Best Civil Rights Law

A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police—from the bestselling author of The Divide NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi’s kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can’t Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice. “A complex and textured examination of the complicated personalities, flawed legal system, and politics revolving around the police killing of forty-three-year-old Eric Garner, whose final words became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.” — The Boston Globe , “Must Read Books for the Fall” “[A] brilliant work of narrative nonfiction . After deeply exploring Garner’s life from a variety of perspectives, Taibbi offers detailed reporting about the out-of-control Staten Island police officers present at the death scene . What emerges from the author’s superb reporting and vivid writing is a tragically revealing look at a broken criminal justice system geared to serve white citizens while often overlooking or ignoring the rights of others.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Matt Taibbi’s I Can’t Breathe marries the best instincts of explanatory narrative journalism with uncompromising moral clarity. The result is a riveting walk through decades of policing policy and big city politics that culminated, seemingly inevitably, in Eric Garner’s killing by the New York Police Department. Taibbi, through thorough reporting and captivating writing, captures the totality of an American tragedy.” —Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize–winning national correspondent for The Washington Post and author of the New York Times bestselling They Can’t Kill Us All : Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Taibbi takes us through the evolution of stop and frisk, the Broken Windows theory of policing, the use of statistical modeling for fighting crime, the use of statistics for measuring "success", and how all of these factors have become bent and twisted resulting in the victimization of minority communities who are regularly terrorized by law enforcement officers. Despite its comprehensive coverage of the history of modern policing tactics, this is no academic treatment, but rather a caring, feeling recap of what happened to Garner and the factors that led to the fatal convergence of Garner and the NYPD that fateful day."
"Just so we all get it Not Justice for All should b ingraved in every court house."
"Great writer ...great book..."
"A phenomenal book about race and policing in America."
"On July 17, 2014, plainclothes NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a banned chokehold to a fat, middle-aged, diabetic street hustler named Eric Garner. Bystander Ramsey Orta’s cellphone video caught garner wheezing out “I can’t breathe!” eleven times before losing consciousness. Garner’s unconscious body lay untended, possibly already dead, for eight minutes, while paramedics parked over a block away, and cameras kept rolling. While more police killed more African-American men and youths, often with flimsier pretexts, like Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, Garner’s death had the distinction of being caught on camera with sound, from beginning to end to badly bungled aftermath. He established a remarkably sophisticated network of buyers nabbing cigarettes by the trunkful in Virginia, with America’s lowest tobacco tax. Garner got caught in a campaign to disproportionately target black and brown communities, assuming that darker-hued neighborhoods innately caused crime. This isn’t hypothetical, either; internal NYPD whistleblowers caught commanders, on tape, ordering racially targeted sweeps. Massive, leaderless demonstrations gained national support, then lost it overnight when one march turned into an attack on police. Though his sympathy, measured in column inches, clearly lies with community members, the police he interviews appear dedicated, misunderstood, and yoked to an administration that treats them badly."

Now for the first time, Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity ten-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian , and revealing fresh information on the NSA's unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself. An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014 : In May of 2013, Edward Snowden, a young systems administrator contracting for the National Security Agency, fled the United States for Hong Kong, carrying with him thousands of classified documents outlining the staggering capabilities of the NSA.’s surveillance programs--including those designed to collect information within the U.S. There Snowden arranged a meeting with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, and so began the most explosive leak of classified material since the Pentagon Papers, over 40 years ago. No Place to Hide opens with Greenwald’s tense account of his initial cloak-and-dagger encounters with Snowden, then transitions into descriptions of the NSA’s vast information-collection apparatus, including a selection of the “Snowden files” with commentary on the alphabet soup of agencies and code names. And--in typical Greenwald style--the book is packed with his opinions on government snooping, its legality, and the impacts on our Constitutional freedoms. Whether you consider Snowden a whistleblower crying foul on government overreach, or a self-aggrandizing traitor who put national security at risk, Greenwald’s book is thrilling and enlightening, a bellwether moment in a crucial debate. No Place to Hide is also a morality tale about the personal courage required of Snowden and Greenwald and his colleagues to expose government wrongdoing and the risk to their lives, liberties, and properties in doing so.” ― Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Fox News.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Glenn Greenwald reminds us just why the Guardian and Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in publishing the documents that Edward Snowden made available and how outrageous it is that his effort to inform the public of attacks on their freedom has left this brave young man a hunted fugitive."
"A brief note before you purchase this book: This is not a book written for the purpose of telling you the US government is watching your every step and every move, everyone knows that. This is not merely a book with facts, but a book with opinion, with logical and concrete evidence that not just the U.S., but other state actors are well, are progressing into what George Orwell wrote in his infamous 1984 novel (Orwellian state)."
"Many of these NSA programs will be familiar to people who have closely followed the reporting by The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Intercept and other news outlets over the past year, but to have it all gathered together in one chapter makes this book an invaluable resource. However, the book is equally effective at describing the human drama of Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald's early interactions and their decision-making process in the days leading up to the flurry of initial publications during that week in June 2013."
"I recommend this book highly as being relevant to all citizens in countries of our modern world."

