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In 1993 Margie Witt, a young Air Force nurse, was chosen as the face of the Air Force’s “Cross into the Blue” recruitment campaign. This was also the year that President Clinton’s plan for gays to serve openly in the military was quashed by an obdurate Congress, resulting in the blandly cynical political compromise known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to its intent, DADT had the perverse effect of making it harder for gay servicemen and -women to fight expulsion. Over the next seventeen years more than 13,000 gay soldiers, sailors, marines, coast guard, and airmen and -women were removed from military service. That is, until Margie Witt’s landmark case put a stop to it. Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner—now wife—Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights. Tell is a testament to the power of love to transform hearts and minds, as well as a celebration of the indomitable spirit of Major Witt, her wife Laurie, her dedicated legal team, and the brave men and women who came forward to testify on her behalf in a historic federal trial. “The name Margaret Witt may join the canon of US civil rights pioneers.” —Guardian “Major Witt’s trial provided an unparalleled opportunity to attack the central premise of [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] . . . and set an important precedent.”— New York Times “A landmark ruling.”—Politico

The Baneberry Disaster covers the calamitous December 1970 Baneberry underground nuclear test that pumped nearly 7 million curies of radiation into the atmosphere, caused the suspension of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site for six months, and whose radioactive cloud exposed 86 test-site workers to radiation, two of whom died of leukemia less than four years later.
 
The authors are attorneys from Las Vegas who spent 25 years pursuing a lawsuit for the victims at Baneberry. The story begins in 1971, just after the Baneberry test vented, and takes the reader through the years leading up to the trial, the 41-day trial in 1979, and the multiple appeals following the trial. It discusses the claims and lawsuits filed by others exposed to atomic testing, and the congressional investigations that led to the enactment of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990.

The Rowley family's struggle began when Amy entered kindergarten and culminated five years later in a pivotal decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In effect, the Court majority concluded that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act did not mandate equal opportunity for children with disabilities in classes with typical children; a disappointing decision for disability advocates.

The Supreme Court decided that schools were required only to provide enough help for children with disabilities to pass from grade to grade. The Court reversed the lower courts' rulings, which had granted Amy an interpreter, setting a precedent that could affect the quality of education for all individuals with disabilities.

From the time Amy entered kindergarten in Peekskill, New York, her parents battled with school officials to get a sign language interpreter in the classroom. Nancy and Clifford Rowley, also deaf, struggled with officials for their own right to a communications process in which they could fully participate. Stuck in limbo was a bright, inquisitive child, forced to rely on partial lipreading of rapid classroom instruction and interaction, and sound amplifiers that were often broken and always cumbersome.

R.C. Smith chronicles the Rowley family's dealings with school boards, lawyers, teachers, expert consultants, advocates, and supporters, and their staunch determination to get through the exhaustive process of presenting the case time after time to school adjudicative bodies and finally the federal courts. The author also documents his own "coming to awareness" about how the "able" see the "disabled."

In the series Health, Society, and Policy, edited by Sheryl Ruzek and Irving Kenneth Zola.

On the morning of May 7, 1965, the American freighter Cedarville collided with the Norwegian vessel Topdalsfjord in heavy fog in the Straits of Mackinac. Ultimately, ten crew members of the Cedarville died and a legal battle ensued implicating U.S. Steel---the company that owned the Cedarville---in the chain of events leading to the tragedy.

The Cedarville Conspiracy is the story of that doomed ship and its crew. It is also the first Great Lakes history to expose the heroism, villainy, courage, and confusion surrounding the Cedarville disaster.

In atmospheric, cinematic style, L. Stephen Cox's gripping page-turner dramatizes the events surrounding the collision between the Norwegian and American freighters. As the mortally wounded Cedarville began to list and sink, U.S. Steel refused to allow the crew to escape to safety, while the captain secretly donned his life jacket and abandoned the sinking ship. Ten seamen died in the frigid waters that morning as the captain and survivors swam to safety.

Researching the story, author L. Stephen Cox interviewed the surviving crew and their rescuers and attorneys, examined more than 20,000 pages of Coast Guard reports, and discovered deposition transcripts and other documentary evidence that detailed the deterioration of the ship, the captain's disregard of Great Lakes navigational rules, the company's participation in the decision to confine the men aboard the sinking vessel, and the subsequent efforts by U.S. Steel to manipulate the evidence.

