Product Description: New Jersey’s legal system was plagued with injustices from the time the system was established through the mid-twentieth century. In Battleground New Jersey, historian and author of Boardwalk Empire, Nelson Johnson chronicles reforms to the system through the dramatic stories of Arthur T...read more

Product Description: I knew she'd be trouble."So quipped Antonin Scalia about Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court's annual end-of-term party in 2010. It's usually the sort of event one would expect from such a grand institution, with gentle parodies of the justices performed by their law clerks, but this year Sotomayor decided to shake it up―flooding the room with salsa music and coaxing her fellow justices to dance...read more

Product Description: Get a unique look at the life and trials of Federal District Court Judge Frederic Block, whose bench sits in the heart of New York City. The book was written for the general public in an effort to explain, in practical terms, the perspective behind some of the most newsworthy and sensational cases of the last 20 years...read more

Product Description: This contemporary biography series profiles the lives of some of today's most prominent newsmakers; whether covering contributions and achievements or notorious deeds, books in this series examine why these well-known people garner public attention...read more

Product Description: Readers seeking information about Elena Kagan―from her early life and her ascent to the Supreme Court to how she approaches questions of fairness, justice, equality, and civil rights―will find this biography engaging and invaluable...read more

Product Description: Mary Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams tells the little-known story of Thurgood Marshall's work with Kenyan leaders as they fought with the British for independence in the early 1960s. Not long after he led the legal team in Brown v...read more

When he resigned last June, Justice Stevens was the third longest serving Justice in American history (1975-2010)--only Justice William O. Douglas, whom Stevens succeeded, and Stephen Field have served on the Court for a longer time. In Five Chiefs, Justice Stevens captures the inner workings of the Supreme Court via his personal experiences with the five Chief Justices--Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts--that he interacted with. He reminisces of being a law clerk during Vinson's tenure; a practicing lawyer for Warren; a circuit judge and junior justice for Burger; a contemporary colleague of Rehnquist; and a colleague of current Chief Justice John Roberts. Along the way, he will discuss his views of some the most significant cases that have been decided by the Court from Vinson, who became Chief Justice in 1946 when Truman was President, to Roberts, who became Chief Justice in 2005. Packed with interesting anecdotes and stories about the Court, Five Chiefs is an unprecedented and historically significant look at the highest court in the United States.

Product Description: “Americans have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge of our Founding Fathers. Now Michael Toth brings us the story of Oliver Ellsworth, key member of the Constitutional Convention, sponsor of the Judiciary Act in the Senate, and chief justice for four crucial years...read more

Written by former law clerks, legal scholars, biographers, historians, and political scientists, the essays in In Chambers tell the fascinating story of clerking at the Supreme Court. In addition to reflecting the personal experiences of the law clerks with their justices, the essays reveal how clerks are chosen, what tasks are assigned to them, and how the institution of clerking has evolved over time, from the first clerks in the late 1800s to the clerks of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In Chambers offers a variety of perspectives on the unique experience of Supreme Court clerks. Former law clerks―including Alan M. Dershowitz, Charles A. Reich, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III―write about their own clerkships, painting vivid and detailed pictures of their relationships with the justices, while other authors write about the various clerkships for a single justice, putting a justice's practice into a broader context. The book also includes essays about the first African American and first woman to hold clerkships. Sharing their insights, anecdotes, and experiences in a clear, accessible style, the contributors provide readers with a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Supreme Court.

A portrait of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and president of the Continental Congress discusses his contributions to the early Republic during the Revolutionary War and the writing of the Constitution.

[Read by Robert Fass]A soul-stirring biography of John Marshall, the young Republic's great chief justice who led the Supreme Court to power and brought law and order to the nation.In the political turmoil that convulsed America after George Washington's death, the surviving Founding Fathers went mad - literally pummeling each other in Congress and challenging one another to deadly duels in their quest for power. Out of the political intrigue, one man emerged to restore calm and dignity to the government: John Marshall. The longest-serving chief justice in American history, Marshall transformed the Supreme Court from an irrelevant appeals court into the powerful and controversial branch of government that Americans today either revere or despise.Drawing on rare documents, Harlow Giles Unger shows how, with nine key decisions, Marshall rewrote the Constitution, reshaped government, and prevented Thomas Jefferson from turning tyrant. John Adams called his appointment of Marshall to chief justice his greatest gift to the nation and ''the pride of my life.''

Product Description: John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court presents a portrait of US Supreme Court justice John McKinley (1780–1852) and provides a penetrating analysis of McKinley’s time and place, the exigencies of his circuit work, and the contributions he made to both American legal history and Alabama...read more

Product Description: During the Civil War, the Union Army grew from a semi-professional force of 12,000 to a force of almost one million citizens. The unique disciplinary requirements for this citizen army were only one facet of the nation's unique wartime needs...read more

Product Description: Joseph Holt, the stern, brilliant, and deeply committed Unionist from Kentucky, spent the first several months of the American Civil War successfully laboring to maintain Kentucky's loyalty to the Union and then went on to serve as President Lincoln's judge advocate general...read more