Eugenicist arguments ranking the presumed genetic virtue of various ethnic groups helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the United States for more than forty years. By 1921 Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that 'biological laws' had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law that remained U.S. policy until 1965 was enacted three years later. Okrent connects the work of the American eugenicists to Nazi racial policies and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad. -- adapted from jacket

Tobacco companies had been protecting their turf for decades. They had congressmen in their pocket. They had corrupt scientists who made excuses about nicotine, cancer and addiction. They had hordes of lawyers to threaten anyone—inside the industry or out—who posed a problem. They had a whole lot of money to spend. And they were good at getting people to do what they wanted them to do. After all, they had already convinced millions of Americans to take up an addictive, unhealthy, and potentially deadly habit. David Kessler didn't care about all that. In this book he tells for the first time the thrilling detective story of how the underdog FDA—while safeguarding the nation's food, drugs, and blood supply—finally decided to take on one of the world's most powerful opponents, and how it won. Like A Civil Action or And the Band Played On, A Question of Intent weaves together science, law, and fascinating characters to tell an important and often unexpectedly moving story. We follow Kessler's team of investigators as they race to find the clues that will allow the FDA to assert jurisdiction over cigarettes, while the tobacco companies and their lawyers fight back—hard. Full of insider information and drama, told with wit, and animated by its author's moral passion, A Question of Intent reads like a Grisham thriller, with one exception—everything in it is true.

Relates the gripping story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain.

"Author Adam Winkler, a professor of Constitutional law, uses the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's Capitol, as a springboard for a historical narrative of America's four-centuries-long political battle over gun control and the right to bear arms. From the Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment to the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, ironically as a gun control organization, the debate over guns has always generated controversy. Whether examining the Black Panthers' role in provoking the modern gun rights movement or Ronald Reagan's efforts to curtail gun ownership, Winkler weaves together the dramatic stories of gun rights advocates and gun control lobbyists, providing often unexpected insights into the venomous debate that now cleaves our nation"--Provided by publisher.

"As one of a handful of journalists allowed in the courtroom, for 23 days Jonathan Alter sat just feet away from the most dangerous threat to democracy in American history, watching the spectacle of the century: the felony trial of Donald Trump. Highly publicized but untelevised and thus largely hidden from public view, this landmark trial offered hope of real justice amid a grueling eight-year national ordeal and foreshadowed the drama of the 2024 presidential election. Alter shares everything he witnessed--from eviscerating takes on the colorful characters to the chilling legal ups and downs--to offer a barbed account of the trial and its aftermath, including fresh reporting about the historic events of the summer of 2024. A Zelig of journalism experiencing a crisis of faith in the good sense of the American people, Alter chronicles the shaping of his political consciousness and his bracing, unpredictable relationships with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Joe Biden, whose decision to stand down in favor of former prosecutor Kamala Harris put the criminal trial front and center as Americans render their own verdict at the polls."--

Journalist Irin Carmon was eight months pregnant when the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, unleashing pain and suffering for those who didn't want to be pregnant and, shockingly to some, those who did. What was clear to Carmon from her dozen years of reporting -- and from what she felt in her bones -- was how incomplete the American story of reproduction had been, and how much had been unexpressed, hidden, or taken for granted, and not just by conservative justices or in red states. Whether in cosmopolitan, liberal New York City or rural Alabama, the entire system is broken. Unbearable tells a deeper story, going beyond the headlines and any one experience or choice, and grounded in history and journalism. It introduces us to five women navigating pregnancy care -- from that first positive pregnancy test through joy, loss, and the unforeseen -- in a country that is at best indifferent and at worst willfully cruel, and to brave, outnumbered people fighting to make it better. Written with deep empathy and analytical rigor, Unbearable is at once a moving story of interconnection, a harrowing exposé, and assertion of humanity. Above all, it is a powerful call for solidarity, regardless of our circumstances or our decisions. -- Provided by publisher.

