Legal History category: 1513 books
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso
A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2016
Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class, black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest. As details surrounding the shocking...
Among the Powers of the Earth
The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire
Language: English
Release Date: March 19, 2012
The Revolution’s aspiration was summed up by the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the American founding was also a bid for inclusion in the community of nations. According to Eliga Gould, America aspired to diplomatic recognition under international law and the authority to become an Atlantic colonizing power itself.
Slavish Shore
The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2015
In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. became a common seaman, and soon his Two Years Before the Mast became a classic. Literary acclaim did not erase the young lawyer’s memory of floggings he witnessed aboard ship or undermine his vow to combat injustice. Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s determination to keep that vow.
by Niamh Howlin, Kevin Costello
Language: English
Release Date: September 16, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: September 16, 2017
This multi-disciplinary study considers the intersection between law and family life in Ireland from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Setting the law in its wider social historical context it traces marriage from its formation through to its breakdown. It considers the impact of...
The Great Decision
Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2010
Following the bitterly contested election between Adams and Jefferson in 1800, the United States teetered on the brink of a second revolution. When Adams sought to prolong his policies in defiance of the electorate by packing the courts, it became evident that the new Constitution was limited in its...
by Caleb Smith
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2013
Caleb Smith explores the confessions, trial reports, maledictions, and martyr narratives that juxtaposed law and conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion and shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.
The Role of Circuit Courts in the Formation of United States Law in the Early Republic
Following Supreme Court Justices Washington, Livingston, Story and Thompson
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 2018
While scholars have rightly focused on the importance of the landmark opinions of the United States Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, in the rise in influence of the Court in the Early Republic, the crucial role of the circuit courts in the development of a uniform system of federal...
by Paul Finkelman, Karen E. Robbins, Timothy S. Huebner
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2013
A Scots-Irish immigrant, James McHenry determined to make something of his life. Trained as a physician, he joined the American Revolution when war broke out. He then switched to a more military role, serving on the staffs of George Washington and Lafayette. He entered government after the war and...
Injustice on the Eastern Shore
Race and the Hill Murder Trial
Language: English
Release Date: March 16, 2015
Lynching rumors simmered as journalists descended on the small town of Millington, Maryland, in the spring of 1892. The frenzy focused on nine African American men and boys--some as young as fifteen--accused of murdering Dr. James Heighe Hill, who was white. Prosecutors portrayed this as retribution...
by Mary Sue Anton
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2017
In 2015, New Madrid County Missouri celebrated its courthouse centennial. To mark the occasion, the classical Greek revival courthouse gained a spruced-up stained glass dome over the rotunda, a resurrected 1821 County Seal, new portraits of founding fathers, festive banners surrounding the building and...
by M. J. C. Vile
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 1998
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 1998
In Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, M. J. C. Vile traces the history of the doctrine from its rise during the English Civil War, through its development in the eighteenth century—through subsequent political thought and constitution-making in Britain, France, and the United States.
M....
Elbert Parr Tuttle
Chief Jurist of the Civil Rights Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2011
This is the first—and the only authorized—biography of Elbert Parr Tuttle (1897–1996), the judge who led the federal court with jurisdiction over most of the Deep South through the most tumultuous years of the civil rights revolution. By the time Tuttle became chief judge of the United States...
Avenging Lincoln’s Death
The Trial of John Wilkes Booth’s Accomplices
Language: English
Release Date: November 12, 2015
Avenging Lincoln’s Death: The Trial of John Wilkes Booth’s Accomplices is an examination of the 1865 military commission trial of eight alleged accomplices of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who murdered President Abraham Lincoln. The book analyzes the trial transcript and other relevant evidence...
Another Country, Another Life
Calumny, Love, and the Secrets of Isaac Jelfs
Language: English
Release Date: March 30, 2013
Quiet Isaac Jelfs led many lives: a scapegoated law clerk in England; a soldier in the mad Crimean War; a lawyer on swirling Broadway Avenue in New York. His escape from each was wrapped in deep secrecy. He eventually reached Canada, in 1869, with a new wife and a changed name. In his new home —...