The Most Democratic Branch:  How the Courts Serve America by Jeffrey Rosen
Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006
KF5130 .R67 2006 Balcony

"It was not until I arrived at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that I learned my profession, how to work with colleagues and clients, and how it might feel to grow up in the law." So begins Michael Meltsner's vivid account of how as a lawyer for Muhammad Ali, for the doctors who ended Jim Crow at American hospitals, and for scores of death row inmates he became such a deeply involved activist in the civil rights movement. Part memoir and part critical study, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer offers both a personalized history of the civil rights movement from a participant's perspective, and the compelling account of how a lawyer committed to social change discovered himself in his work.

Focused on the inside story of law reform, the book contains portraits of some larger-than-life figures, including Thurgood Marshall, William Kuntsler, and the charismatic black law professor Derrick Bell, as well as of unheralded movers and shakers such as the attorney C. B. King of Albany, Georgia, and Margaret Burnham, who as a young lawyer representing Angela Davis got caught in a racial and generational crossfire. Alongside these recollections, Meltsner provides a critical analysis of early civil rights efforts to achieve social change through litigation while also providing the wider context of the personalities, policies, and tactics that continue to shape reform efforts today.

Deeply researched and using case files that have previously been off-limits to historians, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer will appeal to young and upcoming lawyers, to students of the history of the 1960s, of civil rights, and of African American studies, and to anyone interested in social change.

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls "juridical racialism." The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.

Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group--and, in turn, Americans as a whole--by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun structured the argument of the majority around the history of abortion laws. That history built on the work of law professor Cyril Means, Jr., and historian James Mohr. Means and Mohr proclaim four theses as summarizing the "true" history of abortion in England and America:

(1) Abortion was not a crime "at common law" (before the enactment of abortion statutes in the nineteenth century.

(2) Abortion was common and relatively safe during this time.

(3) Abortion statutes were enacted in the nineteenth century in order to protect the life of the mother rather than the life of the embryo or fetus.

(4) The moving force behind the nineteenth-century statutes was the attempt of the male medical profession to suppress competition from competing practitioners of alternative forms of medicine.

This book dispels these myths and sets forth the true history of abortion and abortion law in English and American society. Anglo- American law always treated abortion as a serious crime, generally including early in pregnancy. Prosecutions and even executions go back 800 years in England, establishing law that carried over to colonial America. The reasons offered for these prosecutions and penalties consistently focused on protecting the life of the unborn child. This unbroken tradition refutes the claims that unborn children have not been treated as persons in our law or as persons under the Constitution of the United States.

In Law and Class in America, a group of leading legal scholars reflect on the state of the law from the end of the Cold War to the present, grappling with a central question posed to them by Paul D. Carrington and Trina Jones: have recent legal reforms exacerbated class differences in America? In a substantive introduction, Carrington and Jones assert that legal changes from the late-20th century onward have been increasingly elitist and unconcerned with the lives of poor people having little access to the legal system. Contributors use this position as a springboard to review developments in their own particular fields and to assess whether or not legal decisions and processes have contributed to a widening gap between privileged and unprivileged people in this country.

From antitrust and bankruptcy to tax and election law, the essays in this unique volume invite readers to reflect thoughtfully on socio-economic justice in the new century, and suggest that a lack of progressive reform in all areas of law may herald a form of undiagnosed class dominance reminiscent of America's Gilded Age.

While the right to be judged by one's peers in a court of law appears to be a hallmark of American law, protected in civil cases by the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, the civil jury is actually an import from England. Legal historian James Oldham assembles a mix of his signature essays and new work on the history of jury trial, tracing how trial by jury was transplanted to America and preserved in the Constitution.

Trial by Jury begins with a rigorous examination of English civil jury practices in the late eighteenth century, including how judges determined one's right to trial by jury and who composed the jury. Oldham then considers the extensive historical use of a variety of "special juries," such as juries of merchants for commercial cases and juries of women for claims of pregnancy. Special juries were used for centuries in both English and American law, although they are now considered antithetical to the idea that American juries should be drawn from jury pools that reflect reasonable cross-sections of their communities. An introductory overview addresses the relevance of Anglo-American legal tradition and history in understanding America's modern jury system.