Bøger i Landmark Law Cases and American Society serien

When the US took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam following the Spanish-American War, it was unclear to what degree these islands were actually part of the US. By looking at what became known as the Insular Cases, this work reveals how America resolved to govern these territories.

This volume reexamines the events and personalities in the 1894 strike when the American Railway Union took action against the Pullman Palace Car Company. It also looks at related proceedings in the Chicago trial courts, and the decision which set important standards for labour injunctions.

Roberto Rossellini's ""Il Miracolo"" is deceptively simple: a demented peasant woman is seduced by a stranger she believes to be Saint Joseph, is socially ostracized for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but is finally redeemed through motherhood. This book explores the unique place that the movies occupy in American culture.

Focuses on the antebellum Supreme Court's role prescribing state-federal regulation of immigrants, the movement of free blacks within the United States and on the origins, state court decisions, federal precedents, appellate arguments, and opinion-making that culminated in the Court's decision of the Passenger Cases.

Anita Whitney was a child of wealth and privilege who became a vocal leftist early in the twentieth century, supporting radical labor groups such as the Wobblies and helping to organize the Communist Labor Party. In 1919 she was arrested and charged with violating California's recently passed laws banning any speech or activity intended to change the American political and economic systems. The story of the Supreme Court case that grew out of Whitney's conviction, told in full in this book, is also the story of how Americans came to enjoy the most liberal speech laws in the world.In clear and engaging language, noted legal scholar Philippa Strum traces the fateful interactions of Whitney, a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims; Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a brilliant son of immigrants; the teeming immigrant neighborhoods and left wing labor politics of the early twentieth century; and the lessons some Harvard Law School professors took from World War I-era restrictions on speech. Though the Supreme Court upheld Whitney's conviction, it included an opinion by Justice Brandeis--joined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--that led to a decisive change in the way the Court understood First Amendment free speech protections. Speaking Freely takes us into the discussions behind this dramatic change, as Holmes, Brandeis, Judge Learned Hand, and Harvard Law professors Zechariah Chafee and Felix Frankfurter debate the extent of the First Amendment and the important role of free speech in a democratic society. In Brandeis's opinion, we see this debate distilled in a statement of the value of free speech and the harm that its suppression does to a democracy, along with reflections on the importance of freedom from government control for the founders and the drafters of the First Amendment.Through Whitney v. California and its legacy, Speaking Freely shows how the American approach to speech, differing as it does that of every other country, reflects the nation's unique history. Nothing less than a primer in the history of free speech rights in the US, the book offers a sobering and timely lesson as fear once more raises the specter of repression.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 are indelibly etched into our cultural memory. This is the story of how the legal ramifications of that day brought two presidents, Congress, and the Supreme Court into repeated confrontation over the incarceration of hundreds of suspected terrorists and "e;enemy combatants"e; at the US naval base in Guantnamo, Cuba. Could these prisoners (including an American citizen) be held indefinitely without due process of law? Did they have the right to seek their release by habeas corpus in US courts? Could they be tried in a makeshift military judicial system? With Guantnamo well into its second decade, these questions have challenged the three branches of government, each contending with the others, and each invoking the Constitution's separation of powers as well as its checks and balances.In The 9/11 Terror Cases, Allan A. Ryan leads students and general readers through the pertinent cases: Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, both decided by the Supreme Court in 2004; Hamdan v. Bush, decided in 2006; and Boumediene v. Bush, in 2008. An eloquent writer and an expert in military law and constitutional litigation, Ryan is an adept guide through the nuanced complexities of these cases, which rejected the sweeping powers asserted by President Bush and Congress, and upheld the rule of law, even for enemy combatants. In doing so, as we see clearly in Ryan's deft account, the Supreme Court's rulings speak directly to the extent and nature of presidential and congressional prerogative, and to the critical separation and balance of powers in the governing of the United States.

