Frank Carlson Library

Scott Turow's Pleading Guilty takes us back to Kindle County, where skies are generally gray and the truth is seldom simple, in an edge-of-the-chair story rife with indelible characters and riveting suspense.

The star litigator from a top-notch law firm has gone missing, along with 5.6 million dollars from a class-action settlement, and "Mack" Malloy, a foul-mouthed ex-cop and partner-on-the-wane must find both. Immediately.

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The murder trial of a Black gangster accused of killing a State senator's wife, shot driving her husband's car. Question is, was the ambush meant for the senator, as police claim, or was she, in fact, the intended victim in a plot involving the senator?

John Henry Schlegel recovers a largely ignored aspect of American Legal Realism, a movement in legal thought in the 1920s and 1930s that sought to bring the modern notion of empirical science into the study and teaching of law. In this book, he explores individual Realist scholars' efforts to challenge the received notion that the study of law was primarily a matter of learning rules and how to manipulate them. He argues that empirical research was...

Americans have always regarded farming as a special calling, oneimbued with the Jeffersonian values of individualism and self-sufficiency. As Victoria Saker Woeste demonstrates, farming'scultural image continued to shape Americans' expectations ofrural society long after industrialization radically transformedthe business of agriculture. Even as farmers enthusiasticallyembraced cooperative marketing to create unprecedented industry-wide monopolies...

Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance...

Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of...

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context,...

A compelling blend of legal and political history, this book chronicles the largest tenant rebellion in U.S. history. From its beginning in the rural villages of eastern New York in 1839 until its collapse in 1865, the Anti-Rent movement impelled the state's governors, legislators, judges, and journalists, as well as delegates to New York's bellwether constitutional convention of 1846, to wrestle with two difficult problems of social policy. One was...

This ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that most essential institution of modern democracy, the political party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic The Idea of a Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern party system in mind when they built the original Democratic party.Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s and...

From the Mormon Church's public announcement of its sanction of polygamy in 1852 until its formal decision to abandon the practice in 1890, people on both sides of the "Mormon question" debated central questions of constitutional law. Did principles of religious freedom and local self-government protect Mormons' claim to a distinct, religiously based legal order? Or was polygamy, as its opponents claimed, a new form of slavery--this time for white...