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Justice
President Clinton came into office determined to give his cabinet a new look of diversity, and this apparently meant naming a woman as Attorney General. It took him three tries to achieve the goal, but he has done so with Janet Reno, and it is a bold historical stroke.
One of my favorite quotations from Finley Peter Dunne’s inimitable bartender “Mr. Dooley” occurs when his friend Mr. Hennessy walks into the saloon just after the 1898 liberation of Cuba from Spain. “I see where th’ war is over,” says Hennessy, beaming.
He didn’t want the job, but felt he should do it. For the first time, the soldier who tracked down the My Lai story for the office of the inspector general in 1969 tells what it was like to do some of this era’s grimmest detective work.
In the early spring of 1969, I was an Army colonel recently assigned to the office of the inspector general in Washington, and I was not particularly happy about it; I have always disliked living in Washington, and I think that most infantry officers would ra
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.
In 1646 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Mary Martin was pregnant and unmarried. Her paramour was a married man, but it was her status as a single woman that determined the nature of her crime.
When Elsie Parrish was fired, her fight for justice led to dramatic changes in the nation’s highest court.
When, on a spring day in 1935, Elsie Parrish walked into the office of an obscure lawyer in Wenatchee, Washington, to ask him to sue the town’s leading hotel for back pay, she had no idea she was linking her fate to that of exploited women in a Brooklyn laund
Dear Chief: It is coming up on 25 years since, fresh out of law school, I reported for duty as your clerk on the Supreme Court.
Fascinating legal cases such as Hawkins v. McGee are known to lawyers across the land, and to almost nobody else.
Packages that explode when dropped, cows that unexpectedly turn fertile, hands that sprout hair, and little boys who pull chairs out from under old ladies are the foundation of the American legal profession.