When aggrieved individuals turn to the law, the adversarial character of litigation imposes considerable personal and financial costs that make plaintiffs feel like they’ve lost regardless of the outcome of the case. In fact, the contemporary approach to workplace discrimination law perversely comes to reinforce the very hierarchies that antidiscrimination laws were created to redress. Based on rich interviews with plaintiffs, attorneys, and representatives of defendants and an original national dataset on case outcomes, Rights on Trial reveals the fundamental flaws of workplace discrimination law and offers practical recommendations for how we might better respond to persistent patterns of discrimination. As the authors convincingly show, rather than enhancing workers' rights, employment discrimination litigation often reinforces the very hierarchies it was intended to diminish. It is a landmark analysis, the clearest and most well-documented account of claimants’ hurtful experiences in claiming and litigating against discrimination. (Charles R. Epp, author of Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship) “Rights on Trial embarks on a thorough exploration of civil rights in the world of employment litigation on a quest to uncover how this system of rights-based litigation actually works and, in truth, whether it does. People who face discrimination at work rarely complain, and when they do, they don’t find coworkers to join them or lawyers to represent them.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Comprehensive, well written, excellent data and important analysis of how & why courts tend to replicate employment inequalities."
Best Law in German

Renommierte Autoren aus der Wissenschaft, häufig als Richter, Schiedsrichter oder Berater tätig und wissenschaftlich ausgewiesene Praktiker aus Justiz und Anwaltschaft gewährleisten eine ausgewogene Rechtsinterpretation und garantieren eine zuverlässige und aktuelle Aufbereitung der jeweiligen Teilgebiete in komprimierter Form, um dem Leser eine praxisnahe und kompetente Einarbeitung in kurzer Zeit zu ermöglichen.
Find Best Price at AmazonBest Law Ethics & Professional Responsibility

Judges in Street Clothes: Acting Ethically Off-the-Bench. provides an in-depth analysis of the rules limiting the charitable, educational, religious, fraternal, civic, and law-related extrajudicial activities of state and federal judges. This comprehensive, heavily footnoted resource examines: (1) the historical development of the American Bar Association’s four model judicial codes with an emphasis on the rules regulating the charitable, educational, religious, fraternal, civic, and law-related activities of judges; (2) the State’s interests in restricting the extrajudicial activities of judges; (3) the strengths and weaknesses of rules governing a judge’s off-bench activities; (4) how state and federal courts, judicial disciplinary commissions, and judicial ethics advisory committees have interpreted judicial conduct rules; (5) best practices for judges; and (6) the constitutionality of the restrictions on a judge’s charitable, educational, religious, fraternal, civic, and law-related undertakings. "McKoski, a retired Illinois circuit court judge who teaches at John Marshall Law School, mines the mass of accumulated documents and case law to present a systematic and comprehensive picture of what judges can ethically do in their off-duty hours. Raymond J. McKoski is an adjunct professor at The John Marshall Law School and retired Illinois Circuit Court Judge.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Judges in Street Clothes provides an excellent overview of the ethical issues facing judges outside the courtroom."
Best Human Rights Law