Most people could probably tell you that Lizzie Borden "e;took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks,"e; but few could say that, when tried, Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and fewer still, why. In Joseph A. Conforti's engrossing retelling, the case of Lizzie Borden, sensational in itself, also opens a window on a time and place in American history and culture. Surprising for how much it reveals about a legend so ostensibly familiar, Conforti's account is also fascinating for what it tells us about the world that Lizzie Borden inhabited. As Confortihimself a native of Fall River, the site of the infamous murdersintroduces us to Lizzie and her father and step-mother, he shows us why who they were matters almost as much to the trial's outcome as the actual events of August 4, 1892. Lizzie, for instance, was an unmarried woman of some privilege, a prominent religious woman who fit the profile of what some characterized as a "e;Protestant nun."e; She was also part of a class of moneyed women emerging in the late 19th century who had the means but did not marry, choosing instead to pursue good works and at times careers in the helping professions. Many of her contemporaries, we learn, particularly those of her class, found it impossible to believe that a woman of her background could commit such a gruesome murder. As he relates the details, known and presumed, of the murder and the subsequent trial, Conforti also fills in that background. His vividly written account creates a complete picture of the Fall River of the time, as Yankee families like the Bordens, made wealthy by textile factories, began to feel the economic and cultural pressures of the teeming population of native and foreign-born who worked at the spindles and bobbins. Conforti situates Lizzie's austere household, uneasily balanced between the well-to-do and the poor, within this social and cultural milieulaying the groundwork for the murder and the trial, as well as the outsize reaction that reverberates to our day. As Peter C. Hoffer remarks in his preface, there are many popular and fictional accounts of this still-controversial case, "e;but none so readable or so well-balanced as this."e;

In the late 1960s an Amish community considered state education detrimental to its own values. When the state claimed truancy and took Jonas Yoder to court, a legal battle of landmark proportions followed. This volume is a complete and compelling account of the Yoder case.

After the American Civil war black men were gunned down for daring to attempt to vote and another black man was denied the the right to vote for failing to pay a poll tax. This title argues that the supreme court decisions in these cases signalled a gap between guaranteed and enforced rights.

When the Cleveland suburb of Euclid first zoned its land in 1922, the Ambler Realty Company was left with a sizable tract it could no longer sell for industrial use - and so the company sued. This book describes how the ordinance, and the defense of it, burst onto the national stage and became the focus of litigation.

In 1957, a violent mob barred black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School and was faced off against paratroopers sent by a reluctant President Eisenhower. This book provides a summary of that historic case and shows that it paved the way for later civil rights victories. It describes the work of the Little Rock NAACP.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, sought to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves; but its first important test - centered on a vitriolic dispute among the white butchers of mid-Reconstruction New Orleans - did not arise until five years later. This is a guide to one of the US Supreme Court's most famous cases.

Tying together legal, historical, social, political and literary strands to show how the law itself was implicated in the persistence of slavery, this work sheds new light on slavery and Southern history, as it probes the conscience of a troubled jurist incapable of fully transcending his times.

When Gregory Lee Johnson burned a flag, he was convicted for flag desecration under Texas law, but the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction. This work examines the case and the attendant controversy over whether protection of the flag conflicts with constitutional guarantees of free speech.

In two 1997 decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Yet for many people the concept strikes to the heart of notions of liberty. This text examines those cases, the law surrounding the claims and the moral debate around the issue.

In late 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts, neighbours turned against neighbours and children against parents with accusations of witchcraft. This text examines what created an epidemic of accusations that resulted in the investigation of nearly 200 colonists and, for many, trial and incarceration.

Lochner v. New York pitted a conservative activist judiciary against a reform-minded legislature, and is a frequently-cited case in Supreme Court history. In this guide Kens shows why the case remains an important marker in the ideological battles between the free market and the regulatory state.

The military trial of William Calley for his role in the slaughter of 500 or more Vietnamese civilians at My Lai shocked a nation already sharply divided over a controversial war. This work is a retelling of the My Lai story through the prism of the law.