Results by title
111 books match the query 'Trials, litigation, etc' and 3 start with p
Patty's Got a Gun
Patricia Hearst in 1970s AmericaWilliam Graebner
University of Chicago Press, 2008
It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. But the robbery—and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst’s criminal conviction—seemed oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era.
With Patty’s Got a Gun, the first substantial reconsideration of Patty Hearst’s story in more than twenty-five years, William Graebner vividly re-creates the atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration of mid-1970s America. Drawing on copious media accounts of the robbery and trial—as well as cultural artifacts from glam rock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Graebner paints a compelling portrait of a nation confused and frightened by the upheavals of 1960s liberalism and beginning to tip over into what would become Reagan-era conservatism, with its invocations of individual responsibility and the heroic. Trapped in the middle of that shift, the affectless, zombielike, “brainwashed” Patty Hearst was a ready-made symbol of all that seemed to have gone wrong with the sixties—the inevitable result, some said, of rampant permissiveness, feckless elitism, the loss of moral clarity, and feminism run amok.
By offering a fresh look at Patty Hearst and her trial—for the first time free from the agendas of the day, yet set fully in their cultural context—Patty’s Got a Gun delivers a nuanced portrait of both an unforgettable moment and an entire era, one whose repercussions continue to be felt today.
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Penchant for Prejudice
Unraveling Bias in Judicial Decision-MakingLinda G. Mills
University of Michigan Press, 1999
A Penchant for Prejudice combines a detailed empirical study of the decision-making practices of judges with a sophisticated theoretical argument which exposes contemporary myths about judging and suggests methods of incorporating the inevitable bias that is detected in this and other studies. Based on a unique study of the decisions of Social Security judges, the book challenges the meaning of judicial impartiality. Linda G. Mills finds that, in practice, bias is a consistent dimension of what is considered "impartial" decision-making. The results reveal that impartiality as the legal system now defines it, is itself a form of bias, and that a historically and contextually sensitive definition of bias, one which takes account of the communities and cultures that come to be judged in the legal system, must overcome the modern dualistic notion of imparitality as the exclusion of bias in order to respond to needs of the diversity of applicants and the judges who adjudicate their claims. According to Mills, the judicial bias she found reflected in her study seems not only to essentialize and stereotype applicants but also prevents judges from engaging vulnerable claimants in a way that the legal process positively demands. A Penchant for Prejudice will be of interest to students and scholars of law, judicial decisionmaking, and discrimination. Linda G. Mills is Assistant Professor of Social Welfare and Law, University of California, Los Angeles.
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Promise of Justice
Essays on Brown v. Board of EducationMac A. Stewart
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth century. It overturned the Court’s earlier ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), declaring the establishment of separate public schools for black and white students, as inherently unequal. This victory paved the way for integration in public schools and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Promise of Justice: Essays on Brown v. Board of Education assembles fourteen essays about Brown and its consequences in the fifty years following the decision.
Several of the essayists in this anthology provide personal recollections of the conditions before and immediately after the decision in Brown. One of the authors was a child plaintiff in a related case. Another was the federal district judge responsible for deciding in favor of, and then overseeing, integration in a major northern city. Contributors to this volume include legal specialists, sociologists, educators, and political scientists. A history of the legal milestones of integration is included, as well as judgments about the progress that has been made and the need for additional actions to assure racial equality under the law. Ten of these essays first appeared in a special issue of The Negro Educational Review published in January 2005, and four were written expressly for this volume.
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