In this powerful book, Brook Thomas revisits the contested era of Reconstruction. He evokes literature’s immediacy to recreate arguments still unresolved today about state versus federal authority, th
As questions of citizenship generate new debates for this generation of Americans, Thomas argues for revitalizing the role of literature in civic education. He considers 4 case studies in which indivi
In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and 'Bartleby' (worker exploitation or wage slavery), The Confidence-Man (contracts), and finally, 'Billy Budd', which examines a number of issues illustrative of the triumph of legal formalism after the Civil War.
In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and 'Bartleby' (worker exploitation or wage slavery), The Confidence-Man (contracts), and finally, 'Billy Budd', which examines a number of issues illustrative of the triumph of legal formalism after the Civil War.
In 1896, The Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision made legal a system of "separate but equal" racial segregation not overruled until 1954. Using the full text of the Court's opinion, along with
The only book on Dred Scott built around primary documents, this brief text examines the 1857 Supreme Court case - one of the most controversial and notorious judicial decisions in U.S. history - in w
Your guide to making better decisionsDespite the dizzying amount of data at our disposal today?and an increasing reliance on analytics to make the majority of our decisions?many of our most critical c