In December 1981, when the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Nativity scene in the Christmas display put on by the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, an emotional controversy erupted. Two federal courts disallowed the crèche because its religious impact in the taxpayer-supported display overstepped the constitutional boundary between church and state. In March 1984, the United States Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote in Lynch V. Donnelly overruled the lower courts, deciding that in the predominantly secular context of Pawtucket’s display, the purpose and effect of the Nativity scene was not to promote religion, but only to acknowledge the spirit of the holiday season. The Christ Child Goes to Court traces the judicial history of a case that lasted more than two years and explores its implications for future issues concerning the relationship between religion and government.

Wayne R. Swanson describes how this compelling constitutional issue polarized public opinion in Rhode Island and generated "unimaginable vilification" of the Roman Catholic judge who first ordered the crèche removed. He reports the reactions of local citizens, which echoed the national debate on this issue. By carefully documenting the case’s trek through the judiciary, Swanson illustrates the workings of the judicial process in the United States, the political nature of the courts, and how their interpretation of the Constitution helps to shape the development of public policy.

An important conclusion of this critical examination of the courts’ approach to a controversial church-state question is that judicial decisions are usually interim in nature and often lead to imperfect solutions. Lynch V. Donnelly did not solve the problems posed by government-supported Nativity scenes or other religious symbols. The controversy lives on and the courts continue to struggle with one of the most difficult First Amendment problems.

In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford raised issues that have not been fully resolved despite three amendments to the Constitution and more than a century and a half of litigation.

The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law presents original research and the reflections of the nation’s leading scholars who gathered in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of what was arguably the most infamous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision, which held that African Americans “had no rights” under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to alter that, galvanized Americans and thrust the issue of race and law to the center of American politics. This collection of essays revisits the history of the case and its aftermath in American life and law. In a final section, the present-day justices of the Missouri Supreme Court offer their reflections on the process of judging and provide perspective on the misdeeds of their nineteenth-century predecessors who denied the Scotts their freedom.
Contributors: Austin Allen, Adam Arenson, John Baugh, Hon. Duane Benton, Christopher Alan Bracey, Alfred L. Brophy, Paul Finkelman, Louis Gerteis, Mark Graber, Daniel W. Hamilton, Cecil J. Hunt II, David Thomas Konig, Leland Ware, Hon. Michael A. Wolff

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the city of New London, Connecticut, could condemn fifteen residential properties in order to transfer them to a new private owner. Although the Fifth Amendment only permits the taking of private property for “public use,” the Court ruled that the transfer of condemned land to private parties for “economic development” is permitted by the Constitution—even if the government cannot prove that the expected development will ever actually happen. The Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London empowered the grasping hand of the state at the expense of the invisible hand of the market.
           
In this detailed study of one of the most controversial Supreme Court cases in modern times, Ilya Somin argues that Kelo was a grave error. Economic development and “blight” condemnations are unconstitutional under both originalist and most “living constitution” theories of legal interpretation. They also victimize the poor and the politically weak for the benefit of powerful interest groups and often destroy more economic value than they create. Kelo itself exemplifies these patterns. The residents targeted for condemnation lacked the influence needed to combat the formidable government and corporate interests arrayed against them.  Moreover, the city’s poorly conceived development plan ultimately failed: the condemned land lies empty to this day, occupied only by feral cats. The Supreme Court’s unpopular ruling triggered an unprecedented political reaction, with forty-five states passing new laws intended to limit the use of eminent domain. But many of the new laws impose few or no genuine constraints on takings. The Kelo backlash led to significant progress, but not nearly as much as it may have seemed.

Despite its outcome, the closely divided 5-4 ruling shattered what many believed to be a consensus that virtually any condemnation qualifies as a public use under the Fifth Amendment. It also showed that there is widespread public opposition to eminent domain abuse. With controversy over takings sure to continue, The Grasping Hand offers the first book-length analysis of Kelo by a legal scholar, alongside a broader history of the dispute over public use and eminent domain and an evaluation of options for reform.
 

