Born To Be Killers


Ray Black - 1874
    In this volume the stories reveal the complexity of abnormal human behaviour. In some cases the reason appears to be psychosis or demonic voices, for others, overpowering compulsions with deep psychological roots and for some killing is better than sex and the only way they can achieve total gratification. Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Chase, Andrei Chikatilo and many more.Part One: Children who Kill - what makes them kill? including Mary and Norma Bell, Jessie Holtmeyer, Larry SchwartzPart Two: Men who Kill - these men are monsters including The Yorkshire Ripper, The Cannibal Killer, The Boston Strangler, The Ultimate Psycho, The Real Dracula.Part Three: Women who Kill - can women be a cold-blooded as men? including Elizabeth Bathory, Lizzie Borden, Velma Barfield, Mary Ann Cotton, Florida's Black Widow.Part Four: Couples who Kill - torturous teams including Fred and Rosemary West

In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate


Nancy Gertner - 2011
    District Court for the District of Massachusetts. But in the 1970s, when she was one of few women in a stubbornly male profession, she sported bright red suits that reflected her fearless choice of cases and her daring litigation tactics. Defending clients in some of the most prominent criminal and civil rights cases of the time, Gertner drove home the point that women lawyers belonged in our courtrooms.In 1975, Nancy Gertner launched her legal career by defending antiwar activist Susan Saxe, who was on trial for her role in a robbery that resulted in the murder of a police officer. It was a high-profile, complex, and highly charged case. What followed for Gertner was a career of other groundbreaking firsts, as she fought her way through the boys' club climate of the time, throwing herself into criminal and civil cases focused on women's rights and civil liberties.Looking back on her storied career, Gertner writes about her struggle to succeed personally and professionally while working on benchmark cases. Among her clients were a woman suing the psychiatrist who had repeatedly molested her; another on trial for murdering her abusive husband; Teresa Contardo, suing Merrill Lynch for discrimination; and Clare Dalton, suing Harvard Law School for the same offense. In her signature red suit, Nancy Gertner was always the unrepentant advocate in defense of women. But over the years she also represented a student accused of rape; Ted Anzalone, on trial for extortion; and Matthew Stuart, implicated in his brother Charles's infamous murder of his pregnant wife. In Defense of Women is the one-of-a-kind memoir of an exceptional, self-proclaimed "outsider lawyer."

Hunting Evil: Inside the Ipswich Serial Murders


Paul Harrison - 2008
    For the quiet town of Ipswich it was fifty days of fear and soul seatching, from the disappearance of the first victim to the dramatic arrest of the lead suspect, Steve Wright.Journalist Paul Harrison and Professor of Criminology David Wilson arrived in Ipswich just as the first body was discovered. Their on-the-scene access, and Professor Wilson's unique experience as a profiler, meant that they were first to put forward the explosive theory that a serial killer was at large.In 'Hunting Evil' Harrison and Wilson take the reader to the heart of the story. Both visited the sites where the killer disposed of his victims' bodies; both walked the red-light area of Ipswich; and both talked to those who were closest to the victims and to Steve Wright. They explore the reasons why someone will kill and kill again and, perhaps most important of all, explain how serial killers target the most vulnerable in our society, and what can be done to make our communities safer for everyone.With sensitive portraits of the victims, a close examination of the police investigation, and full details of the trial, 'Hunting Evil' is the definitive account of a national tragedy.

Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning


Frederick Schauer - 2009
    It argues, among other things, that the best decision in a case is not always the best legal decision.

Legal Eagles: Stories of the Top Seven Indian Lawyers


Indu Bhan - 2015
    Mukul Rohatgi was unable to secure a place at the Law Faculty, Delhi University. Rohinton Nariman was trained to become a Parsi priest.Legal Eagles examines the lives and times of India’s top seven lawyers, who fought some of the country’s landmark courtroom battles. Tracing their journey from their childhood days to the present, the book highlights the important milestones of their careers, their victories and failures, their influences, and their work ethic and role models, demonstrating that the path to success is paved with determination, grit and challenges. Journalist Indu Bhan gives a ringside view of the most significant case handled by each of these lawyers, including the Vodafone tax case, Coalgate and the 2G spectrum controversy, among others.

