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Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
Defender of Liberty and Law
Donald L. Smith
Harvard University Press, 1986

In 1952 Senator Joseph McCarthy included Zechariah Chafee’s name on a list of seven persons he called “dangerous to America.” How could this happen to a man whose life was filled with the quiet grace of achievement as a scholar of the law? In the first biography of this distinguished American, Donald Smith portrays Chafee as temperamentally conservative, only accidentally a defender of radicals and a civil rights advocate.

Chafee is most remembered for his contributions to First Amendment scholarship, including the classic Freedom of Speech, published in 1920 [and revised and republished in 1941 as Free Speech in the United States]. He publicly criticized the Justice Department prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts; appeared in court on behalf of Communists fighting deportation; and was president of a commission for the abolition of the death penalty. He served as vice chairman of the Commission on Freedom of the Press (the Hutchins Commission) and continued his public service when appointed to the United Nations Subcommission on Freedom of Information and of the Press.

Yet Chafee, who put his Harvard professorship in jeopardy more than once, never chose to be or perceived himself to be a controversial public figure. Preeminently a man of ideas, he spent most of his life teaching—at times applying both mathematical formulations and Greek philosophical theories to questions of law. This perceptive intellectual biography brings to life the story of a scholar caught up in the dramatic political events of his time.

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front cover of Zion in the Courts
Zion in the Courts
A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900
Edwin Brown Firmage and Richard Collin Mangrum
University of Illinois Press, 1988
The inability of American society to tolerate the peculiar institutions embraced by Mormons was one of the major events in the religious history of nineteenth-century America. Zion in the Courts explores one aspect of this collision between the Mormons and the mainstream: the Mormons' efforts to establish their own court system--one appropriate to the distinctive political, social, and economic practices they envisioned as Zion--and the pressures applied by the federal legal system to bring them to heel.
 
This first paperback edition includes two new introductory pieces in which the authors discuss the Mormon emphasis on settling disputes outside the court, a practice that foreshadows current trends toward arbitration and mediation.
 
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