Neither the Constitution nor the laws but John Marshall made the Court Supreme
As the 2000 election made very clear, we are torn between revering judges and despising them. It’s in the nature of the job.
Can it be fair? Humane? Deter crime? These very current questions troubled Americans just as much in the day of the Salem witch trials as in the day of Timothy McVeigh
He was a Northerner. He was an industrialist. He was a Jew. And a young girl was murdered in his factory.
“GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS,” wrote Robert Frost. But he may have been closer to the mark with another line: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Is trial by jury the essential underpinning of our system of justice or—as more and more critics charge—a relic so flawed it should perhaps even be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.
You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954
Why Litigiousness Is a National Character Trait
Justice served nearly fifty years ago in a wrecked German city still casts its eight and shadow over much of the world
It has always been politics as usual
While the Revolution was still being fought, Mum Bett declared that the new nation’s principle of liberty must extend to her too. It took eighty years and a far more terrible war to confirm the rights she demanded.
Of the thousands of American soldiers court-martialed for desertion in World War II, Eddie Slovik was the only one put to death. One of the judges who convicted him looks back with regret.
Up until the last century in some parts of the country, a murderer’s guilt could legally be determined by what happened when he or she touched the victim’s corpse
When Elsie Parrish was fired, her fight for justice led to dramatic changes in the nation’s highest court.
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
Fascinating legal cases such as Hawkins v. McGee are known to lawyers across the land—and to almost nobody else.
For this crime, she was arrested, held, indicted, and put on trial. Judge Hunt presided.
Eight generations back, the author discovered a forebear hanging on the family tree
Americans don’t hesitate to say anything they please about a public performance. But the right to do so wasn’t established until the Cherry Sisters sued a critic who didn’t like their appalling vaudeville act.
The Supreme Court says the First Amendment gives newspapers the right to denounce the government, advocate revolution, attack public figures, and even be wrong. This may not be nice—but those who understand the strengths of a republic wouldn’t have it any other way.
—More than a century ago, the city of St. Louis enacted a well-thought-out plan to legalize vice. What went wrong? Everything .
A century ago a President’s murderer went on trial for the first time in our history. The issues raised then continue to trouble us.
The Curious World of the Trademark
There are over 3,000 county courthouse across the country -- staunch hometown symbols of our faith in our ability to govern ourselves
Was there really a conspiracy to burn the town?
She was, said Governor Winthrop, an American Jezebel