Law Biography

In 2014, Chessy Prout was a freshman at St. Paul's School, a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, when a senior boy sexually assaulted her as part of a ritualized game of conquest. Chessy bravely reported her assault to the police and testified against her attacker in court. Then, in the face of unexpected backlash from her once-trusted school community, she shed her anonymity to help other survivors find their voice.

Combining wisdom drawn from over a dozen years as a public defender and cutting-edge research in the fields of organizational and cultural psychology, Jonathan Rapping proposes a radical cultural shift to a “fiercely client-based ethos” driven by values-based recruitment training, awakening defenders to their role in upholding an unjust status quo, and a renewed pride in the essential role of moral lawyering in a democratic society.

Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a Black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. Corey Robin - one of the foremost analysts of the right - delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches.

In the past thirty years alone, more than 2,800 innocent American prisoners—their combined sentences surpassing 25,000 years—have been exonerated and freed after being condemned for crimes they did not commit. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a fraction of the actual number of persons wrongfully accused and convicted over the same period.

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.

Fue el hombre que encarceló a secretarios de Estado, se encargó de la aprehensión de la Quina -el líder petrolero más poderoso de finales del siglo XX-, que capturó al narcotraficante Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo y quien recuperó las joyas del Museo Nacional de Antropología. Esta es la historia de Javier Coello Trejo contada por él mismo.

This fascinating book covers true tales in the life and career of a Sheriff's Department captain in New Hanover County, North Carolina. Mark Vincent was the captain of the county jail for most of his career but that title was sorely inadequate in describing what his job entailed. The stories run the gamut from humorous to frightening to sad to unbelievable. But truth, as is often stated, is stranger than fiction. If you think there is nothing new under the sun in law enforcement, well, there is always something. Mark Vincent has had a remarkable career, but it's certain there are many days ...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was famous for her stylish collars (called jabots) and her commanding dissents. This opera-loving New Yorker always spoke her mind; as a young lawyer, RBG advocated for gender equality and women's rights when few others did. She gained attention for the cases she won when arguing in front of the Supreme Court, before taking her place on the bench in 1993. Author Patricia Brennan Demuth answers all the questions about what made RBG so irreplaceable and how the late Supreme Court justice left a legacy that will last forever.

In Being Oscar,one of America’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys recounts the stories and cases of his epic life. The Mafia’s go-to defender, he has tried an estimated 300 criminal cases, and won most of them. His roster of clients reads like a history of organized crime: Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, and "Lefty" Rosenthal, as well as Mike Tyson and boxing promoter Don King, along with a midget, a dentist, and a federal judge. After 35 years as a defender, he ran for mayor of Las Vegas, and America’s greatest Mob lawyer became the mayor of its sexiest city.

The American legal system changed dramatically when the OJ Simpson trial became a television-ratings bonanza. Now it's all crime, all the time, from tabloid news to police procedurals. Americans now know more about the criminal justice system than ever before. Or do they?

Brilliant. Colorful. Visionary. Tenacious. Witty. Since his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1986, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has been described as all of these things, and for good reason.

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.

Ginsburg and Amanda Tyler, Berkeley Law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk, bring together RBG's most penetrating opinions - many previously unpublished - sharing details from Justice Ginsburg's family life and long career.

Bruce Sterling delves into the world of high-tech crime and punishment in one of the first books to explore the cyberspace breaches that threaten national security. From the crash of AT&T’s long-distance switching system to corporate cyberattacks, he investigates government and law enforcement efforts to break the back of America’s electronic underground in the 1990s.

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.

This prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle and confinement that marked the end of his own youth. On the surface, the narrative tumbles from one crazed moment to the next as Gantos pieces together the story of his restless final year of high school, his short-lived career as a criminal, and his time in prison.

A leading Supreme Court expert recounts the personal and philosophical rivalries that forged our nation's highest court and continue to shape our daily lives. The Supreme Court is the most mysterious branch of government, and yet the Court is at root a human institution, made up of very bright people with very strong egos, for whom political and judicial conflicts often become personal.

On a November night in 1990, Cathy Robertson is murdered in her home outside Chillicothe, Missouri. After law enforcement conduct a haphazard investigation, the sheriff’s office puts the case in the hands of a Kansas City private eye with his own agenda. In a close-knit town still reeling from the aftereffects of the farming crisis, friends and neighbors abruptly fracture into opposing camps. Mark Woodworth, a Robertson family neighbor, eventually receives four life sentences for a crime that a growing group of local supporters believe he didn’t commit.

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.

At the height of the roaring 1920s, the ex-frontier town of Denver, Colorado, emerged from the postwar boom as the future of the American city. Rookie district attorney Phillip Van Cise was already making national headlines for a new brand of law enforcement. Employing military intelligence tools he'd developed during the Great War, Van Cise crippled the criminal empire of Lou Blonger, an ex-lawman who had risen from petty scam artist to master of the Big Con. But Van Cise had even darker, more malevolent forces on his radar.