Justifying Injustice

Justifying Injustice
Author: Herlinde Pauer-Studer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 110715930X

Examines Nazi legal theory, the normative ideas driving the Führer state and the legal subtext to the regime's escalating atrocities.

Law, Gender, and Injustice

Law, Gender, and Injustice
Author: Joan Hoff
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 580
Release: 1994-04
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0814735096

The legal status of women has changed more rapidly in the last 20 years than in the previous 200, Hoff argues, but these changes have become less important over time. The American power structure has relinquished rights to women and minorities only after these rights have been diminished by a white-male-dominated legal system. She calls for a reinterpretation of legal texts to create a feminist jurisprudence. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Legal Injustice

Legal Injustice
Author: Kevin Montgomery
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 145753925X

When a poor Missouri hill farmer’s wife leaves him and his three children for another man, the oldest son takes on the responsibility of helping his already overworked father raise his younger siblings at age ten. Battling the shame of small town rumors, gossip, and poverty, the oldest son earns his family the respect of their townsmen through athletic and military heroism as he grows older, only to see it torn apart by a spoiled rich kid who inherits most of the town from his wealthy grandfather. Out of boredom and greed, this spoiled young man devises a plan to seduce the whole county into growing massive amounts of marijuana to supply the most corrupt men in this country’s underworld. Money will buy almost anything in a small economically depressed town. The hill farmer’s son, now a Vietnam War hero, fights to save what is left of both his family and his corrupt hometown. This young man and his brothers battle the most powerful and influential man in Missouri, who has the law, the newspaper, and the citizens of the town in his back pocket, resulting in a massive man hunt and all-out war for this Vietnam War hero, who uses his Special Forces skills to escape and evade law enforcement while spending the winter in a cave. In the spring he finds true love in both the arms of the reporter sent to cover his story and in God in his almost hopeless battle against overwhelming odds. He destroys the local dope industry only to find he has to put his trust in three special women by turning himself in and letting them do his fighting in court to ultimately bring justice home and have a chance at a normal life with his newfound love.

Supreme Injustice

Supreme Injustice
Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2018-01-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674982088

The three most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War—Chief Justices John Marshall and Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story—upheld the institution of slavery in ruling after ruling. These opinions cast a shadow over the Court and the legacies of these men, but historians have rarely delved deeply into the personal and political ideas and motivations they held. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life. Finkelman uses census data and other sources to reveal that Justice Marshall aggressively bought and sold slaves throughout his lifetime—a fact that biographers have ignored. Justice Story never owned slaves and condemned slavery while riding circuit, and yet on the high court he remained silent on slave trade cases and ruled against blacks who sued for freedom. Although Justice Taney freed many of his own slaves, he zealously and consistently opposed black freedom, arguing in Dred Scott that free blacks had no Constitutional rights and that slave owners could move slaves into the Western territories. Finkelman situates this infamous holding within a solid record of support for slavery and hostility to free blacks. Supreme Injustice boldly documents the entanglements that alienated three major justices from America’s founding ideals and embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.

Fixing Legal Injustice in America

Fixing Legal Injustice in America
Author: Andrea D. Lyon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1538164663

In these times of reckoning—at last—with America’s original sin of slavery and racist policies, with police misconduct, and with mass-incarceration, many in our country ask, “What can we do?” In this powerful and insightful book, Andrea D. Lyon explicates what is wrong with the criminal justice system through clients’ stories and historical perspective, and makes the compelling case for the need for reform at the center of the system; not just its edges. Lyon, suggests that we should create an office of the Defender General of the United States and give it the same level of importance as the Attorney General and the Solicitor General. Such an office would not be held by someone who represents law enforcement, or corporate America, but rather by someone who represents and advocates for accused individuals, collectively before the powers that be. A Defender General would raise his or her voice against injustices like those involving the unnecessary killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, or the Texas Supreme Court’s refusal to let an innocent man, cleared by DNA, out of prison. The United States needs a Defender General.