There was an almost religious intensity to the project, championed by Eleanor Roosevelt under the aegis of the newly formed United nations and brought into being by an extraordinary group of men and women who knew, like the framers of the Declaration of Independence, that they were making history. As the specter of the Cold War loomed, a U.N. delegation, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, began writing what would become the world's first standard statement of human rights. When it was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the first formal statement of what the phrase human rights actually entailed.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It showcases how the civilized world came about - via highly-talented, highly-motivated people who had vision."
"A friend suggested it -- and it was revelatory!"
"Excellent book and service was exceptional."
""A World Made New" is an excellent book about "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and the "birth process" of this important declaration, as well as Eleanor Rossevelt's important contributions in this process."
"The Atlantic Charter was made with `Roosevelt's freedoms' - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International refer to it in their evaluations. However she argues persuasively that human rights are universal. In a fine example near the end of the book a Chinese refugee points out to another delegate at a human rights convention - "If you were to voice dissent from the prevailing view in China, you would end up in a jail, and there you would soon be asking for your rights, without worrying about whether they were `American' or `Chinese' "."
"That said, the work provides great insights into the background of that seminal document and the "perfect storm" of events that allowed it to come to fruition. It is fascinating to consider how the process was buffeted and ways in which the document could have ended up--such as providing rights of the unborn."
Best Discrimination Constitutional Law

He was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of the US’s criminal justice system. ‘Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age … This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: Stevenson's life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life … You don't have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful … Bryan Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.’ The New York Times. When Stevenson was a 23-year-old Harvard law student, he started an internship in Georgia where his first assignment was to deliver a message to a man living on death row. This is a title for the many young adults who have a parent or loved one in the prison system and the many others who are interested in social justice, the law, and the death penalty. [It] demonstrates, as powerfully as any book on criminal justice that I’ve ever read, the extent to which brutality, unfairness, and racial bias continue to infect criminal law in the United States. But at the same time that [Bryan] Stevenson tells an utterly damning story of deep-seated and widespread injustice, he also recounts instances of human compassion, understanding, mercy, and justice that offer hope. Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.” —David Cole, The New York Review of Books “A searing, moving and infuriating memoir . This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: [Bryan] Stevenson’s life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court. Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.” —Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review “Inspiring . “As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.” —The Financial Times “Brilliant.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.” —John Grisham “Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. Bryan Stevenson is a real-life, modern-day Atticus Finch who, through his work in redeeming innocent people condemned to death, has sought to redeem the country itself. It is inspiring and suspenseful—a revelation.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns “Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning, along with one’s hopes for humanity.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains “Bryan Stevenson is America’s young Nelson Mandela, a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction to guarantee justice for all. Just Mercy should be read by people of conscience in every civilized country in the world to discover what happens when revenge and retribution replace justice and mercy.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"My tendency is to put things into "liberal" and "conservative" buckets and this one seemingly fit into the liberal bucket and I am a professed conservative."
"I have a new hero . Bryan Stevenson. This is a great book."
"This is a system that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole, that makes petty theft a crime as serious as murder, and that has declared war on hundreds of thousands of people with substance abuse problems by imprisoning them and denying them help. JUST MERCY explores a number of devastating cases, including children as young as fourteen facing life imprisonment, and scores of people on death row - mostly poor, and mostly black - who have been unfairly convicted. But the central focus is on Walter McMillan, a black man sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent young white woman. Ours is no longer a country that sees compassion as a virtue; instead, we write harsher and harsher laws that demand longer and longer sentences for those we consider undesirables. It's rare these days to meet someone who truly dedicates himself to those least able to help themselves, especially someone who isn't after media attention or self-promotion."
"He is a witness in the stories, a helper, an overwhelmed human who makes sure his clients and the system are the focus of his stories, so we, the readers, can begin to understand what really happens in the legal system, from the behavior of police to the biases of justices with unchecked power, and the witnesses that are the wrong color to be heard."