Crapshoot Justice

A simultaneously rollicking and sobering indictment of the policies of President George W. Bush, Bushwhacked chronicles the destructive impact of the Bush administration on the very people who put him in the White House in the first place. Here are the ties that connected Bush to Enron, yes, but here, too, is the story of the woman who walks six miles to the unemployment office daily, wondering what happened to the economic security Bush promised. Here are reports on failed nation-building missions in Kabul and Baghdad. Here, too, the story of a rancher who has fallen prey to a Bush-Cheney interior department that is perhaps a wee bit too cozy with the oil industry. Bushwhacked is highly original and entirely thought-provoking—essential reading for anyone living in George W. Bush's America.

The reality for Texas judges is that in order to be elected or reelected, they must be either rich or really good at begging. Increasingly, they also have to be "pure" supporters of their political party. Texans tell pollsters that the big campaign money needed for elections influences judicial decisions--an opinion with which lawyers agree, as do a surprising number of judges. But most Texans want to keep electing judges [despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of us don't even vote In judicial elections]. The end result is a judicial election system that is merely a crapshoot. Judges and lawyers have talked about the problem for years and can't agree on what should be done. With "Crapshoot Justice, which features interviews with lawyers and former judges, the authors' intent is to keep stirring the pot until the system is changed.

New medical technologies, women’s willingness to talk online and off, and tighter judicial reins on state legislatures are shaking up the practice of abortion. As talk becomes more transparent, Carol Sanger writes, women’s decisions about whether to become mothers will be treated more like those of other adults making significant personal choices.

A Wall Street securities trader teams up with a female CIA agent to track down terrorists manipulating the stock market in this modern day espionage thriller. It begins in 1987, when the prevailing winds of Glasnost have caught the Russian leadership by surprise... catapulting the confusion caused by the impending breakup of the Soviet Union to new levels. For KGB agent Mikhail Volkov and his brother, Vladimir, the chaos provides something else altogether: An opportunity to steal four nuclear weapons from a Russian test facility. Sean McGowan, a software designer in the securities industry, has come a long way from the trailer park where he grew up in New Mexico. He leads an exciting life now, with wealth, influence, and the company of beautiful women, until the Volkov brothers come after him to expropriate his ultra-fast derivatives trading program. CIA Agent Beate Nicholson recruits Sean to help her track down financiers manipulating the stock markets prior to terrorist strikes. But first, they must use their computer skills to thwart a massive cyber-attack against the world's banking system perpetrated through the Internet using a massive multi-player on-line role-playing gaming platform. Sean and Beate's collaboration leads them to the doorstep of a rogue's gallery of sinister figures, including white-collar jihadist Rahim Delacroix-who wreaks revenge against the infidels that killed his family; former KGB agent Mikhail Volkov and his brother Vladimir-Russian immigrants building massive fortunes in America through organized crime; and the mysterious John Napoleon-leader of the Protectorate, an environmental syndicate committed to saving the planet by seizing control of the world's resources. Sean and Beate watch in helpless disbelief as terrorists strike Europe. Can they connect all the dots in time to collar the villains before they inflict even more destruction?

Our adversarial legal system is used to evade the truth and makes winning the paramount goal. Here, a law veteran proposes we shift to an inquisitorial system seeking the truth, and recommends changes to evidentiary rules that confuse law enforcement and juries alike.

For anyone who is contemplating the study of law, or wished they had done so, or is in the midst of such an endeavor, this book will provide rewards of insight into how the lawyer thinks through problems in a legal context. The Death of Jeffrey Stapleton is based on, introduces and illustrates a technically sound, testable and easy to demonstrate explanation of how people think and act that lays a foundation for psychology to become a natural science rather than merely an art. The book shows that an understanding the phenomenon of control provides an explanation for the way people behave, what behavior is, how it works, and what it accomplishes. This has profound implications for litigation where psychology is involved.

In this lively and persuasive critique, Franklin Strier doesn't simply describe problems with the American trial system; he proposes reforms. He offers a detailed blueprint of how to improve our basic adversarial system while blunting its excesses and inequities. Strier points out that the jury system was originally intended to diffuse the power of the government, but criticizes the method by which jurors are selected, patronized, and manipulated. Among his suggestions: eliminate peremptory challenges, give jurors the authority, and judges the responsibility, to ask questions of witnesses, and use neutral expert witnesses.

White provides the most comprehensive scholarly compilation of fictional work of legal suspense in existence. Primarily a bibliography of novels, it also annotates plays, scripts for film and television, novelizations, and short-story collections about lawyers and the law. The idea behind the principal of selection is to disdain labels that reduce the variety of the legal thriller to a subgenre of mystery fiction. Novels that range from suspense thrillers through science fiction to the philosophical novel are included if justice is thematically important. It is therefore an eclectic reference source beyond a compilation of books about lawyers as protagonists. Its biographical and scholarly information about authors, major and minor, and their novels or works is traditionally encyclopedic and objective regardless of whether the work has been genre-defined, or worse—deified as a classic or denigrated as a bestseller. Many novels included are long out of print, but historically interesting for their contribution to the lineage of the courtroom drama, showing that the history of the legal thriller is one of the major branches of modern literature since the Age of Reason. The criterion of justice denoted moves beyond the fact of lawyers and courtrooms to select seminal novels like Robert Travers' Anatomy of a Murder as well as the romantic potboiler. Among the more than 2,000 works are the Perry Mason novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, John Mortimer's Rumpole series, along with a staple of fiction by major authors of the genre like John Lescroart, Lisa Scottoline, Margaret Maron, Scott Turow, and John Grisham. There are also individual works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Kafka, Camus, and Twain delineating humanity's obsession with the law as its shining prop of civilization and, alternative, béte-noire of the common individual caught up in its maw. The appendices include comments by lawyer-novelist Michael A. Kahn, a historical introduction to the legal thriller, craft notes by writers and prominent trial lawyers responding to author and lawyer questionnaires, bibliography of critical sources and articles, series characters, and the legal terminology found in courtroom dramas and novels. An essential reference tool for scholars, researchers as well as the occasional reader of legal thrillers.