"A radical case for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment as the only way to control gun violence in America There's an average of one mass shooting per day in the United States. Given the ineffectiveness of the gun control lobby, it's time for a strategy with spine. In Repeal the Second Amendment, Allan J. Lichtman has written the first book that uses history, legal theory and up-to-the-minute data to make a compelling case for the amendment's repeal in order to create a clear road to sensible gun control in the US. Repeal the Second Amendment explores both the true history and current interpretation of the Second Amendment to expose the NRA's blatant historical manipulations and irresponsible fake news releases. Lichtman looks at the history of firearms and gun regulations from colonial times to the present to explain how a historically forgotten sentence in the Constitution has become a flash point of recent politics that benefits only of the gun industry, their lobbyists, and the politicians on their payroll. He probes court decisions and the effective lobbying and public relations strategies of the gun lobby as well as the ineffectiveness of the gun control movement for lessons in doing better. What emerges is a clear and cogent plan - repeal and replace the Second Amendment without taking guns away from anyone who has them now - to make the US a safer place. It's time to Repeal the Second Amendment, and Allan Lichtman is the man to bring this radical plan to America"--

"On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal throughout the United States. But the road to victory was much longer than many know. In this seminal work, Sasha Issenberg takes us back to Hawaii in the 1990s, when that state's supreme court first started grappling with the issue, and traces the fight for marriage equality from the enactment of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to the Goodridge decision that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and finally to the seminal Supreme Court decisions of Windsor and Obergefell. This meticulously reported work sheds new light on every aspect of this fraught history and brings to life the perspectives of those who fought courageously for the right to marry as well as those who fervently believed that same-sex marriage would destroy the nation. It is sure to become the definitive book on one of the most important civil rights fights of our time"--

This is the first comprehensive book in English on the fate of the homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The author, a German refugee, examines the climate and conditions that gave rise to a vicious campaign against Germany's gays, as directed by Himmler and his SS--persecution that resulted in tens of thousands of arrests and thousands of deaths .In this Nazi crusade, homosexual prisoners were confined to death camps where, forced to wear pink triangles, they constituted the lowest rung in the camp hierarchy. The horror of camp life is described through diaries, previously untranslated documents, and interviews with and letters from survivors, revealing how the anti-homosexual campaign was conducted, the crackpot homophobic fantasies that fueled it, the men who made it possible, and those who were its victims, this chilling book sheds light on a corner of twentieth-century history that has been hidden in the shadows much too long. --

This book contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography, spoken on the record for the first time in history. Speaking at hearings on a groundbreaking antipornography civil rights law, women offer eloquent witness to the devastation pornography has caused in their lives. Supported by social science experts and authorities on rape, battery, and prostitution, discounted and opposed by free speech advocates and absolutists, their riveting testimony articulates the centrality of pornography to sexual abuse and inequity today. At issue in these hearings is a law conceived and drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon that defines harm done through pornography as a legal injury of sex discrimination warranting civil redress. From the first set of hearings in Minneapolis in 1983 through those before the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992, the witnesses heard here expose the commonplace reality of denigration and sexual subordination due to pornography and refute the widespread notion that pornography is harmless expression that must be protected by the state. Introduced with powerful essays by MacKinnon and Dworkin, these hearings--unabridged and with each word scrupulously verified--constitute a unique record of a conflict over the meaning of democracy itself--a major civil rights struggle for our time and a fundamental crisis in United States constitutional law: Can we sacrifice the lives of women and children to a pornographer's right to free "speech"? Can we allow the First Amendment to shield sexual exploitation and predatory sexual violence? These pages contain all the arguments for protecting pornography--and dramatically document its human cost.

