City of Courts


Book Description

This 2003 book looks at contesting concepts of crime, and social justice in nineteenth-century industrial America.




City of Quartz


Book Description

Recounts the story of Los Angeles. He tells a tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States.




City of Quartz


Book Description

This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker) No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs L.A.’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.




London's Secret Square Mile


Book Description

The streetscape of London's historic square mile has been evolving for centuries, but the City's busy commercial heart still boasts an extensive network of narrow passages and alleyways, secret squares and half-hidden courtyards. Using his wealth of local knowledge, historian David Long guides you through these ancient rights of passage – many dating back to medieval times or earlier – their evocative names recalling old taverns, notable individuals and City traditions. Hidden behind the glass, steel and stone of London's banks and big business, these survivors of modern development bear witness to nearly 2,000 years of British history.




Court, Cloister, and City


Book Description

In this book, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann chronicles more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Ukraine, Lithuania and western parts of the Russian Federation. Massive in scale, the book is highly accessible and lavishly illustrated. The readability of the text and the entirely new insights it provides into three hundred years of Central European history make this a vital introduction to one of the least understood periods in the history of art.




The Districts


Book Description

An unprecedented plunge into New York City's federal court system that gives us a revelatory picture of how our justice system, and the pursuit of justice, really works. A young Italian Mafioso helps get rid of a body in Queens. In Manhattan, a hedge fund portfolio manager misrepresents his company's assets to investors. At JFK International Airport, a college student returns from Jamaica with cocaine stuffed in the handle of her suitcase. These are just a few of the stories that come to life in this comprehensive look at the Southern District Court in Manhattan, and the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn--the two federal courts tasked with maintaining order in New York City. Johnny Dwyer takes us not just into the courtrooms but into the lives of those who enter through its doors: the judges and attorneys, prosecutors and defendants, winners and losers. He examines crimes we've read about in the papers or seen in movies and on television--organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, corruption, and white-collar crime--and weaves in the nuances that rarely make it into headlines. Brimming with detail and drama, The Districts illuminates the meaning of intent, of reasonable doubt, of deception, and--perhaps most important of all--of justice.




Crook County


Book Description

Winner of the 2017 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Winner of the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Winner of the 2017 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Culture Section. Honorable Mention in the 2017 Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Race, Class, and Gender. NAACP Image Award Nominee for an Outstanding Literary Work from a debut author. Winner of the 2017 Prose Award for Excellence in Social Sciences and the 2017 Prose Category Award for Law and Legal Studies, sponsored by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers. Silver Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (Current Events/Social Issues category). Americans are slowly waking up to the dire effects of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color. The criminal courts are the crucial gateway between police action on the street and the processing of primarily black and Latino defendants into jails and prisons. And yet the courts, often portrayed as sacred, impartial institutions, have remained shrouded in secrecy, with the majority of Americans kept in the dark about how they function internally. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors and enters the hallways, courtrooms, judges' chambers, and attorneys' offices to reveal a world of punishment determined by race, not offense. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to "save" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Delve deeper into Crook County with related media and instructor resources at www.sup.org/crookcountyresources. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.




Good Courts


Book Description

Presented in a new digital edition, and adding a Foreword by Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the state of New York, Good Courts is now available as an eBook to criminal justice workers, jurists, lawyers, political scientists, court officials, and others interested in the future of alternative justice and process in the United States. Public confidence in American criminal courts is at an all-time low. Victims, communities, and even offenders view courts as unable to respond adequately to complex social and legal problems including drugs, prostitution, domestic violence, and quality-of-life crime. Even many judges and attorneys think that the courts produce assembly-line justice. Increasingly embraced by even the most hard-on-crime jurists, problem-solving courts offer an effective alternative. As documented by Greg Berman and John Feinblatt—both of whom were instrumental in setting up New York’s Midtown Community Court and Red Hook Community Justice Center, two of the nation’s premier models for problem-solving justice—these alternative courts reengineer the way everyday crime is addressed by focusing on the underlying problems that bring people into the criminal justice system to begin with. The first book to describe this cutting-edge movement in detail, Good Courts features, in addition to the Midtown and Red Hook models, an in-depth look at Oregon’s Portland Community Court. And it reviews the growing body of evidence that the problem-solving approach to justice is indeed producing positive results around the country. Quality eBook features include linked Notes, active TOC, and proper formatting.




Shadow Courts


Book Description

"Haley Sweetland Edwards explains the history of global shadow courts and how these courts have spun out of control, threatening the interests of citizens everywhere including the United States. Her fantastic book is exactly what long-form journalism is meant to do, to move beyond current events and provide historical perspective that aims at future reform. SHADOW COURTS should be at the top of the reading list of all those interested in redesigning trade agreements to be in the publicinterest." -- Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor, Columbia University and author ofThe End of Poverty International trade deals have become vastly complex documents, seeking to govern everything from labor rights to environmental protections. This evolution has drawn alarm from American voters, but their suspicions are often vague. In this book, investigative journalist Haley Sweetland Edwards offers a detailed look at one little-known but powerful provision in most modern trade agreements that is designed to protect the financial interests of global corporations against the governments of sovereign states. She makes a devastating case that Investor-State Dispute Settlement -- a "shadow court" that allows corporations to sue a nation outside its own court system -- has tilted the balance of power on the global stage. Acorporation can use ISDS to challenge a nation's policies and regulations, if it believes those laws are unfair or diminish its future profits. From the 1960s to 2000, corporations brought fewer than 40 disputes, but in the last fifteen years, they have brought nearly 650 -- 54 against Argentina alone. Edwards conducted extensive research and interviewed dozens of policymakers, activists, and government officials in Argentina, Canada, Bolivia, Ecuador, the European Union, and in the Obama administration. The result is a major story about a significant shift in the global balance of power.




Legal Pluralism in the Holy City


Book Description

This book offers fresh perspectives on the phenomenon of legal pluralism, on shari'a law in practice and on Palestinian-Israeli relations in the divided city of Jerusalem. The study is based on participant observations in the studied shari'a court in contemporary West Jerusalem, as well as on textual and legal analyses of court cases and rulings, and suggests an organizational-institutional approach to legal pluralism, which examines not only the relations between bodies of law but also the relations between courts of law serving the same population.