An English court in 1736 described rape as an accusation“easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defendedby the party accused, though never so innocent. ”To prove thecrime, the law required a woman to physically resist, to put up a“hue and cry,” as evidence of her unwillingness. Beginning in the1970s, however, feminist and victim-advocacy groups began changingattitudes toward rape so the crime is now seen as violent initself: the legal definition of rape now includes everything fromthe sadistic serial rapist to the eighteen-year-old who hasconsensual sex with a fourteen-year-old. This inclusiveness means there are now more rapists among us. Andmore of rape’s camp followers: the prison-makers, the communitywatchdogs, law-and-order politicians, and the real-crime/real-timeentertainment industry. Vanessa Place examines the ambiguity ofrape law by presenting cases where guilt lies, but lies uneasily,and leads into larger ethical questions of what defines guilt, whatis justice, and wh

This historical narrative of the Salem witch trials takesits dialogue from actual trial records but applies modernpsychiatric knowledge to the witchcraft hysteria. Starkey's senseof drama also vividly recreates the atmosphere of pity and terrorthat fostered the evil and suffering of this human tragedy.

The Religious Right has dedicated much of the last thirty years to molding the federal judiciary, always with an eye toward casting the Supreme Court in its image. Through broad political work that has involved grassroots campaigns as much as aggressive lobbying, and a welltended career path for conservative law students and attorneys, the Right has been incredibly effective in influencing major Court decisions on everything from laws banning prayer in school to women's secure access to abortion and birth control. How will the courts set in place in recent decades confront stem cell research, gay rights, or euthanasia in a new era? In The Court and the Cross, attorney and legal journalist Frederick Lane draws on legal history and savvy political analysis to expose, in layperson's terms, the Religious Right's unrelenting efforts to declare the United States a Christian nation.

This 2004 book is a comparative study of the American legaldevelopment in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on Illinois andVirginia, supported by observations from six additional states, thebook traces the crucial formative moment in the development of anAmerican system of common law in northern and southern courts. Theprocess of legal development, and the form the basic analyticalcategories of American law came to have, are explained as theproducts of different responses to the challenge of new industrialtechnologies, particularly railroads. The nature of those responseswas dictated by the ideologies that accompanied the social,political, and economic orders of the two regions. American commonlaw, ultimately, is found to express an emerging model ofcitizenship, appropriate to modern conditions. As a result, theprocess of legal development provides an illuminating perspectiveon the character of American political thought in a formativeperiod of the nation.

From prosecuting (and defending) murderers in the Bronx tohandling the public and private problems of Manhattan’s elite, Mouthpiece recounts the colorful adventures of New YorkCity’s ultimate legal operator. “In the pages before us, the Counselor tells a saga’s worth oftales of the city. As the saying goes, he’s got a million ofthem.” — Tom Wolfe, from his Introduction Edward Hayes is that unusual combination: the likable lawyer, onewho could have stepped off the stages of Guys and Dolls or Chicago . Mouthpiece is his story—an irreverent,entertaining, and revealing look at the practice of law in moderntimes and a social and political anatomy of New York City. Itrecounts Hayes’s childhood in the tough Irish sections of Queensand his eventual escape to the University of Virginia and then toColumbia Law School. Not at all white-shoe-firm material, Hayesheaded to the hair-raising, crime-ridden South Bronx of themidseventies—first as a homicide prosecutor and then as a defenseattor

There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood AfricanAmerican in our public life than Clarence Thomas. SupremeDiscomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a hauntingportrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by muchof the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society,internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and ruralpoverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to thepinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions oncrime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposedhim to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he ishimself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited fromracially conscious admissions policies. Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reportedwork that features testimony from friends and foes alike who havenever spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candidconversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, AntoninScalia. It offers a long-overdue windo