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Scott Turow is a novelist, lawyer, and humanist who has fused his two passions, writing and the law, to create challenging novels that raise significant legal issues and test the justice of present laws. In all of his books, Turow reveals the moral ambiguities that afflict both accuser and accused, and challenges his readers to reconsider their preconceived notions of justice. Beginning with One-L, his first published work about the first-year law school experience, Turow continues to capture his readers' imaginations with books such as Presumed Innocent and Burden of Proof.

InReconstituting Authority,William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority. Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and practices but shows how writers imagined the two fields as engaged in the same cultural process. He argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions. The first half of the book is devoted in separate chapters to William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Pauline Hopkins. The focus shifts from large theoretical concerns to questions of contract and native sovereignty, to issues of African American citizenship and racial entitlement. In each case the discussion is rooted in a larger consideration of the rule (or misrule) of law.The second half of the book turns from the rule of law to the issue of property, specifically the Lockean version of the self that tied identity to legal conceptions of property and economic value. In separate discussions of Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser,Reconstituting Authorityreveals authors as closely engaged with those changing perspectives on property and identity, in ways that challenged the racial, gendered, and economic consequences of America's possessive individualism.

In Reconstituting Authority, William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority.Moddelmog does not assume a sharp distinction between literary and legal institutions and practices but shows how writers imagined the two fields as engaged in the same cultural process. He argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions.The first half of the book is devoted in separate chapters to William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Pauline Hopkins. The focus shifts from large theoretical concerns to questions of contract and native sovereignty, to issues of African American citizenship and racial entitlement. In each case the discussion is rooted in a larger consideration of the rule (or misrule) of law.The second half of the book turns from the rule of law to the issue of property, specifically the Lockean version of the self that tied identity to legal conceptions of property and economic value. In separate discussions of Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, Reconstituting Authority reveals authors as closely engaged with those changing perspectives on property and identity, in ways that challenged the racial, gendered, and economic consequences of America's possessive individualism.

This book offers a critically informed yet relaxed historical overview of the legal thriller, a unique contribution to crime fiction where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges. The legal thriller typically uses court trials as the suspense-creating background for presenting legal issues reflecting a wide range of concerns, from corporate conflicts to private concerns, all in a dramatic but highly informed manner. With authors primarily from the USA and the UK, the genre is one which nonetheless enjoys a global reading audience. As well as providing a survey of the legal thriller, this book takes a gender–focused approach to analyzing recently published titles within the field. It also argues for the fascination of the legal thriller both in the way its narrative pattern parallels that of an actual court trial, and by the way it reflects, frequently quite critically, the concerns of contemporary society.

Carol Weisbrod uses a variety of stories to raise important questions about how society, through law, defines relationships in the family. Beginning with a story most familiar from the opera Madame Butterfly, Weisbrod addresses issues such as marriage, divorce, parent-child relations and abuses, and nonmarital intimate contacts. Each chapter works with fiction or narratives inspired by biography or myth, ranging from the Book of Esther to the stories of Kafka. Weisbrod unites the book with running commentary on variations of the Madame Butterfly story, showing the ways in which fiction better expresses the complexities of intimate lives than does the crude, simple language of the law. Butterfly, the Bride looks at law from the outside, using narrative to provide a fresh perspective on the issues of law and social structure -- and individual responses to law. This book thoroughly explores relationships between inner and public lives by examining what is ordinarily classified as the sphere of private life -- the world of family relationships.

