front cover of The Ballad of Gato Guerrero
The Ballad of Gato Guerrero
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2003
Luis Montez—Denver attorney and part-time detective—has been getting his career and his life together. So how did he end up in a ditch, his car twisted and smoking nearby, a gun-wielding giant in a cowboy hat coming toward him?

The answer: his friend, Felix "Gato" Guerrero.

Trouble has always followed the larger-than-life Felix the Cat. Now it has jumped all over him. His girlfriend is the wife of a ruthless local crime lord and in spite of bullets and hit men he won't give her up. His former father-in-law blames him for a family tragedy and is bent on revenge. Worst of all, Felix is determined to remain unaware of the dangers. It's up to Montez-and not for the first time-to step in and save him.

As in his Edgar-nominated The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, Manuel Ramos immerses readers not only in a thrilling mystery but also in the fascinating Chicano culture of the West. Fast-paced and richly textured, The Ballad of Gato Guerrero is an entertaining addition to the acclaimed Luis Montez mystery series.
[more]

front cover of The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz
The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2003
This debut novel in the acclaimed Luis Montez series introduced a hero unique in detective fiction: a world-weary middle-aged lawyer steeped in the politics, history, and culture of the golden age of Chicano activism.

Twenty years ago, a gang attacked four Chicano student activists and shot down their leader, Rocky Ruiz. Now the survivors, Montez's former compatriots in the movement, are in danger. One is killed, another beaten, and a third driven into hiding. Enter Teresa Fuentes, a beautiful young lawyer determined to solve the mystery and just as determined to avoid becoming involved with Montez. To save his friends, Montez must reexamine the central event of their shared past-the murder of Rocky Ruiz. Just as difficult, he finds, may be to untangle his feelings for Teresa Fuentes.
[more]

front cover of Beyond Winning
Beyond Winning
Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes
Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet, and Andrew S. Tulumello
Harvard University Press, 2004

Conflict is inevitable, in both deals and disputes. Yet when clients call in the lawyers to haggle over who gets how much of the pie, traditional hard-bargaining tactics can lead to ruin. Too often, deals blow up, cases don’t settle, relationships fall apart, justice is delayed. Beyond Winning charts a way out of our current crisis of confidence in the legal system. It offers a fresh look at negotiation, aimed at helping lawyers turn disputes into deals, and deals into better deals, through practical, tough-minded problem-solving techniques.

In this step-by-step guide to conflict resolution, the authors describe the many obstacles that can derail a legal negotiation, both behind the bargaining table with one’s own client and across the table with the other side. They offer clear, candid advice about ways lawyers can search for beneficial trades, enlarge the scope of interests, improve communication, minimize transaction costs, and leave both sides better off than before. But lawyers cannot do the job alone. People who hire lawyers must help change the game from conflict to collaboration. The entrepreneur structuring a joint venture, the plaintiff embroiled in a civil suit, the CEO negotiating an employment contract, the real estate developer concerned with environmental hazards, the parent considering a custody battle—clients who understand the pressures and incentives a lawyer faces can work more effectively within the legal system to promote their own best interests. Attorneys exhausted by the trench warfare of cases that drag on for years will find here a positive, proven approach to revitalizing their profession.

[more]

front cover of Blues for the Buffalo
Blues for the Buffalo
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Winner, 2013 3rd Annual Latino Books Into Movies Award for Suspensee/Mystery
 
The sun, the sand, a young beauty named Rachel in a white bikini—there's no better way to recover from the aches and pains of your latest case. At least that's what attorney and part-time detective Luis Montez thinks until the woman gives him the manuscript of her novel and vanishes.

Montez just wants to rebuild his Denåver practice, but an aggressive young P.I. with an emotional attachment to Rachel draws him in. With the woman's powerful adopted family on one side and unexplained death of a writer friend on the other, Montez digs up a series of long-told lies and long-hidden ugly truths. He also finds himself confronting one of the great unsolved mysteries of recent Chicano history. What happened to Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, the iconic activist-writer presumed dead since 1974? More to the point, what made Rachel insist the legendary Brown Buffalo was alive-and that he was her real father?
[more]

front cover of The Consciousness of the Litigator
The Consciousness of the Litigator
Duffy Graham
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"An important and thought-provoking addition to the literature on the ethics of lawyers."
---Kimberly Kirkland, Franklin Pierce Law Center

The Consciousness of the Litigator investigates the role of the lawyer in modern American political and social life and in the judicial process, and plumbs lawyers' perceptions of themselves, their work, and, especially, their sense of right and wrong.