A Criminal Injustice: A True Crime, a False Confession, and the Fight to Free Marty Tankleff


Richard Firstman - 2008
    He was looking forward to starting his senior year at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School the next day. But instead, Marty woke in the morning to find his parents brutally bludgeoned, their throats slashed. His mother, Arlene, was dead. His father, Seymour, was barely alive and would die a month later. With remarkable self-possession, Marty called 911 to summon help. And when homicide detective James McCready arrived on the scene an hour later, Marty told him he believed he knew who was responsible: Jerry Steuerman, his father’s business partner. Steuerman owed Seymour more than half a million dollars, had recently threatened him, and had been the last to leave a high-stakes poker game at the Tankleffs’ home the night before. However, McCready inexplicably dismissed Steuerman as a suspect. Instead, he fastened on Marty as the prime suspect–indeed, his only one. Before the day was out, the police announced that Marty had confessed to the crimes. But Marty insisted the confession was fabricated by the police. And a week later, Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California under an alias. Yet the police and prosecutors remained fixated on Marty–and two years later, he was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to fifty years in prison. But Marty’s unbelievable odyssey was just beginning. With the support of his family, he set out to prove his innocence and gain his freedom. For ten years, disappointment followed disappointment as appeals to state and federal courts were denied. Still, Marty never gave up. He persuaded Jay Salpeter, a retired NYPD detective turned private eye, to look into his case. At first it was just another job for Salpeter. As he dug into the evidence, though, he began to see signs of gross ineptitude or worse: Leads ignored. Conflicts of interest swept under the rug. A shocking betrayal of public trust by Suffolk County law enforcement that went well beyond a simple miscarriage of justice. After Salpeter’s discoveries brought national media attention to the case, Marty’s conviction was finally vacated in 2007, and New York’s governor appointed a special prosecutor to reopen the twenty-year-old case. At the same time, the State Investigation Commission announced an inquiry into Suffolk County’s handling of what has come to be widely viewed as one of America’s most disturbing wrongful conviction cases. As gripping as a Grisham novel, A Criminal Injustice is the story of an innocent man’s tenacious fight for freedom, an investigator’s dogged search for the truth. It is a searing indictment of justice in America.

Lecretia's Choice: A Story of Love, Death and the Law


Matt Vickers - 2016
    In Lecretia’s Choice, Matt tells the story of their life together, and how it changed when his proud, fiercely independent wife was diagnosed with a brain tumour and forced to confront her own mortality. The death she faced—slow, painful, dependent—was completely at odds with how she had lived her life. Lecretia wanted to die with dignity, to be able to say goodbye well, and not to suffer unnecessarily—but the law denied her that choice. With her characteristic spirit, she decided to mount a challenge in New Zealand’s High Court, but as the battle raged, Lecretia’s strength faded. She died on 5 June 2015, at the age of forty-two, the day after her family learned that the court had ruled against her. Lecretia’s Choice is not only a moving love story but compulsory reading for everyone who cares about the dignity we afford terminally ill people who want to die on their own terms. In 2015 Matt Vickers supported his wife, Lecretia Seales, in her campaign to gain the right to choose how she died. Lecretia’s Choice is his first book.

The Collected Stories of Rumpole


John Mortimer - 2013
    In these twenty classic tales, Rumpole battles through the Old Bailey, whether defending various members of an incompetent South London crime family, taking on haute-cuisine chefs and showfolk or mocking the pomposity of his own profession, all the while being held in check by his wife, Hilda: the wonderful, fearsome She Who Must Be Obeyed. These collected stories, in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time, are a definitive introduction to one of the wisest and wittiest characters in British comic writing and a reminder of what justice should really be about. With a new introduction by Sam Leith, former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and contributor to the Evening Standard, Guardian and Spectator.

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market


Philip Augar - 2018
    In a tale of feuds, grandiose dreams and a struggle for supremacy between rival strategies and their adherents, Philip Augar gives a riveting account of Barclays' journey from an old Quaker bank to a full-throttle capitalist machine. The disagreement between those ambitious for Barclays to join the top table of global banks, and those preferring a smaller domestic role more in keeping with the bank's traditions, cost three chief executives their jobs and continues to divide opinion within Barclays, the City and beyond.This is an extraordinary corporate thriller, which among much else describes how Barclays came to buy Lehman Brothers for a bargain price in 2008, why it was so keen to avoid taking government funding during the financial crisis, and the price shareholders have paid for a decade of barely controlled ambition. But Augar also shows how Barclays' experiences are a paradigm for Britain's social and economic life over thirty years, which saw the City move from the edge of the economy to its very centre. These decades created unprecedented prosperity for a tiny number, and made the reputations of governments and individuals but then left many of them in tatters.The leveraged society, the winner-takes-all mentality and our present era of austerity can all be traced to the influence of banks such as Barclays. Augar's book tells this rollercoaster story from the perspective of many of its participants - and also of those affected by the grip they came to have on Britain.