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the city of New London, Connecticut, could condemn fifteen residential properties in order to transfer them to a new private owner. Although the Fifth Amendment only permits the taking of private property for “public use,” the Court ruled that the transfer of condemned land to private parties for “economic development” is permitted by the Constitution—even if the government cannot prove that the expected development will ever actually happen. The Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London empowered the grasping hand of the state at the expense of the invisible hand of the market.
           
In this detailed study of one of the most controversial Supreme Court cases in modern times, Ilya Somin argues that Kelo was a grave error. Economic development and “blight” condemnations are unconstitutional under both originalist and most “living constitution” theories of legal interpretation. They also victimize the poor and the politically weak for the benefit of powerful interest groups and often destroy more economic value than they create. Kelo itself exemplifies these patterns. The residents targeted for condemnation lacked the influence needed to combat the formidable government and corporate interests arrayed against them.  Moreover, the city’s poorly conceived development plan ultimately failed: the condemned land lies empty to this day, occupied only by feral cats. The Supreme Court’s unpopular ruling triggered an unprecedented political reaction, with forty-five states passing new laws intended to limit the use of eminent domain. But many of the new laws impose few or no genuine constraints on takings. The Kelo backlash led to significant progress, but not nearly as much as it may have seemed.

Despite its outcome, the closely divided 5-4 ruling shattered what many believed to be a consensus that virtually any condemnation qualifies as a public use under the Fifth Amendment. It also showed that there is widespread public opposition to eminent domain abuse. With controversy over takings sure to continue, The Grasping Hand offers the first book-length analysis of Kelo by a legal scholar, alongside a broader history of the dispute over public use and eminent domain and an evaluation of options for reform.
 

In 1915, Jukichi and Ken Harada purchased a house on Lemon Street in Riverside, California. Close to their restaurant, church, and children's school, the house should have been a safe and healthy family home. Before the purchase, white neighbors objected because of the Haradas' Japanese ancestry, and the California Alien Land Law denied them real-estate ownership because they were not citizens. To bypass the law Mr. Harada bought the house in the names of his three youngest children, who were American-born citizens. Neighbors protested again, and the first Japanese American court test of the California Alien Land Law of 1913-The People of California v. Jukichi Harada-was the result.

Bringing this little-known story to light, The House on Lemon Street details the Haradas' decision to fight for the American dream. Chronicling their experiences from their immigration to the United States through their legal battle over their home, their incarceration during World War II, and their lives after the war, this book tells the story of the family's participation in the struggle for human and civil rights, social justice, property and legal rights, and fair treatment of immigrants in the United States.

The Harada family's quest for acceptance illuminates the deep underpinnings of anti-Asian animus, which set the stage for Executive Order 9066, and recognizes fundamental elements of our nation's anti-immigrant history that continue to shape the American story. It will be worthwhile for anyone interested in the Japanese American experience in the twentieth century, immigration history, public history, and law.

This publication was made possible with the support of Naomi, Kathleen, Ken, and Paul Harada, who donated funds in memory of their father, Harold Shigetaka Harada, honoring his quest for justice and civil rights. Additional support for this publication was also provided, in part, by UCLA's Aratani Endowed Chair as well as Wallace T. Kido, Joel B. Klein, Elizabeth A. Uno, and Rosalind K. Uno.

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis’s book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.
 
The Eastham-Thompson feud pitted a former Confederate against a member of the new business elite who was, as a northern Republican, his cultural and political opposite. For Lewis, their clash was one flashpoint in a larger phenomenon central to US history in the second half of the nineteenth century: the often violent imposition of new commercial and legal regimes over holdout areas stretching from Appalachia to the trans-Missouri West. Taking a ground-level view of these so-called “wars of incorporation,” Lewis’s powerful microhistory shows just how strongly local communities guarded traditional relationships to natural resources. Modernizers sought to convict Eastham of murder, but juries drawn from the traditionalist population refused to comply. Although the resisters won the courtroom battle, the modernizers eventually won the war for control of the state’s timber frontier.
 

Inspired by a series of visions, Francisca de los Apóstoles (1539-after 1578) and her sister Isabella attempted in 1573 to organize a beaterio, a lay community of pious women devoted to the religious life, to offer prayers and penance for the reparation of human sin, especially those of corrupt clerics. But their efforts to minister to the poor of Toledo and to call for general ecclesiastical reform were met with resistance, first from local religious officials and, later, from the Spanish Inquisition. By early 1575, the Inquisitional tribunal in Toledo had received several statements denouncing Francisca from some of the very women she had tried to help, as well as from some of her financial and religious sponsors. Francisca was eventually arrested, imprisoned by the Inquisition, and investigated for religious fraud.