Mechanisms and standards exist to safeguard the health and welfare of the patient, but for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)-used to treat depression and other mental illnesses-such approval methods have failed. Prescribed to thousands over the years, public relations as opposed to medical trials have paved the way for this popular yet dangerous and controversial treatment option.Doctors of Deceptionis a revealing history of ECT (or shock therapy) in the United States, told here for the first time. Through the examination of court records, medical data, FDA reports, industry claims, her own experience as a patient of shock therapy, and the stories of others, Andre exposes tactics used by the industry to promote ECT as a responsible treatment when all the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.As early as the 1940s, scientific literature began reporting incidences of human and animal brain damage resulting from ECT. Despite practitioner modifications, deleterious effects on memory and cognition persisted. Rather than discontinue use of ECT, the $5-billion-per-year shock industry crafted a public relations campaign to improve ECT's image. During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatry's PR efforts misled the government, the public, and the media into believing that ECT had made a comeback and was safe.Andre carefully intertwines stories of ECT survivors and activists with legal, ethical, and scientific arguments to address issues of patient rights and psychiatric treatment. Echoing current debates about the use of psychopharmaceutical interventions shown to have debilitating side-effects, she candidly presents ECT as a problematic therapy demanding greater scrutiny, tighter control, and full disclosure about its long-term cognitive effects.

The study dives into racial bias in the legal system, and it draws insights from Barry Jenkins's If Beale Street Could Talk to emphasize how widespread oppression affects the lives of African Americans. It also looks at how racial expressions in films reveal the flaws in the legal process. While past research has often focused on the romance and the characters' perseverance, this study fills in the gaps by zeroing in on the scenes that tackle racial injustice. Doing so provides a fresh perspective on how race and the law intersect. The real value of this study is that it simplifies how widespread racism is woven into cultural stories, which adds more depth to the ongoing conversation about media representation. The analysis takes a qualitative approach focusing on conversations and selected scenes, all supported by Intersectionality theory. The primary data comes from specific scenes in the film. The study shows that Jenkins uses racial expression, both in speech and body language, to critique racial bias in the legal system, emphasizing the structural barriers that contribute to injustice. This study adds to the growing use of Intersectionality in analyzing media, helping us understand how film can push back against dominant narratives and advocate for racial equality. The unique part of this study is its sharp focus on racial expressions in key scenes, which expands the conversation about race, law, and storytelling in cinema.

This article offers a reading of the little-known 1925 short story “The Serpent” by Cherokee writer and political figure Ruth Muskrat Bronson. Published in the Mount Holyoke Monthly, “The Serpent” challenges federal policy during the allotment era, particularly the unparalleled power of Indian agents as key political figures during and after Oklahoma statehood. Bronson represents the threat of sexual violence during this time, forecasting the jurisdictional crisis that Native communities would continue to face up to the present. In response to these dangers to the Cherokee Nation and its citizens, Bronson's story re-members Cherokee matrilineal and clan legal systems as her protagonist intervenes in the predatory advances of the Indian agent. The story, I argue, marks a turning point in Bronson's early career as a powerful indictment of settler injustice. Her interventions are much more measured in Bronson's more familiar 1944 text, Indians Are People, Too. Nevertheless, reading Bronson's later nonfiction and early fiction illustrates the complexity of the Cherokee literary tradition theorized by Daniel Heath Justice as Bronson moves from resistant Chickamauga consciousness in her early fiction to Beloved Path writing in her later career, all the while advocating for Indigenous justice and sovereignty. This study contributes to broader debates regarding Native writings from the early twentieth century, when figures like Bronson demonstrated rhetorical savvy by moving between political and polemical writings, using literary fiction and nonfiction as vehicles to deliver powerful critiques of the settler state.

Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners' written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzantine grievance process, which begins with prisoners filing claims and ends after four levels of review, with corrections officials usually denying requests for remedies.Appealing to Justiceis both an unprecedented study of disputing in an extremely asymmetrical setting and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. Quoting extensively from their interviews with prisoners and officials, the authors give voice to those who are almost never heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms within the sociological literature-for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable and/or stigmatized populations to name injuries and file claims, and about the relentlessly adversarial subjectivities of prisoners and correctional officials-and they do so with striking poignancy. Ultimately,Appealing to Justicereveals a system fraught with impediments and dilemmas, which delivers neither justice, nor efficiency, nor constitutional conditions of confinement.