Legal English

Law has played a central role in American history. From colonial times to the present, law has not just reflected the changing society in which legal decisions have been made - it has played a powerful role in shaping that society, though not always in positive ways. Eminent legal scholar G. Edward White offers a compact overview that sheds light on the impact of law on a number of key social issues.

On New Year's Day, Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone - a bone that the dog's owner, a doctor, feels certain is human.

Butch Karp's career prosecuting New York's worst criminals takes a chilling turn when a series of ghastly child murders opens a window into the city’s hellish underworld. Karp and love-interest Marlene Ciampi pursue a psychopath known to his young victims as the Bogeyman, but what they find is more threatening than a lone predator. To stop the evil they unearth will take more than just courage in the courtroom; the two will need to follow a sinister trail into New York City's darkest corners, where the law is powerless to protect them.

Robert Sulzberger appeared to have a perfect life—a respected position in the City Council, a lovely family, a house with all the trimmings—but behind the façade, his life was crumbling. Drawn into a world of crime and corruption, Sulzberger couldn't find a way out. He couldn't escape. And when he tried to walk away, he found himself behind bars. The trial captures the media's attention, and the dark forces of politics are thrown into the limelight. As the son of a convicted serial killer, Tex Hunter knows just how dangerous those forces can be.

In this masterful debut, Martin Clark proves to be the heir apparent of great Southern raconteurs and the envy of more seasoned novelists as he takes us on a frantic tour of the modern South. Hung over, beaten by the unforgiving sun, bitter at his estranged wife, and dreading the day's docket of petty criminal cases, Judge Evers Wheeling is in need of something on the morning he's accosted by Ruth Esther English.

When he goes undercover to bust mobsters who have infiltrated the sports world, Butch Karp glides effortlessly from the criminal courts he dominates as a prosecutor to the basketball court. Police have found the body of a pro basketball star in a car on the edge of the city, the glove compartment stuffed with cocaine. The investigation leads to a sophisticated ring of sports fixing and drug trafficking, and Karp's own background as a college basketball standout helps him close in on the crooks.

When racial tension erupts in the sleepy community of Colleton County, North Carolina, Deborah is caught off guard. She is happily tending her own home fires: her simmering romance with Kidd Chapin, the house she's building on her family's land, and her campaign for reelection as district judge. But then the first black church is burned, and all of Deborah's alarms go off.

In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron’s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried, and sentenced to death - in a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence....

Once he was a well-liked, well-paid young partner in a thriving Mississippi law firm. Then Patrick Lanigan stole ninety million dollars from his own firm—and ran for his life.

Corporate lawyer Elizabeth Carlyle is under a lot of pressure. Her prestigious New York law firm is working on the most high-stakes case in company history defending a prominent bank. When Elizabeth gets the news that one of her junior associates has lost his phone - and the secret documents that were on it - she needs help. Badly. Enter ex-CIA officer Valencia Walker, a high-priced fixer who gets called in when governments, corporations, and plutocrats need their problems solved discretely. But things get complicated when the missing phone is retrieved....

Constitutional fundamentalists read the Constitution selectively and self-servingly. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution elevate certain constitutional rights above all others, benefit the most powerful members of society, and undermine the integrity of the document as a whole. The conservative fetish for the Second Amendment (enforced by groups such as the NRA) provides an obvious example of constitutional fundamentalism; the liberal fetish for the First Amendment (enforced by groups such as the ACLU) is less obvious but no less influential.

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own a bank specializing in student loans, the three know they have been caught up in The Great Law School Scam.

Assistant District Attorney Butch Karp is finally recognized for his heroic service to New York City when a group of politicians back him for the top job as Manhattan's district attorney. But a series of cases involving vigilante murders begins to reveal the true motives of those civil servants standing by his side. It's Karp versus the dirty city in one of Tanenbaum's most revealing and caustic legal thrillers - a stunning indictment of civil corruption and overreach.

Jack Dana is a former marine infantry officer and Force Recon platoon leader. He is also the author of three successful books. It may seem odd that someone like Jack - honor graduate of the corps' toughest combat schools - should become a novelist. But there's the other side of Jack: the Yale graduate, the only child of a Harvard philosophy professor father and a flutist mother who played with a Boston-based chamber orchestra. As Jack would say, "The truth is that to everything there is a season."

Lisa and Joe Stone, married for 20 years and sole partners in their small law firm in Henry County, Virginia, handle less-than-glamorous cases: domestic disputes, personal injury settlements, or a plethora of complaints from their cantankerous client Lettie VanSandt. When she dies in a freakish incident, the Stones think it's within the realm of possibility that she was cooking meth in her trailer. But details soon emerge that lead them to question how accidental Lettie's demise actually was.

Craig Parshall is renowned for his Christian inspirational novelsthat expose the inadequacies of the American justice system. Ted Baehr, Chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission,hails this novel as “not only a great mystery, but also a deeply redemptive book.” A small-town farmer and his young wife are falsely accused of having committed a heinous act against their own child. Forced to flee from the law, the mother seeks the legal aid of courageous attorney Will Chambers.

Audrey Spencer has landed her dream job as a Deputy District Attorney and is settling into the career change when the daughter of District Attorney Gregory Pope is found stabbed to death in a nearby park.

Four years ago, LAPD detective Harry Bosch was on a movie set, asking questions about the murder of a young production assistant, when an armored car arrived with $2 million cash for use in a heist scene. In a life-imitates-art firestorm, a gang of masked men converged on the delivery and robbed the armored car with guns blazing. The crime was never resolved, and the young woman's murder was in the stack of unsolved-case files Bosch carried home the night he left the LAPD.

Corporate litigator Mia Shaw suffers the shock of her life when she finds her colleague and friend brutally murdered. Grief-stricken and furious, Mia vows that she will do anything to seek justice and make the killer pay. The man accused of the murder is a friend of security tech guru Noah Ramirez, but the evidence just doesn't add up. To save his former ATF partner, Noah needs to convince Mia that the real killer is still on the loose. Mia soon has more than the criminal prosecution to worry about, however.

As 1995 dawns in the North of Ireland, Belfast is a city of army patrols, bombed-out buildings, and “peace walls” segregating one community from the other. But the IRA has called a ceasefire. So, it’s as good a time as any for Monty Collins and Father Brennan Burke to visit the city: Monty to do a short gig in a law firm, and Brennan to reconnect with family. And it’s a good time for Brennan’s cousin Ronan to lay down arms and campaign for election in a future peacetime government. But then a man goes off a bridge on a dark, lonely road; a rogue IRA enforcer is shot; and a series of car bombs remains an unsolved crime.