This book contains what little is known about Francisca—the several letters she wrote as well as the transcript of her trial—and offers modern readers a perspective on the unique role and status of religious women in sixteenth-century Spain. Chronicling the drama of Francisca's interrogation and her spirited but ultimately unsuccessful defense, The Inquisition of Francisca—transcribed from more than three hundred folios and published for the first time in any language—will be a valuable resource for both specialists and students of the history and religion of Spain in the sixteenth century.

No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. But one of the least-known stories from that era is also one of the ugliest chapters in the history of Jim Crow. In The Interpreter, celebrated author Alice Kaplan recovers this story both as eyewitnesses first saw it, and as it still haunts us today.

The American Army executed 70 of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946—almost all of them black, in an army that was overwhelmingly white. Through the French interpreter Louis Guilloux’s eyes, Kaplan narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.

Kaplan’s insight into character and setting creates an indelible portrait of war, race relations, and the dangers of capital punishment. 

“A nuanced historical account that resonates with today’s controversies over race and capital punishment.” Publishers Weekly

“American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. The Interpreter reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.” Los Angeles Times

“With elegance and lucidity, Kaplan revisits these two trials and reveals an appallingly separate and unequal wartime U.S. military justice system.” Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Kaplan has produced a compelling look at the racial disparities as they were played out…She explores both cases in considerable and vivid detail.” Sacramento Bee

The True Story Behind the Legendary Outlaw Gang, a Civil War Vendetta, and the Forgotten Court Documents That Helped Seal Their Fate
On a dreary December 7, 1869, two strangers entered the Daviess County Savings and Loan in Gallatin, Missouri. One of the men asked the cashier for change and then unexpectedly raised a revolver and shot him at point-blank range. Until now, this crime has been considered the first of a string of bank and train robberies committed by Jesse James, his brother Frank, and other gang members. But a story has circulated for more than a century that the case was actually brought to trial by a young Missouri lawyer—and it was through this case that twenty-two-year-old Jesse was first identified as a criminal to the country. But until recently no evidence for such an action could be found. After years of painstaking searches through dusty court archives across Missouri, defense attorney James P. Muehlberger finally discovered the historic documents in 2007. These fascinating and important records reveal that the gunmen were forced to leave behind a magnificent thoroughbred that linked James to the murder and, more intriguing, that the attack was not a bank robbery at all, but a calculated assassination in retribution for a Civil War killing.
The Lost Cause: The Trials of Frank and Jesse James is a thoroughly researched, thrilling account of the rise, pursuit, and prosecution of the legendary outlaw gang. Beginning with the newfound evidence of the Gallatin bank teller murder, the author explains how Jesse James attempted to avenge the death of his Confederate partisan leader, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, but shot the wrong man. Having lost his thoroughbred, Jesse stole another horse. Newly minted lawyer Henry McDougal brashly sued Jesse and Frank James for the loss of property, which would hang the murder on their heads. While Jesse professed his innocence and remained at large, his case was taken up by John Newman Edwards, editor of the Kansas City Times. Through Edwards’s pen, the James brothers were transformed from petty criminals to noble outlaws still fighting for Southern honor—the “Lost Cause.” Not fooled by Edwards’s rhetoric and populist appeal, McDougal and others, including Pinkerton detectives and the governor of Missouri, led a behind-the-scenes fight to bring down the gang. As the author explains, they first prosecuted lesser gang members, and by infiltrating the group, the authorities slowly unraveled the gang, with Jesse being shot by a paid informant in 1882. Frank James gave himself up, and in what was called the “trial of the century,” he was exonerated on all charges and retired to become a notable horse racing official until his death in 1915. Combining true crime, western adventure, and the transformation of America into a modern nation, The Lost Cause is engaging, entertaining history.

In The Modern Legislative Veto, Michael J. Berry uses a multimethod research design, incorporating quantitative and qualitative analyses, to examine the ways that Congress has used the legislative veto over the past 80 years. This parliamentary maneuver, which delegates power to the executive but grants the legislature a measure of control over the implementation of the law, raises troubling questions about the fundamental principle of separation of governmental powers.

