonya Craft, a Georgia kindergarten teacher and loving mother of two, never expected a knock on her door to change her life forever. But in May 2008, false accusations of child molestation turned her world upside down. The trial that followed dragged her reputation through the mud and lent nationwide notoriety to her name. Tonya's life spiraled into a witch-trial nightmare in which she was deemed guilty before her innocence could be determined by a jury.

The legendary crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir - as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels - about his obsessive search for “atonement in women". The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was 10 years old. He hated and lusted after his mother and “summoned her dead". She was murdered three months later. The Hilliker Curse is a predator’s confession, a treatise on guilt and on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur.

This nonfiction legal thriller traces the 14-year struggle of two lawyers to bring the most powerful coal baron in American history to justice. Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy since the early 1990s, ran an industry that provides nearly half of America’s electric power. But wealth and influence weren’t enough for Blankenship and his company, as they set about destroying corporate and personal rivals, challenging the Constitution, purchasing the West Virginia judiciary, and willfully disregarding safety standards in the company’s mines - mines in which scores died unnecessarily.

Full of lighthearted humor, sumptuous food, the wisdom of an Italian mother-in-law, and all the atmosphere of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, this warm and witty memoir follows American-born Katherine Wilson on her adventures abroad. Thanks to a surprising romance—and a spirited woman who teaches her to laugh, to seize joy, and to love—a three-month rite of passage in Naples turns into a permanent embrace of this boisterous city on the Mediterranean.

The world of law enforcement has always been described as a boy’s club, but what does that really mean for women who choose to cross the thin blue line? Is there room for women in the brotherhood? Retired Officer Nenia Corcoran breaks the silence by shining a light on the sexism and sexual harassment that’s ingrained in modern policing. In this unfiltered novel, Corcoran breaks down double standards, unspoken rules, and the frustrating biases that come with wearing a badge.

In 2003, Kathleen Folbigg was found guilty of smothering her four young children to death, one by one. Medical experts told her trial that they had never come across a family like hers, where three or more infants had died from natural causes. Extracts from diaries she had written were judged to be virtual admissions of guilt, and Folbigg was sentenced to 40 years in jail. But did she do it?

Signed on September 17, 1787 - four years after the American War for Independence - the Constitution laid out the supreme law of the United States of America. Today it's easy for us to take this blueprint of our government for granted. But the Framers - 55 men from almost all of the original 13 states - argued fiercely for many months over what ended up being only a four-page document. Here is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the hotly fought issues - those between Northern and Southern States; big states and little ones - and the key players.

In his meteoric, 13-year rise to fame, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a mass movement for civil rights - with his relentless peaceful, non-violent protests, public demonstrations, and eloquent speeches. But as violent threats cast a dark shadow over Dr. King's life, Swanson hones in on James Earl Ray, a bizarre, racist prison escapee who tragically ends King's life.

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.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.