Plain English for Lawyers


Richard C. Wydick - 2005
    The sixth edition, now co-authored by Amy Sloan, updates this classic text, including new chapter exercises.Available here:boomreads.com/download?i=153100699XPlain English for Lawyers PDF by Richard C. Wydick

Killer Instinct: Having A Mind for Murder


Donald Grant - 2018
    Is it a chill whisper of fear reminding us we too can kill? Grant describes ten true murder cases, each different, each complex, each with unique triggers. Fact leaves fiction for dead. For those directly affected, murder is a sombre and scarring event. For most of us, murder is an arm’s length experience, close enough to frighten and fascinate yet far enough not to traumatise. Grant proposes that our restless chatter about it, our state of heightened alert, our endless viewing, may be play therapy, reassuring us that our own killer instinct is under control.

Without Honour: The True Story of the Shafia Family and the Kingston Canal Murders


Rob Tripp - 2012
    A father, mother and son convicted of murder. The shocking truth about the “ honourless crime” that stunned a nation.On the morning of June 30, 2009, police in a small eastern Ontario city made a ghastly discovery: four females dead in a car submerged in a shallow canal. Sisters Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Mohammad Amir, 50, floated serenely inside the car, seemingly the victims of a terrible accident. That morning, Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba and their son, Hamed, arrived at the Kingston police station to report the four missing. In a sweeping covert investigation that spanned three continents, police uncovered layers of lies in the Shafias’ story and they developed a horrifying theory: Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona had been the victims of a meticulously plotted family murder � Canada’ s first mass honour killing.In Without Honour, award-winning journalist Rob Tripp draws on three years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews to make sense of a senseless crime in a way no other writer could. His unprecedented access tells a story beyond anything the jury heard: a story about a patriarch who fled war and strife in Afghanistan but who did not leave behind his devotion to repressive tradition. Tripp was the first journalist on the scene as the news broke and the only reporter to attend every day of court sessions, through to the convictions of Shafia, Tooba and Hamed on four counts each of first-degree murder, fuelled by what Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger called a “ twisted notion of honour.” In this gripping and compassionate account, Tripp reveals the heartbreaking and stunning truth about the desperate lives of four women who died in the pursuit of freedom.

Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution


Stephen G. Breyer - 2005
    As this book argues, promoting active liberty requires judicial modesty and deference to Congress; it also means recognizing the changing needs and demands of the populace. Indeed, the Constitution’s lasting brilliance is that its principles may be adapted to cope with unanticipated situations, and Breyer makes a powerful case against treating it as a static guide intended for a world that is dead and gone. Using contemporary examples from federalism to privacy to affirmative action, this is a vital contribution to the ongoing debate over the role and power of our courts.

Falling Over Backwards: An Essay On Reservations, And On Judicial Populism


Arun Shourie - 2006
    Is this any way to become a knowledge super - power”? As there has been no caste - wise enumeration and tabulation since the 1931 Census, where does this mythical figure, “OBCs are 52 per cent of the population” come from? And what did the 1931 Census itself say about its cast - wise figures?

24 Hours with 24 Lawyers: Profiles of Traditional and Non-Traditional Careers


Jasper Kim - 2011
    Whether you want to be a full-time corporate lawyer, work as a legal consultant while pursuing your music career, or anything in between, this book gives you a unique "all-access pass" into the real-world, real-time personal and professional lives of twenty-four law school graduates. These working professionals each present you with a "profile" chronicling a typical twenty-four-hour day in their traditional and non-traditional careers. You will read actual twenty-four-hour accounts from the perspective of a venture capitalist, Wall Street lawyer, lobbyist, entertainment lawyer, IP attorney, sports broadcaster, JAG officer, prosecutor, criminal defense lawyer, mediator, and politician, just to name a few. From the time they wake up in the morning to the time they go to bed, each professional illustrates what their position entails on a day-to-day basis and will give you invaluable, informative, and honest insight above and beyond what many brochures, guest lectures, career workshops, or law firm website descriptions can provide. After reading 24 Hours with 24 Lawyers, you'll be better prepared to determine which career profile may suit you best before accepting a new job or investing in a legal education.