Berry argues that, since the U.S. Supreme Court declared the legislative veto unconstitutional in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) v. Chadha (1983), Congress has strategically modified its use of the veto to give more power to appropriations committees. Using an original dataset of legislative veto enactments, Berry finds that Congress has actually increased its use of this oversight mechanism since Chadha, especially over defense and foreign policy issues. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have fought back by vetoing legislation containing legislative vetoes and by using signing statements with greater frequency to challenge the legislative veto’s constitutionality. A complementary analysis of state-level use of the legislative veto finds variation in oversight powers granted to state legislatures, but similar struggles between the legislature and the executive.

This ongoing battle over the legislative veto points to broader efforts by legislative and executive actors to control policy, efforts that continually negotiate how the democratic republic established by the Constitution actually operates in practice.

On March 11, 1854, the people of Wisconsin prevented agents of the federal government from carrying away the fugitive slave, Joshua Glover. Assembling in mass outside the Milwaukee courthouse, they demanded that the federal officers respect his civil liberties as they would those of any other citizen of the state. When the officers refused, the crowd took matters into its own hands and rescued Joshua Glover. The federal government brought his rescuers to trial, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervened and took the bold step of ruling the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.

The Rescue of Joshua Glover delves into the courtroom trials, political battles, and cultural equivocation precipitated by Joshua Glover’s brief, but enormously important, appearance in Wisconsin on the eve of the Civil War.

H. Robert Baker articulates the many ways in which this case evoked powerful emotions in antebellum America, just as the stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was touring the country and stirring antislavery sentiments. Terribly conflicted about race, Americans struggled mightily with a revolutionary heritage that sanctified liberty but also brooked compromise with slavery. Nevertheless, as The Rescue of Joshua Glover demonstrates, they maintained the principle that the people themselves were the last defenders of constitutional liberty, even as Glover’s rescue raised troubling questions about citizenship and the place of free blacks in America.

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history. Considered an imposter by the British, a hero by nationalists, and a prophet-king by area-studies specialists, Saya San came to embody traditional Southeast Asia’s encounter with European colonialism in his attempt to resurrect the lost throne of Burma.

The Return of the Galon King analyzes the legal origins of the Saya San story and reconsiders the facts upon which the basic narrative and interpretations of the rebellion are based. Aung-Thwin reveals how counter-insurgency law produced and criminalized Burmese culture, contributing to the way peasant resistance was recorded in the archives and understood by Southeast Asian scholars.

This interdisciplinary study reveals how colonial anthropologists, lawyers, and scholar-administrators produced interpretations of Burmese culture that influenced contemporary notions of Southeast Asian resistance and protest. It provides a fascinating case study of how history is treated by the law, how history emerges in legal decisions, and how the authority of the past is used to validate legal findings.

On January 6, 1649, the House of Commons passed an act for “the Trying and Judging of Charles Stuart, King of England.” By month’s end, the King’s judges had found him “guilty of High Treason and of the murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damage, and mischief to this nation” committed during the recently concluded Civil War. The sentence, ordering his execution “by severing of his head from his body,” was carried out in full public view on January 30. How and why a King--God’s annointed--could be executed for treason are questions that underscore the profound changes that politics and political thought were undergoing at this time. To provide a window into this pivotal period, accounts of the trial and execution taken from contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, and official records, are collected here and edited for modern readers. This compilation of eyewitness accounts has been arranged to sketch a dramatic day-by-day narrative of that fateful month, introducing the important issues in a way that brings readers close to the making of these great events. The speeches at the trial make especially vivid the clash between two contrasting theories of government--that of a divine monarchy in which a king is deemed essential to the true liberty of his people, and that of a commonwealth in which sovereignty rests with the people and is exercised by its representatives.

Though George W. Bush took office in January, the nation is still recovering from the prolonged and complex process by which he was elected. The Florida electoral controversy and the subsequent decisions by both the Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court left citizens and scholars alike divided over the role of the judiciary in the electoral arena. Now, after a few months of reflection, leading constitutional scholarsCass R. Sunstein, Richard A. Epstein, Pamela S. Karlan, Richard A. Posner, and John Yoo, among others—weigh in on the Supreme Court's actions, which remain sensible, legally legitimate, and pragmatically defensible to some and an egregious abuse of power to others. Representing the full spectrum of views and arguments, The Vote offers the most timely and considered guide to the ultimate consequences and significance of the Supreme Court's decision.

