Government Law

As the son of celebrated NYPD commissioner, Ray Kelly, and a former lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, Greg Kelly has had a firsthand look at the critical importance of law enforcement in America. From police to border control and beyond, these men and women provide a fundamental service for our country. In a nation divided, progressives want to abolish the very organizations that keep us safe. Kelly expertly reveals their indispensability. Both a celebration and a call to action, Justice for All is perfect for fans of Mark Levin, Greg Gutfield, and Sean Hannity.

Decrees were legislative acts of the highest Soviet institutions, primarily of the Council of People's Commissars (the highest executive body — Sovnarkom) and of VTsIK (the highest legislative body between sessions of the Congress of Soviets). The Bolshevik Initial Decrees were announced as soon as the Bolsheviks declared their success in the October Revolution (October 26, 1917). The Decrees seemed to conform to the popular Bolshevik slogan "Peace, Land and Bread". The slogan succinctly articulated the grievances of the Russian peasantry, armed forces and proletariat.

Over the last 30 years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House.

With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what’s gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it’s running on vibes. By “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials.

Guaranteed to give the listener a deeper understanding of America’s most powerful judicial body, John Yoo, professor of law at UC Berkeley, and Robert Delahunty, professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, detail in sprightly, slightly irreverent manner how the black-robed judges who make up the U.S. Supreme Court have swung like a pendulum from saviors of the Republic to super-legislators who usurp the roll of Congress and dictate law from the bench, back to defenders of the Constitution again—or at least for the moment.

The Romans sure did a lot of thinking and working back in the time, because their results are still felt today. They even thought of the basic laws that we know and follow today....

Terrorism and Extremism are well known 21st Century terms, despite being largely undefined in law. Weaponized by the powerful, terms are attributed based on malleable current affairs and policy, as apposed to strong legal foundations. What one group considers terrorism, another may view as legitimate resistance or self-defense. The gift of the 21st Century, the internet, has allowed the voiceless to be heard, for new societal ideas to flourish, and for different political views to become the next hashtag.

In 1989, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.” The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses, and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison.

Deliberate mischaracterization of political opponents and their policies has always been a part of politics; however, lying, dishonesty, and distortion of the facts remain morally wrong and have the potential to obstruct important political interests. For example, a false or misleading claim publicized about an election candidate may lead someone to lose an election that they might otherwise have won. So, does—and should—the law seek to provide protection from the risk of this happening?

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of Black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South.

Originalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Noted legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky gives a comprehensive analysis of the problems that make originalism unworkable as a method of constitutional interpretation. He argues that the framers themselves never intended constitutional interpretation to be inflexible and shows how it is often impossible to know the "original intent" of any provision.

Time and again, when confronted with serious challenges to their power and privilege, white Christian nationalists seek solace—and satisfaction—in state-supported forms of vigilantism. Vigilante Nation tells this story of the American Right marginalizing, subordinating, and disenfranchising the increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan members of the American polity. This book exposes the vigilantes’ plans, explains their methods—everything from book bans to anti-abortion bounties to attacks on government proceedings, including elections—and underscores the stakes.

Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants-whether innocent or guilty-to take a plea deal. Punishment Without Trial showcases how plea bargaining has undermined justice at every turn and across socioeconomic and racial divides. It forces the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is dogging our jails and pun­ishing citizens.

Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people on the planet. Indigenous men are fifteen times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous counterparts; Indigenous women are twenty-one times more likely. Featuring vivid case studies and drawing on a deep sense of history, Black Lives, White Law explores Australia's extraordinary record of locking up First Nations people.

A tour de force of groundbreaking reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the Spring follows the historic legal challenge mounted against California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a remarkable lawsuit that forced the issue of marriage equality before the highest court in the land. For nearly five years Becker embedded with the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, was given free rein within the legal and political war rooms where strategy was plotted, and attended every day of the trial and every appellate argument.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement.

The Words We Live By takes an entertaining and informative look at America's most important historical document, now with discussions on new rulings on hot button issues such as immigration, gay marriage, gun control, and affirmative action. Through entertaining and informative annotations, The Words We Live By offers a new way of looking at the Constitution. It reflects a critical, respectful, and appreciative look at one of history's greatest documents.

The clashes between President Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney over slavery, secession, and Lincoln's constitutional war powers went to the heart of Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln and Taney's bitter disagreements began with Taney's Dred Scott opinion in 1857, when the chief justice declared that the Constitution did not grant the black man any rights that the white man was bound to honor.

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.

In this sweepingly ambitious volume, the nation's foremost experts on the American presidency and the US Constitution join together to tell the intertwined stories of how each American president has confronted and shaped the Constitution. Each occupant of the office - the first president to the 44th - has contributed to the story of the Constitution through the decisions he made and the actions he took as the nation's chief executive.