Big and small dramas play out every day in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.  Headquartered in Chicago, the court has played a pivotal role in U.S. history.  This is where Abraham Lincoln, as a young lawyer, changed the direction of westward expansion when he argued that trains -- not steamships -- were America's future.  This is where Al Capone met his fall, at a trial that finished him as Public Enemy Number One.  And this is where Abbie Hoffman, the nation's first Yippie, butted heads with Judge Julius J. Hoffman and the Establishment at the trial known as the Conspiracy Eight.

A Court that Shaped America traces the flesh-and-blood courtroom scenes from the district's first cases in the early nineteenth century through the turn of the millennium.  Historical figures -- including Mormon leader Joseph Smith, inventor Thomas Edison, and author Mark Twain -- as well as contemporary superstars like Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey have all had their day in the Northern Illinois court.  Some were victorious, some came out scathed.  This book examines these great trials and the people behind them to offer a unique look at Chicago and U.S. history.

A leading expert in informal logic, Douglas Walton turns his attention in this new book to how reasoning operates in trials and other legal contexts, with special emphasis on the law of evidence.  The new model he develops, drawing on methods of argumentation theory that are gaining wide acceptance in computing fields like artificial intelligence, can be used to identify, analyze, and evaluate specific types of legal argument.

In contrast to approaches that rely on deductive and inductive logic and rule out many common types of argument as fallacious, Walton's aim is to provide a more expansive view of what can be considered "reasonable" in legal argument when it is construed as a dynamic, rule-governed, and goal-directed conversation.  This dialogical model gives new meaning to the key notions of relevance and probative weight, with the latter analyzed in terms of pragmatic criteria for what constitutes plausible evidence rather than truth.

In the coldest reaches of northern Minnesota, a group of women endured a shocking degree of sexual harassment -- until one of them stepped forward and sued the company that had turned a blind eye to their pleas for help.  Jenson v. Eveleth Mines, the first sexual harassment class action in America, permanently changed the legal landscape as well as the lives of the women who fought the battled.

In 1975 Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, heard that the local iron mine was now hiring women.  The hours were grueling, but the pay was astonishing and Jenson didn't think twice before accepting a job cleaning viscous soot from enormous grinding machines.  What she hadn't considered was that she was now entering a male-dominated, hard-drinking society that firmly believed that women belonged at home -- a sentiment quickly borne out in the relentless, brutal harassment of every woman who worked at the mine.  When a group of men whistled at her walking into the plant, she didn't think much of it; when they began yelling obscenities at her, she was resilient; when one of them began stalking her, she got mad;  when the mining company was unwilling to come to her defense, she got even.

From Jenson's first day on the job, through three intensely humiliating trials, to the emotional day of the settlement, it would take Jenson twenty-five years and most of her physical and mental health to fight the battle with the mining company.  But with the support of other women miners like union official Patricia Kosmach and her luck at finding perhaps the finest legal team for class action law, Jenson would eventually prevail.

As we move towards a more global legal community, often with accompanying injustice and violence, Mireille Delmas-Marty demonstrates that there is an urgent need to reconstruct the national and international legal landscapes.  Legal reasoning can be applied to concepts such as human rights for European citizens in the new world order.  In this book the author argues for a rule of law that is common in every sense of the word:  accessible to all rather than reserved exclusively for officials, common to the various legal sectors despite increasing specialization, and common to diverse States.  The book will be of interest to all comparative European lawyers, and to social scientists and legal theorists grappling with contemporary issues in legal pluralism and globalization.

Markets, not politics, are driving health care reform in America today.  Inventive entrepreneurs have transformed medicine over the past decade, and the future promises even more rapid change.  Medical costs are again soaring, and consumer anxieties over managed care remain high.  Meanwhile, the federal government remains mostly on the health policy sidelines, as it has since the collapse of the Clinton administration's campaign for health care reform.  This book addresses the changes that the market has wrought -- and the challenges this transformation poses for courts and regulators.  The law that governs the medical marketplace is an incomplete, overlapping patchwork, conceived for the most part without medical care in mind.  Fragmentation of health care lawmaking has foreclosed coordinated, system-wide policy responses, and lack of national consensus on many of the central questions in health care policy has translated into legal contradiction and bitter controversy.  The ensuring confusion and incoherence are central themes of this book.  The authors, leading commentators on American health law and policy, differ sharply with each other over the perceived failings of managed care and the law's relationship to them.  Some of the contributors treat law as a cause of the trouble; others emphasize the law's potential and limits as a corrective tool when the market disappoints. The authors span a broad range of ideological perspectives.  Yet they share a commitment to understanding the health sphere's complexities and to crafting remedies that fit American legal, political and cultural constraints.  Within limits, they believe, a measure of rationality is possible. 

Today's United States Supreme Court consists of nine intriguingly varied justices and one overwhelming contradiction:  Compared to its revolutionary predecessor, the Rehnqust Court appears deceptively passive, yet it stands as dramatically ready to defy convention as the Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s.  Now Kenneth W. Starr -- who served as clerk for one chief justice, argued twenty-five cases as solicitor general before the Supreme Court, and is widely regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished practitioners of constitutional law -- offers use an incisive and unprecedented look at the paradoxes, the power, and the people of the highest court in the land.

In First Among Equals Ken Starr traces the evolution of the Supreme Court from its beginnings, examines major Court decisions of the past three decades, and uncovers the sometimes surprisingly continuity between the precedent-shattering Warren Court and its successors under Burger and Rehnquist.  He shows us, as no other author ever has, the very human justices who shape our law, from Sandra Day O'Connor, the Court's most pivotal -- and perhaps most powerful -- player, to Clarence Thomas, its most original thinker.  And he explores the present Court's evolution into a lawyerly tribunal dedicated to balance and consensus on the one hand, and zealous debate on hotly contested issues of social policy on the other. 

Compelling and supremely readable, First Among Equals sheds new light on the most frequently misunderstood legal pillar of American life.