The contributors to this volume were highly visible in the national media while the controversy raged, and here they present fully fleshed-out arguments for the positions they promoted on the airwaves. Readers will find in The Vote equally impassioned defenses for and indictments of the Court's actions, and they will come to understand the practical and theoretical implications of the Court's ruling in the realms of both law and politics. No doubt a spate of books will appear on the 2000 presidential election, but none will claim as distinguished a roster of contributors better qualified to place these recent events in their appropriate historical, legal, and political contexts.

Leading constitutional scholars render their verdicts on the 2000 presidential election controversy

Contributors:

Richard A. Epstein

Elizabeth Garrett

Samuel Issacharoff

Pamela S. Karlan

Michael W. McConnell

Frank I. Michelman

Richard H. Pildes

Richard A. Posner

David A. Strauss

Cass R. Sunstein

John Yoo

An earlier electronic edition of The Vote was available on the University of Chicago Press Web site.

The gangland style slaying if State Senator Warren G. Hooper on January 11, 1945, three days before he was to testify before a grand jury investigating alleged corruption in the Michigan legislature, forced coverage of Allied war triumphs from the state's newspaper headlines. National media representatives flocked to Michigan to join local reporters in following the efforts of grand jury special prosecutor Kim Sigler and the State Police to apprehend the killers. Because no arrests ever were made, a 1951 journalistic prediction has proven true: "The Hooper case will continue to come back to remind the people and politicians of Michigan of the black days of 1945 when almost every official of the state had his price." For this reason, the Hooper murder has endured as one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries in the annals of Michigan crime.
     Utilizing interviews, trial transcripts, State police files, and a collection of grand jury testimony long thought to have been destroyed, Professors Bruce A. Rubenstein and Lawrence E. Ziewacz set forth the reason for Hooper's assassination. Written in a lively style, using dialogue taken from court records and correspondence, Three Bullets Sealed His Lips demonstrates that historical writing need not be dull.

In 2006, Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in the Hague during a four-year marathon trial for war crimes. John Laughland was one of the last Western journalists to meet with him. Laughland had followed the trial from its beginning and wrote extensively on it in the Guardian and the Spectator, challenging the legitimacy of the Yugoslav Tribunal and the hypocrisy of "international justice."



In this short book, Laughland gives a full account of the trial---the longest trial in history---from the moment the indictment was issued at the height of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia to the day of Milosevic's mysterious death in custody. "International justice" is supposed to hold war criminals to account, but---as the trials of both Milosevic and Saddam Hussein show---the indictments are politically motivated and the judicial procedures are irredeemably corrupt. Laughland argues that international justice is an impossible dream and that such show trials are little more than propaganda exercises designed to distract attention from the war crimes committed by Western states.



"Study this story. . . . The truth is hard to find, but in John Laughland we are fortunate to have a man blessed with the desire to find the truth."
---Ramsey Clark, from the Foreword

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America.

           

For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as “responses” to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro’s study—particularly as it plays out in one of America’s most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.

An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The historic trial of the “Butcher of the Balkans” began in 2002 and ended abruptly with Milosevic’s death in 2006. Judith Armatta, a lawyer who spent three years in the former Yugoslavia during Milosevic’s reign, had a front-row seat at the trial. In Twilight of Impunity she brings the dramatic proceedings to life, explains complex legal issues, and assesses the trial’s implications for victims of the conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s and international justice more broadly. Armatta acknowledges the trial’s flaws, particularly Milosevic’s grandstanding and attacks on the institutional legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal. Yet she argues that the trial provided an indispensable legal and historical narrative of events in the former Yugoslavia and a valuable forum where victims could tell their stories and seek justice. It addressed crucial legal issues, such as the responsibility of commanders for crimes committed by subordinates, and helped to create a framework for conceptualizing and organizing other large-scale international criminal tribunals. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague was an important step toward ending impunity for leaders who perpetrate egregious crimes against humanity.