State Laws

Nationalism is inevitable: It supplies feelings of belonging, identity, and recognition. It binds us to our neighbors and tells us who we are. But increasingly - from the United States to India, from Russia to Burma - nationalism is being invoked for unworthy ends: to disdain minorities or to support despots. As a result, nationalism has become to many a dirty word.

At the end of the summer of 1859, 22-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than 3,000 cases - including more than 25 murder trials - during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

In February 1971, racial tension surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, culminated in four days of violence and skirmishes between white vigilantes and black residents. The turmoil resulted in two deaths, six injuries, more than $500,000 in damage, and the firebombing of a white-owned store before the National Guard restored uneasy peace. Despite glaring irregularities in the subsequent trial, 10 young persons were convicted of arson and conspiracy and then sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison.

One promise of democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. And yet, from our founding, strong political forces were determined to limit that right. The Supreme Court, Alexander Hamilton wrote, would protect the weak against this very sort of tyranny. Still, as On Account of Race forcefully demonstrates, through the better part of American history the Court has instead been a protector of white rule. And complex threats against the right to vote persist even today.

Religious traditions in the United States are characterized by ongoing tension between assimilation to the broader culture and defiant rejection of cultural incursions. However, legal theorist and Catholic theologian Cathleen Kaveny contends there is a third possibility - a culture of engagement - that accommodates and respects tradition. It also recognizes the need to interact with culture to remain relevant and to offer critiques of social, political, legal, and economic practices.

The only crime defined in the United States Constitution, treason is routinely described by judges as more heinous than murder. Today the term is regularly thrown around by lawmakers and pundits on both sides of the aisle. But as these heated accusations flood the news cycle, it's not always clear what the crime of treason truly is, or when it should be prosecuted. Drawing on over two decades of research, constitutional law and legal history, scholar Carlton Larson takes us on a grand tour of the Treason Clause of the United States Constitution.

In this landmark work, Kaplan describes her strategy in the lower courts and her preparation and rehearsals before moot courts, and she shares insights into the dramatic oral argument before the Supreme Court justices. Then Comes Marriage is the story of the relationship behind the watershed case, Kaplan's own difficult coming-out journey, and the fascinating unfolding of United States v. Windsor.

Buying the Vote analyzes the rise and decline of campaign finance reform by tracking the evolution of both the ways in which presidential campaigns have been funded since the late nineteenth century. Through close examinations of major Supreme Court decisions, Mutch shows how the Court has fashioned a new and profoundly inegalitarian definition of American democracy.

If your office building were on fire, would you lock the door and keep working? If you were unhappy with your career, would you pedal a rental commuter bike cross-country to see what else was out there? What if a bloodthirsty axe murderer punched you in the face? Is that the city where you’d start a new business? Jeffrey Tanenhaus makes a lot of questionable decisions in pursuit of a fresh start, but they add up to one wild ride in this true story of the all-American adventure that has everyone talking.

For most of the 20th century, the American founding has been presented as a struggle between social classes over issues arising primarily within, rather than outside, the United States. But in recent years, new scholarship has instead turned to the international history of the American union to interpret both the causes and the consequences of the US Constitution. Max M. Edling argues that the Constitution was created to defend US territorial integrity and the national interest from competitors in the western borderlands and on the Atlantic Ocean.

Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration. Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people", however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets.

In his meteoric, 13-year rise to fame, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a mass movement for civil rights - with his relentless peaceful, non-violent protests, public demonstrations, and eloquent speeches. But as violent threats cast a dark shadow over Dr. King's life, Swanson hones in on James Earl Ray, a bizarre, racist prison escapee who tragically ends King's life.

At a time when the hottest issue in US immigration law is the proposed action by President Obama to protect from deportation as many as five million illegals in the United States, the John Lennon case takes on special relevance, notwithstanding the passage of 40 years since he was placed in deportation proceedings. This is John and Yoko's incredible story, as told by the lawyer who fought in the front lines.

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.

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.

Throughout his presidency, John F. Kennedy was passionate about the issue of immigration reform. He believed that America is a nation of people who value both tradition and the exploration of new frontiers, deserving the freedom to build better lives for themselves in their adopted homeland.

Meet Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, once just a girl growing up in The Bronx, New York, with her brother and Puerto Rican-born parents. From a young age, her mother emphasized the value of education. Sonia would eventually graduate summa cum laude from Princeton University, receive a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, and later begin working as an assistant district attorney for New York County. Throughout her decades-long career, Sonia Sotomayor has been driven by her commitment to justice, inspiring young people to follow their dreams and strive to make them reality.

Frontier Law follows the exploits of Texas Ranger Frank Sirocco when he rides into San Ysidro to investigate the murder of two colleagues. Up against a deadly band of killers, gunfighters and renegades, Sirocco will need all of his wits and guns to survive this one. Fortunately, help arrived from unexpected sources.

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.