Legal history

The state of South Australia was a British imperial construct, its borders determined by three straight lines, with no reference to the Aboriginal presence.The colonial process in South Australia began decades before formal annexation with unregulated...

Hannah McGlade's new book bravely addresses the complex and fraught issue of Aboriginal child abuse. She argues that Aboriginal child sexual assault has been formed within the entrenched societal forces of racism, colonisation and patriarchy, yet cast in...

In Legal Briefs: The Ups and Downs of Life in the Law, editor Roger Witten takes us behind the scenes of some of the most fascinating court cases of the last few decades, while introducing us to the sometimes strange, and sometimes comical situations...

In The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Grietje Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on the role of law in the global political economy. Closing a major gap in historical-materialist scholarship, Baars demonstrates how the corporation, capitalism's...

AKIRKUS REVIEWSBEST INDIE BOOK OF 2023From a divided Berlin to The Hague, the Reagan White House, the forests of Costa Rica, and more, Judge Charles N. Brower shares a personal history of a life spent at the forefront of international justice-and a case...

The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution-the product of compromises and an artifact of its time-and made it more democraticWho wrote the Constitution? That's obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in...

This ground-breaking book challenges the widespread view that sex and homosexuality were unmentionable in the USSR. The Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras (1956-82) have remained obscure and unexplored from this perspective. Drawing on previously undiscovered...

Beverley McLachlin was the first woman to be chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Joining the Court while it was establishing its approach to the CanadianCharter of Rights and Freedoms, McLachlin aided the court in weathering the public backlash...

How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belongingIn the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing...

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgmentWhen buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment-and its concern...

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk's legal odyssey began in 1975,...

Why do we need laws? What rights are protected by law? When was forensic evidence first used in court? This book explores big questions like these, explaining the laws and legal precedents, and religious, political, and moral codes that have shaped the...