They're wrong when they tell you the Second Amendment protects the right to own a private arsenal. They're wrong when they say the death penalty isn't cruel or unusual punishment. They're wrong when they tell you we have no legal remedies for the scourge of police violence against people of color.In fact, Mystal argues, Republicans are wrong about the law almost all of the time, and now, instead of talking about this on cable news, Mystal explains why in his first book.Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument primer, offered so that people can tell the Republicans in their own lives why they are wrong. Mystal brings his trademark humor, snark, and legal expertise to topics as crucial to our politics as gerrymandering and voter suppression, and explains why legal concepts such as the right to privacy and substantive due process are constantly under attack from the very worst judges conservatives can pack onto the courts.You don't need to be a legal scholar to grasp how stop-and-frisk is an unconstitutional policy of racial discrimination. You just need to read Mystal's book to understand that the Fourteenth Amendment once made the white supremacist policies adopted by the modern Republican Party illegal—and it can do so again if we let it.

    Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an AntiracistWhen Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it—for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire. Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.

    In the past thirty years alone, more than 2,800 innocent American prisoners – their combined sentences surpassing 25,000 years – have been exonerated and freed after being condemned for crimes they did not commit. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a fraction of the actual number of persons wrongfully accused and convicted over the same period. Renowned criminal defense and civil rights attorney David Rudolf has spent decades defending the wrongfully accused. In American Injustice, he draws from his years of experience in the American criminal legal system to shed light on the misconduct that exists at all levels of law enforcement and the tragic consequences that follow in its wake. Tracing these themes through the lens of some of his most important cases – including new details from the Michael Peterson trial made famous in The Staircase – Rudolf takes the reader inside crime scenes to examine forensic evidence left by perpetrators; revisits unsolved murders to detail how and why the true culprits were never prosecuted; reveals how confirmation bias leads police and prosecutors to employ tactics that make wrongful arrests and prosecutions more likely; and exposes how poverty and racism fundamentally distort the system. In American Injustice, Rudolf gives a voice to those who have been the victim of wrongful accusations and shows in the starkest terms the human impact of legal wrongdoing. Effortlessly blending gripping true crime reporting and searing observations on civil rights in America, American Injustice takes readers behind the scenes of a justice system in desperate need of reform.

    

    This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows.Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post-World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years.Timely and accessible, American Shtetl unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.

    Throughout his long career, he performed more than 10,000 autopsies and gave expert scientific evidence in court that helped secure approximately 400 criminal convictions.But, remarkably, Manock, a self-described ‘witness of fact’, did not have the necessary training for such a senior, specialist role, and he made serious errors in several major cases — with tragic consequences, including the apparently wrongful imprisonment of innocent people. The full extent of his wrongdoing and the exact number of cases impacted by it remains a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired, due to the continuing refusal of those in power to heed calls to launch a formal inquiry into his career.In this book, Rooke examines several of Manock’s most controversial cases, and speaks with many of his former colleagues, people directly impacted by his flawed work, and legal experts. At its heart, A Witness of Fact is about how an entire legal system has failed badly, how unsafe verdicts have been swept under the carpet — and how forensic evidence that is admitted in courts of law in Australia and across the world is dubious more often than we would like to think.

      Canadian settlers expropriated Indigenous lands through the combined might of force and law. Tracing settler efforts to dispossess the Kahnawà:ke nation, The Laws and the Land emphasizes the violent ways settler law clashed with Indigenous law during a series of asymmetrical bouts over land use. Daniel Rück describes the contested path from land-sharing to the colonial imposition of private property as nothing less than an invasion, spearheaded by bureaucrats, politicians, and entrepreneurs. This meticulously researched story of Canadian conquest is deeply connected to larger issues of membership in Indigenous nations, communal versus individual property rights, governance, and inequality.

    It examines how courts have recognized a First Amendment right to anonymity, and how that right has shaped the Internet that we know today"--

    . . they simply don't exist."Over 40 years, two British police units acted undercover to infiltrate activist groups. At least 20 of those officers deliberately targeted women and entered relationships with them. One of those women was me. This is my story.Men wrote the police files. They wrote the scripts and the headlines. Men wrote the court orders to make us anonymous and they will sit in judgement at the coming public inquiry. In a system that doesn't see women, you have to fight to be heard. When they take your identity, you have to find your voice.Learning the truth nearly destroyed me - but an accidental activist was born.A voice at the centre of the Spy Cops scandal. The great love story of Donna McLean's life wasn't just built on lies, it was one. With an inquiry underway, Small Town Girl is a reclamation of a truth that was ruthlessly buried.REVIEWS"Mind-blowing, gut-wrenching, shocking and beautifully written." - Chris Atkins"Utterly compelling from the first page." - Kerry Hudson"Donna McLean experienced the stuff of nightmares. But this profoundly compelling memoir reclaims the truth with eloquence and guts. " - Wendy Erskine"Bold and brave, Donna McLean's courageous and vivid Small Town Girl is both a timely exposure of corruption and a searing story of emotional betrayal' - Catherine Taylor"Small Town Girl is a revelation, it is a brilliant and brave quest for truth, I found it deeply moving and brutally frank and honest." - Salena Godden"Donna suffered horrifically but it is a testament to her immense courage that she was able to take these deeply disturbing events and channel them into confronting the state and its diabolical abuses towards women." - Maxine Peake"This is a thoughtful and intimate account of the lived experience of state sanction betrayals. Donna and the other victims of the Spycops disgrace shine through with wit, kindness and resilience. This should be mandatory reading for all in the Met police, indeed everyone." - Siobhan McSweeney