After the siege ended at Wounded Knee, the real battle had yet to be fought. The 1973 standoff in South Dakota between Oglala Lakota Indians and federal lawmen led to the criminal prosecution of American Indian Movement leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means. The ten-month trial had all the earmarks of a political tribunal; with the defense led by William Kunstler and the prosecution backed by the Nixon administration, it became a media battle for public opinion.
This first book-length study of the Wounded Knee trials demonstrates the impact that legal institutions and the media have on political dissent. It also shows how the dissenters as defendants can influence these institutions and the surrounding political and cultural climate. AIM and its attorneys successfully turned the courtroom into a political forum on the history of U.S.-Indian relations but were often frustrated in telling their story by the need to observe legal procedures--and by the media's stereotyping them as Indian warriors or sixties militants. John Sayer draws on court records, news reports, and interviews with participants to show how the defense, and ultimately the prosecution, had to respond continually to legal constraints, media coverage, and political events taking place outside the courtroom.
Although Banks and Means and most of the other protesters were acquitted, Sayer notes that the confinement of AIM protests to the courtroom robbed the movement of considerable momentum. Ghost Dancing the Law shows how legal proceedings can effectively quell dissent and represents both a critical chapter in the struggle of Native Americans and an important milestone at the crossroads of law and politics.
Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic examines a landmark decision in American jurisprudence, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the thorny legal issue of interstate commerce.
Decided in 1824, Gibbons v. Ogden arose out of litigation between owners of rival steamboat lines over passenger and freight routes between the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey. But what began as a local dispute over the right to ferry the paying public from the New Jersey shore to New York City soon found its way into John Marshall’s court and constitutional history. The case is consistently ranked as one of the twenty most significant Supreme Court decisions and is still taught in constitutional law courses, cited in state and federal cases, and quoted in articles on constitutional, business, and technological history.
Gibbons v. Ogden initially attracted enormous public attention because it involved the development of a new and sensational form of technology. To early Americans, steamboats were floating symbols of progress—cheaper and quicker transportation that could bring goods to market and refinement to the backcountry. A product of the rough-and-tumble world of nascent capitalism and legal innovation, the case became a landmark decision that established the supremacy of federal regulation of interstate trade, curtailed states’ rights, and promoted a national market economy. The case has been invoked by prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and social conservatives alike in debates over federal regulation of issues ranging from labor standards to gun control. This lively study fills in the social and political context in which the case was decided—the colorful and fascinating personalities, the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic, and the technological breakthroughs that brought modernity to the masses.
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