Beyond Law and Development

Beyond Law and Development
Author: Sam Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2022-04-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1351427482

The book highlights new imaginaries required to transcend traditional approaches to law and development. The authors focus on injustices and harms to people and the environment, and confront global injustices involving impoverishment, patriarchy, forced migration, global pandemics and intellectual rights in traditional medicine resulting from maldevelopment, bad governance and aftermaths of colonialism. New imaginaries emphasise deconstruction of fashionable myths of law, development, human rights, governance and post-coloniality to focus on communal and feminist relationality, non-western legal systems, personal responsibility for justice and forms of resistance to injustices. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of development, law and development, feminism, international law, environmental law, governance, politics, international relations, social justice and activism.

Gospel Justice

Gospel Justice
Author: Bruce D. Strom
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0802487173

Can a justice system that doesn’t protect the poor be considered truly just? We have all heard the phrase, “You have the right to an attorney.” But did you know this is only true for those being accused of a crime in our country, not their victims? Without a legal advocate, innocent victims are left to fend for themselves. The church is called to do justice and love mercy. We are given the example of the Good Samaritan serving a victim in need, no matter the stigmas attached. But how are we to do this amidst the complexities of the current system? Bruce Strom left a successful legal career to start Administer Justice, a nonprofit organization providing free legal care to our most vulnerable neighbors. Gospel Justice calls churches across the nation to transform lives by serving both the spiritual and legal needs of the poor through participation in the Gospel Justice Initiative. It is not only a book for lawyers or pastors, though. Bruce Strom is calling each of us, the whole body of Christ, to join the cause of legal justice for the oppressed.

Ordinary Injustice

Ordinary Injustice
Author: Amy Bach
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2009-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780805074475

From an award-winning lawyer-reporter, a radically new explanation for America’s failing justice system The stories of grave injustice are all too familiar: the lawyer who sleeps through a trial, the false confessions, the convictions of the innocent. Less visible is the chronic injustice meted out daily by a profoundly defective system. In a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, Amy Bach reveals a judicial process so deeply compromised that it constitutes a menace to the people it is designed to serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who brings almost no cases to trial; the court that works together to achieve a wrong verdict. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Bach identifies an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants to keep the court calendar moving, and she exposes the collusion between judge, prosecutor, and defense that puts the interests of the system above the obligation to the people. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible—the first and necessary step to any reform. Full of gripping human stories, sharp analyses, and a crusader’s sense of urgency, Ordinary Injustice is a major reassessment of the health of the nation’s courtrooms.

Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory

Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory
Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2009-11-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0472023683

Running through the history of jurisprudence and legal theory is a recurring concern about the connections between law and justice and about the ways law is implicated in injustice. In earlier times law and justice were viewed as virtually synonymous. Experience, however, has taught us that, in fact, injustice may be supported by law. Nonetheless, the belief remains that justice is the special concern of law. Commentators from Plato to Derrida have called law to account in the name of justice, asked that law provide a language of justice, and demanded that it promote the attainment of justice. The justice that is usually spoken about in these commentaries is elusive, if not illusory, and disconnected from the embodied practice of law. Furthermore, the very meaning of justice, especially as it relates to law, is in dispute. Justice may refer to distributional issues or it may involve primarily procedural questions, impartiality in judgment or punishment and recompense. The essays collected in Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory seek to remedy this uncertainty about the meaning of justice and its disembodied quality, by embedding inquiry about justice in an examination of law's daily practices, its institutional arrangements, and its engagement with particular issues at particular moments in time. The essays examine the relationship between law and justice and injustice in specific issues and practices and, in doing so, make the question of justice come alive as a concrete political question. They draw on the disciplines of history, law, anthropology, and political science. Contributors to this volume include Nancy Coot, Joshua Coven, Robert Gorton, Frank Michelin, and Michael Tossing. Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.

Usual Cruelty

Usual Cruelty
Author: Alec Karakatsanis
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1620975289

From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums. He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional. Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.