This book is both a powerful personal memoir and the definitive history of an organization that helped change American society. Jack Greenberg was a key figure at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) for some thirty-five years. Most of the cases we associate from that period--school integration, equal employment, fair housing, voter registration--were LDF cases, either argued by Greenberg himself or litigated under his direction. Greenberg represented Martin Luther King, Jr., in Birmingham and won for him the right to march from Selma to Montgomery. Under Greenberg's leadership, the LDF forced the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith and integrated the University of Alabama when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Greenberg won the cases in which the Supreme Court repudiated the "all deliberate speed" doctrine, which had made school desegregation intolerably slow. Through the 1970s and 1980s, LDF tackled most of the important cases that enforced the new civil rights legislation of the 1960s involving public accommodations, employment, education, and health care, and started the campaigns for prisoners' rights and against capital punishment. More than a history of the litigation that made the LDF so important, the book offers unique insights into its strategies, courtroom techniques, values, and personal relationships. Filled with stories only Greenberg could tell of his experiences with Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Lani Guinier, Roy Wilkins, Vernon Jordan, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lyndon Johnson, and scores of others, Crusaders in the Courts is an epic saga of a critical period in American history as well as the poignant personal story of the evolution of a white Jewish lawyer into a major civil rights advocate.

In 1810, a Scottish student named Jane Cumming accused her school mistresses, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, of having an affair in the presence of their students. Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, the wealthy and powerful grandmother of the accusing student, advised her friends to remove their daughters from the Drumsheugh boarding school. Within days, the institution was deserted and the two women were deprived of their livelihoods. Award-winning author Lillian Faderman recreates the events surrounding this notorious case, which became the basis for Lillian Hellman's famous play, The Children's Hour. Reconstructing the libel suit filed by Pirie and Woods--which resulted in a scotch verdict, or a verdict of inconclusive/not proven--Faderman builds a compelling narrative from court transcripts, judges' notes, witnesses' contradictory testimony, and the prejudices of the men presiding over the case. Her fascinating portrait documents the social, economic, and sexual pressures shaping the lives of nineteenth-century women and the issues of class and gender contributing to their marginalization.

"Brilliant, crisp, and cogently argued. Joan W. Scott's novel and trenchant discursive analysis exposes the prejudices of the reductionist French versions of secularism and feminism regarding Islam and French Muslims from North African and Arab origins. The study is illuminating far beyond the French case, as former colonial and/or working subjects struggle for integration and recognition of their difference." --Abdellah Hammoudi, Princeton University "Carefully argued, insightful and humane, Joan Scott's The Politics of the Veil is far and away the best account of France's identity crisis that was signaled by the famous headscarf affair. The final chapter, on the symbolic meanings of the headscarf/veil, is the most original and brilliant piece of writing that I have read on this topic. This is an indispensable book, transcending the particularity of French obsessions and forcing the reader to think about wider political problems that concern us all." --Talal Asad, author of On Suicide Bombing "Scott traces the history and politics of veil controversies in France and draws apart intertwined strands, starting with the legacy of racism from the colonial past. She persuasively argues for the negotiation of cultural and religious differences rather than their negation. This book will be required reading for all those concerned with the integration of Muslims into Western Christian societies." --Beth Baron, author of Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics "This is an important and timely book that will challenge the dominant terms used to debate the French government's ban on the veil in public schools. Through a careful analysis of historical and contemporary French discourse on Muslims and Arabs, Scott helps us see how the controversy over the veil is indexical of a deep paradox that haunts the ideology of French Republicanism of which the principle of la�cit� is a crucial part." --Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

In 1950s America, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest almost anyone for almost any reason. The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-played a key role not only in maintaining safety and order but also in enforcing conventional standards of morality and propriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff provides a groundbreaking account of this transformation. By reading into the history of the 1960s through the lens of vagrancy laws, Goluboff shows how constitutional challenges to long-standing police practices were at the center of the multiple movements that made "the 1960s." Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they made it possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place in any way: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities, civil rights activists, and interracial couples; prostitutes, single women, and gay men, lesbians, and other sexual minorities. As hundreds of these "vagrants" and their lawyers claimed that vagrancy laws were unconstitutional, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom. In Goluboff's compelling portrayal, the legal campaign against vagrancy laws becomes a sweeping legal and social history of the 1960s. Touching on movements advocating civil rights, peace, gay rights, welfare rights, and cultural revolution, Vagrant Nation provides insight relevant to this battle, as well as the battle over the legacy of the 1960s' transformations themselves.

Mark Tushnet presents the story of the NAACP's legal campaign against segregated schools as a case study in public interest law, which in fact began in the United States with that very campaign.

