Legal English

Crimes and violations of the law require punishment, and our legal system is set up to punish, but what if the system was recalibrated to also weigh grounds for forgiveness? What if something like bankruptcy - a fresh start for debtors - were available to people convicted of crimes? Martha Minow explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive.

Written by distinguished law professors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this outline covers what is typically taught in a law school wills and trusts course. Included are detailed explanations of critical issues and topics you must know to master the course.

Northern New Jersey has a new local hero on its cultural crime turf. He's Andy Carpenter, the Paterson defense attorney who can sling a quip as fast as he can outmaneuver a snarling prosecutor. Acclaimed author David Rosenfelt's first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award. Now, in this new novel, the intrepid lawyer is thrust into the spotlight where he risks becoming a media victim...of the most fatal kind.

On the evening before Thanksgiving, Hal Chase, a guard in the San Francisco County Jail, drives to the airport to pick up his step-brother for the weekend. When they return, Hal’s wife, Katie, has disappeared without a clue. By the time Dismas Hardy hears about this, Katie has been missing for five days. The case strikes close to home because Katie had been seeing Hardy’s wife, a marriage counselor. By this time, the original Missing Persons case has become a suspected homicide, and Hal is the prime suspect.

Anne Murphy is smart, gorgeous, and young, the red-headed rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates. She leaves town for Fourth of July weekend to prepare for a high-profile trial, but when she buys her morning newspaper, her own photo is plastered all over the front page. And the headline, "Lawyer Murdered", supposedly refers to her. Anne sets out to find her killer, playing dead in order to stay alive.

A young woman is haunted by two murders that are closely linked -- despite the 110 years that separate them.

Following the breakup of her marriage and her pursuit by an obsessed stalker, criminal defense attorney Emily Graham accepts an offer to work in a major Manhattan law firm. Feeling a need for roots, she buys her ancestral home in New Jersey, which her family sold in 1892, after the disappearance of young Madeline Shapley, one of Emily's forebears.

Scott Turow has written a supercharged, exquisitely suspenseful novel about a vicious triple murder and the man condemned to die for it. No other writer offers such a profound understanding of what is at stake when the state holds the power to end a man's life.

Mick McFarland is stunned when he's arrested for murdering business tycoon Edwin Hanson, brother to David Hanson - one of Mick's former clients. Mick is even more shocked when he's confronted with the incriminating evidence: surveillance footage of him stalking the victim and pulling the trigger. As Mick's legal team fights against windmills trying to beat the prosecution in court, his wife, Piper, journeys across the country, trying to win her husband's freedom by going after the man she is convinced is out to destroy Mick and David both.

To Robbie Feaver the law is all about making a play - to a client, a jury, or a judge. But when the flashy, womanizing, multimillion-dollar personal injury lawyer is caught offering bribes, he's forced to wear a wire. Even as the besieged attorney looks after his ailing wife, Feaver must also make tapes that will hurl his friends, his enemies, his city, and a particular FBI undercover agent into a crisis of conscience and law.

Arthur Beauchamp, a heralded criminal lawyer, has moved to a quiet island off the British Columbia coast. While trying to recover from a marriage gone sour, his retirement is interrupted by his former law partners - they want Arthur to take charge of the defense trial of Jonathan O'Donnell, the acting dean of a law school. O'Donnell has been accused of rape by one of the students, Kimberley Martin, a smart but arrogant woman who is engaged to a rich businessman.

Alison has it all. A doting husband, adorable daughter, and a career on the rise - she's just been given her first murder case to defend. But all is never as it seems...Just one more night. Then I'll end it. Alison drinks too much. She's neglecting her family. And she's having an affair with a colleague whose taste for pushing boundaries may be more than she can handle. I did it. I killed him. I should be locked up. Alison's client doesn't deny that she stabbed her husband - she wants to plead guilty. And yet something about her story is deeply amiss.

Ten years after graduating from Harvard, lawyer Jack Collins sets out to reinvent himself. The Ivy-leaguer leaves a small Connecticut law practice to join one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, trading a nondescript office for one in a gleaming New York City skyscraper. He surrounds himself with people far more glamorous than those he’s left behind. He basks in the pride of being with his famous new boss, his alluring new coworker, and his new client, Abigail Walker, wealthy widow of a US senator. Jack thinks he is on the path to glory. He couldn’t be more wrong.

It is a small paper square with uneven edges, dark blue in color and bearing a smudged portrait of a long-dead king. It doesn't look like much to Brady Coyne, but the stamp known as the Dutch Blue Error is one of a kind - a philatelic freak worth at least one million dollars. It is the prize possession of Ollie Weston, a wheelchair-bound Boston banker, and it is valuable enough that for its sake, several good men will die.

Once the flashy, successful lawyer known for his in-your-face billboards—IN AN ACCIDENT? GET RICH—Jason Rich has fallen from grace, his reputation scrubbed of its glitz and his life stripped of the people he cares about. All thanks to meth kingpin Tyson Cade. But when Cade is shot and killed in the heart of his territory, things go from bad to worse for Jason as he is charged with his murder.

Seeing a dog next to a homeless man inspires lawyer Andy Carpenter to give the pair some money to help. Soon after Andy’s encounter with them, man and dog are attacked in the middle of the night on the street. The dog defends its new owner, and the erstwhile attacker is bitten but escapes. But the dog is quarantined, and the man, Don Carrigan, is heartbroken. Andy’s wife, Laurie, can’t resist helping the duo. In a matter of days, Don and his dog, Zoey, are living above Andy’s garage and become two new additions to the family. But things soon go awry....

The murder of a woman from one of the town's oldest families has Rosedale's upper crust howling for blood, and the prosecutor is counting on Ruby's inexperience to help him deliver a swift conviction. Ruby's client is a college football star who has returned home after a career-ending injury, and she is determined to build a defense that will stick. She finds help in unexpected quarters from Suzanne, a hard-charging attorney armed to the teeth, and Shorty, a diner cook who knows more than he lets on.

Allen Drury has penetrated the world's stormiest political battleground and the smoke-filled committee rooms of the United States Senate to reveal the bitter conflicts set in motion when the president calls upon the Senate to confirm his controversial choice for secretary of state. This novel is a true epic, showing in fascinating detail the minds and motives of the statesmen, the opportunists, the idealists. Advise and Consent is a timeless story with clear echoes of today's headlines.

Something mysterious is killing the wildlife in the mountains just south of Tucson. When a college intern turned activist sets out to collect her own evidence, she, too, ends up dead. Local law enforcement is slow to get involved. That’s when the mobile FBI unit goes undercover to infiltrate the town and its copper refinery in search of possible leads.

Betrayed by his own country, former spy Charles Jenkins survived an undercover Russian operation gone wrong. The retired family man is through with spy games. Then he learns of a woman isolated in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison. If it’s Paulina Ponomayova, the agent who sacrificed her life to save his, Jenkins can’t leave her behind. But there’s no guarantee it’s her. Or proof Paulina is still alive. To find out, Jenkins must return to Russia and blackmail Viktor Federov, a former Russian officer with his own ax to grind, into helping him infiltrate Lefortovo.

An old house, a new lover, a fresh life for Dominick - or will the faith-driven doom it all? The past just won't go away. Dominick likes to idle there in history's comfortable remove, but when his mother dies and he meets the half sister he never knew he had, the past becomes more personal - and the present more dangerous. Dominick's perpetual peregrinations are interrupted by a visit to his newfound sibling's historic Hudson Valley estate, which is also home to a Wiccan coven.