In so doing, the book sheds light on the unique and little-examined subject of the moral mind of the litigator, whose work extends to all corners of society and whose primary expertise---making legal arguments---is the fundamental skill of all lawyers.

The Consciousness of the Litigator stands with Michael Kelly's Lives of Lawyers as a must-read for the many law students, scholars, and practicing litigators who struggle to balance ethical questions with the dictates of their highly commercialized profession.
[more]

front cover of The Last Client of Luis Montez
The Last Client of Luis Montez
Manuel Ramos
Northwestern University Press, 2004
Hard-luck attorney Luis Montez has hit the big-time at last. He's successfully defended Jimmy Esch, the good-for-nothing son of a powerful Denver family. No small bonus, Jimmy's attractive sister Lisa is, as the saying goes, appreciative. It's enough to make a man quit moping about a lost love.

What a difference a day makes. Inside of twenty-four hours, a cop rumored to have received bribes from Montez takes a header off a mountain, Jimmy Esch is found butchered, and the cops consider the attorney their top suspect. Lisa—Montez's alibi—has conveniently disappeared. As if all that wasn't enough, Montez must also cope with the news his father is in the hospital.

Distracted by family strife and a media circus, Montez broods on the latest wrong turns in his life. Then he decides to act. Jumping bail, he heads across the Rockies to the barrios of San Diego. It's not easy to unravel the perfect set-up when you're down to your last cent. But Montez pursues the truths that will clear his name, and ultimately confronts the powerful force that is Family.
[more]

front cover of Lawyer and Client
Lawyer and Client
Who's in Charge
Douglas E. Rosenthal
Russell Sage Foundation, 1974
To what extent can and should people participate in dealing with the personal problems they bring to consulting professionals? This book presents two alternative models for the conduct of such professional-client relationships as those between lawyers and clients and doctors and patients. One model, called the traditional, prescribes a role of minimal participation for the client. The other, called the participatory, prescribes a role of decision-making shared by the client and the professional. After presenting the two models and their implications, the book systematically tests their validity in a case study of the lawyer-client relationship in the making of personal injury claims. The distinctive feature of this work is a sophisticated and objective test of the traditional proposition that passive clients get better results than active clients. Evidence drawn from a sample of actual cases of personal injury claimants reveals that active clients in fact fare significantly better than passive clients. The book is important and novel in four respects: it offers the first clear and realistic proposal for increasing the control people can have over the complex problems they bring to professionals; it presents concrete evidence that lay participation in complex decision making need not be inefficient; it gives practical advice to clients and to lawyers for dealing with each other more effectively and it presents a comprehensive picture of the actual and often dramatic experiences of accident victims, and what it is like to make a personal injury claim.
[more]

front cover of Wilkie Collins's The Dead Alive
Wilkie Collins's The Dead Alive
The Novel, the Case, and Wrongful Convictions
Wilkie Collins
Northwestern University Press, 2005
On the evidence of The Dead Alive, Scott Turow writes in his foreword that Wilkie Collins might well be the first author of a legal thriller. Here is the lawyer out of sorts with his profession; the legal process gone awry; even a touch of romance to soften the rigors of the law. And here, too, recast as fiction, is the United States' first documented wrongful conviction case. Side by side with the novel, this book presents the real-life legal thriller Collins used as his model-the story of two brothers, Jesse and Stephen Boorn, sentenced to death in Vermont in 1819 for the murder of their brother-in-law, and belatedly exonerated when their "victim" showed up alive and well in New Jersey in 1820.

Rob Warden, one of the nation's most eloquent and effective advocates for the wrongly convicted, reconsiders the facts of the Boorn case for what they can tell us about the systemic flaws that produced this first known miscarriage of justice-flaws that continue to riddle our system of justice today. A tale of false confessions and jailhouse snitches, of evidence overlooked, and justice more blinkered than blind, the Boorns' story reminds us of the perennial nature of the errors at the heart of American jurisprudence-and of the need to question and correct a system that regularly condemns the innocent.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter