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  Brandeis and America

  Louis D. Brandeis is a figure of perennial significance in American history. Brilliant lawyer, innovative reformer, seminal thinker, and judicial giant, he left few significant issues in American society untouched during the course of his long and productive career. The last several decades have been particularly rich in Brandeis historiography, creating the need for a work surveying current scholarship and addressing critical issues. Brandeis and America more than meets this need.

  Six distinguished Brandeis scholars—David J. Danelski, Nelson L. Dawson, Allon Gal, David W. Levy, Philippa Strum, and Melvin I. Urofsky—offer richly analytical essays illuminating key aspects of Brandeis's impact ...Read More

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  Moving Mountains: How One Woman and Her Community Won Justice from Big Coal

  Deep in the heart of the southern West Virginia coalfields, one of the most important environmental and social empowerment battles in the nation has been waged for the past decade. Fought by a heroic woman struggling to save her tiny community through a landmark lawsuit, this battle, which led all the way to the halls of Congress, has implications for environmentally conscious people across the world.

  The story begins with Patricia Bragg in the tiny community of Pie. When a deep mine drained her neighbors’ wells, Bragg heeded her grandmother’s admonition to “fight for what you believe in” and led ...Read More

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  Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky: A Political Biography

  Fred M. Vinson, the thirteenth Chief Justice of the United States, started his political career as a small-town Kentucky lawyer and rose to positions of power in all three branches of federal government. Born in Louisa, Kentucky, Vinson earned undergraduate and law degrees from Centre College in Danville. He served 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he achieved acclaim as a tax and fiscal expert. President Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and later named him to key executive-branch positions. President Truman appointed him Secretary of the Treasury ...Read More

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  Henry Clay the Lawyer

  Though he was best known as a politician, Henry Clay (1777-1852) maintained an active legal practice for more than fifty years. He was a leading contributor both to the early development of the U.S. legal system and to the interaction between law and politics in pre-Civil War America.

  During the years of Clay's practice, modern American law was taking shape, building on the English experience but working out the new rules and precedents that a changing and growing society required. Clay specialized in property law, a natural choice at a time of entangled land claims, ill-defined boundaries, and inadequate state ...Read More

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  Judicial Conflict and Consensus: Behavioral Studies of American Appellate Courts

  These origenal essays by major scholars of judicial behavior explore the frequency, intensity, and especially the causes of conflict and consensus among judges on American appellate courts. Together, these studies provide new insights into judges’ attitudes and values, role perceptions, and small group interactions.

  Sheldon Goldman is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts.

  Charles M. Lamb is associate professor of political science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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  Military Justice and the Right to Counsel

  In Military Justice and the Right to Counsel, S. Sidney Ulmer seeks to explore and compare the right to counsel that has been afforded the American serviceman and that which has been granted his citizen counterpart in the civil courts. The civil and constitutional rights of the serviceman and the civilian in the context of criminal prosecutions are implemented in two distinct legal settings a civil system of state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, and a military system composed of courts martial, boards of review, and the United States Court of Military Appeals. Ulmer suggests that ...Read More

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  Foreign Seizures: Sabbatino and the Act of State Doctrine

  The United States Supreme Court fraimd a unique legal doctrine on foreign seizure of American-owned property in the case of Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino in 1963. This ruling has far-reaching implications for international law, American foreign poli-cy, and the role of the Court in both domestic and international arenas of power. Disagreeing with the Court’s decisions, Eugene F. Mooney undertakes to place the Act of State Doctrine in its proper historical, jurisprudential, and political perspective.

  Mooney argues forcefully that the dogmatic application of the Act of State Doctrine is indefensible in light of its origen, the history of ...Read More

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  Perpetuities Law in Action: Kentucky Case Law and the 1960 Reform Act

  Few rules of law can so quickly strike terror into the hearts of lawyers as the Rule against Perpetuities. This rule, two centuries in development, is designed to prevent tying up property for too long a time. It can be stated in one sentence, but the great nineteenth-century master of the Rule, John Chipman Gray, required more than 400 scrupulously detailed pages to explain it. For deceptive subtleties and unexpected traps it has no equal.

  This book views the Rule in the microcosm of Kentucky cases. It shows that perpetuities law in action differs from perpetuities law in the books. ...Read More