law / constitutional

Discusses presidential impeachment, including the history of it and when it should be used in the present day.

"The life and legal career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg"--Provided by publisher.

"Dispelling rampant confusion about "hate speech," this book explains how U.S. law appropriately distinguishes between punishable and protected discriminatory speech. It shows that more speech-restrictive laws consistently have suppressed vital expression about public issues, targeting minority viewpoints and speakers; and that "counterspeech" has more effectively promoted equality and societal harmony"--Provided by publisher.

"By a brilliant young constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago--who clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for Judge Merrick B. Garland and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer, and who also happens to be an elegant stylist--a powerfully alarming book concerned to vindicate the constitutional rights of public school students, so often trampled upon by the Supreme Court in recent decades Supreme Court decisions involving the constitutional rights of students in the nation's public schools have consistently been most controversial. From racial segregation to unauthorized immigration, from economic inequality to public prayer and homeschooling: these are but a few of the many divisive issues that the Supreme Court has addressed vis-a-vis elementary and secondary education. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education. It argues that since the 1970s, the Supreme Court through its decisions has transformed public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court's decisions over the last four decades would conclude that the following actions taken by school officials pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporeal punishment on students without any procedural protections; searching students and their possessions, without probable cause, in bids to uncover violations of school rules; engaging in random drug testing of students who are not suspected of any wrongdoing; and suppressing student speech solely for the viewpoint that it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have validated a wide array of constitutionally dubious actions, including: repressive student dress codes; misguided "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies; degrading student strip searches; and harsh restrictions on off-campus speech in the internet age. Justin Driver dramatically and keenly surveys this battlefield of constitutional meaning and warns that impoverished views of constitutional protections will only further rend our social fabric"--.

"As the debate about out-of-control policing heats up, an authority on constitutional law offers a provocative account of how our rights have been eroded In June 2013, documents leaked by Edward Snowden sparked widespread debate about secret government surveillance of Americans. Just over a year later, the shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, set off protests and triggered concern about militarization and discriminatory policing. In Unwarranted, Barry Friedman argues that these two seemingly disparate events are connected, and that the problem is not so much the policing agencies as it is the rest of us. We allow these agencies to operate in secret and to decide how to police us, rather than calling the shots ourselves. The courts have let us down entirely. Unwarranted is filled with stories of ordinary people whose lives were sundered by policing gone awry. Driven by technology, policing has changed dramatically from cops seeking out bad guys, to mass surveillance of all of society, backed by an increasingly militarized capability. Friedman captures this new eerie environment in which CCTV, location tracking, and predictive policing has made us all suspects, while proliferating SWAT teams and increased use of force puts everyone at risk. Police play an indispensable role in our society. But left under-regulated by us and unchecked by the courts, our lives, liberties, and property are at peril. Unwarranted is a vital, timely intervention in debates about policing, a call to take responsibility for governing those who govern us. "--.

The Drone Memos collects for the first time the legal and policy documents underlying the U.S. government?s deeply controversial practice of ?targeted killing??the extrajudicial killing of suspected terrorists and militants, typically using remotely piloted aircraft or ?drones.? The documents?including the Presidential Policy Guidance that provides the framework for drone strikes today, Justice Department white papers addressing the assassination of an American citizen, and a highly classified legal memo that was published only after a landmark legal battle involving the ACLU, the New York Times, and the CIA?together constitute a remarkable effort to legitimize a practice that most human rights experts consider to be unlawful and that the United States has historically condemned.

"Debunking the lethal logic behind the pervasive myths that have framed the gun control debate "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." We've all heard these slogans time and again. The result of a targeted marketing effort by the NRA and other pro-gun organizations, these catchphrases have come to define the contemporary gun control debate. Dennis Henigan explodes the misguided thinking at the heart of these pro-gun slogans and dissects their deadly impact on US gun policy in this completely revised and updated edition of his much-praised 2009 hardcover (Lethal Logic, which has never been published in paperback). The gun lobby's remarkable success in infiltrating the gun control lexicon with these catchy slogans has allowed them to block lifesaving gun legislation for decades and gained them unprecedented influence in American politics. In this well-researched but accessible book, Henigan takes the NRA's myths to task and exposes the fallacious thinking behind the gun lobby's bumper-sticker logic"--.

"The United States is the only nation in the world in which political leaders, judges and soldiers all swear allegiance not to a king or a people but to a document, the Constitution. The Constitution today, however, is much revered but little read. . Readers of AMERICAN EPIC will never think of the Constitution in quite the same way again. Garrett Epps, a legal scholar who is also a journalist and writer of prize-winning fiction, takes readers on a literary tour of the Constitution, finding in it much that is interesting, puzzling, praiseworthy, and sometimes hilarious. Reading the Constitution like a literary work yields a host of meanings that shed new light on what it means to be an American"--.