The commission to investigate the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States issued its final report in July of 2004, in which it recommended a dramatic overhaul of the nation's intelligence system. Congress responded by hastily enacting the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which adopts many of the 9/11 commission's specific recommendations, though with a number of alterations. Richard A. Posner, in the first full-length study of the post-9/11 movement for intelligence reform, argues that the 9/11 commission's analysis, on which Congress relied, was superficial and its organizational proposals unsound. The commission, followed by Congress, exaggerated the benefits of centralizing control over intelligence; neglected the relevant scholarship dealing with surprise attacks, organization theory, the principles of intelligence, and the experience of foreign nations, some of which have a longer history of fighting terrorism than the United States; and as a result ignored the psychological, economic, historical, sociological, and comparative dimensions of the issue of intelligence reform. Posner explains, however, that a ray of hope remains: the reorganization provisions of the new Act are so vague, as a result of intense politicking, that the actual shape of the reorganized system will depend critically on decisions made by the President in implementing the Act. In a searing critique, Posner exposes the pitfalls created by the new legislation, identifies the issues overlooked by the 9/11 commission and Congress, and suggests directions for real reform. This book is published in cooperation with the Hoover Institution

"An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer"--

"Written for a broad audience, this book looks at Supreme Court decisions, legal history, and public health theory to tell the story of how the Supreme Court stymied efforts to control the pandemic, as well as how its pre-pandemic decisions left the United States especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and other health threats"--

"Written for a broad audience, this book looks at Supreme Court decisions, legal history, and public health theory to tell the story of how the Supreme Court stymied efforts to control the pandemic, as well as how its pre-pandemic decisions left the United States especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and other health threats"--

Product Description Slavery in the American South could not have existed without the authority of law defining slaves as the property of their masters. But the fact that slaves were also human beings placed limits on this harsh reality. When the rigor of the law and the complex bonds of sentiment linking master and slave came into conflict, masters looked to the courts. In one such case, State v. Mann, North Carolina Supreme Court justice Thomas Ruffin ruled that masters could not be prosecuted for assaulting their slaves. In articulating the legal basis for his decision, Justice Ruffin also revealed his own view of the "logic of slavery," in which he sanctioned the owner's rights even as he expressed his own horror at the mistreatment of the slave. Mark Tushnet, one of the foremost living authorities on antebellum slave law, now shows how studying such a simple case can illuminate an entire society. For those who detested slavery, the case represented all that was intolerable about that institution; for those who defended it, it raised vexing and persistent issues that could not be wished away. As further testament to the importance of State v. Mann, Harriet Beecher Stowe even made it central to her second antislavery novel, Dred. Tushnet discusses the opinion's place in the novel-in which she quoted liberally from Ruffin's decision-and evaluates other historians' interpretations of both the opinion and Stowe's provocative novel. Tushnet provides a finely detailed analysis of Ruffin's opinion, portraying the judge as a man compelled by law to uphold the slaveowner's right while moved as a Christian by the slave's maltreatment and ever hopeful that communal morality and a deep-seated sense of honor would moderate the excesses of slave owners. As Tushnet shows, however, slave law was a means for maintaining the ideological hegemony of the Southern master class. Slave Law in the American South paints a broad picture of a landmark case, tying together legal, historical, social, political, and even literary strands to show how the law itself was implicated in the persistence of slavery. It sheds new light on slavery and Southern history, as it probes the conscience of a troubled jurist incapable of fully transcending his times. This book is part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series. From the Back Cover "While losing neither objectivity nor moral compass, Mark Tushnet skillfully navigates the murky waters of Southern judicial and legal logic. His inspired study highly deserves close and serious attention."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760-1880s"More than two decades ago, Tushnet ignited the field of slave law studies with his provocative and thoughtful overview of the subject, The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860. Now he has given us the first book-length study of a classic American slave case. Comprehensive and insightful, it merits the attention of legal scholars, historians, and non-specialists alike."--Timothy S. Huebner, author of The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Section Distinctness, 1790-1890 About the Author Mark V. Tushnet is Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, he is the author of numerous books including Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts and Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law.