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The Silver State
by Gabriel UrzaWhen a public defender receives a letter from a client on death row, he is forced to reexamine his role in the murder case he cannot shake; a gripping and thought-provoking legal thriller that redefines the genre—by critically acclaimed writer and criminal defense attorney What if justice isn&’t something the legal system is truly capable of? Law school graduate Santi Elcano&’s idealism is wearing away by the cases and clients he&’s assigned. When a young mother, Anna Weston, is brutally murdered and her body is found near Reno&’s infamous silver mines, Santi and his mentor in the public defender&’s office, C.J., are tasked with defending Michael Atwood, a man arrested for Anna's murder on scant physical evidence. Eight years later, a shocking letter from Atwood—now on death row—forces Santi to reexamine his role in the case. At the time, public obsession with Anna&’s disappearance and intense pressure on the police to make an arrest led to a rushed trial. As they investigated the case, Santi and C.J. became increasingly convinced they were defending an innocent man. Now, a horrific discovery leads Santi to reconsider everything he once believed, and all that it has cost him—love, family, and friendship. Illuminating the deals that get cut in the name of justice, The Silver State explores the murkiness between victim and perpetrator, and the cost of a life in the law. Turning the legal thriller on its head, Urza tells an electrifying, emotionally charged tale of systemic failure and moral ambiguity that asks: What if justice isn&’t something the legal system is truly capable of? For readers of Scott Turow&’s Presumed Innocent and Bryan Stevenson&’s Just Mercy." &“A propulsive, hallucinatory, urgent novel. This book will haunt you." —Sierra Crane Murdoch, author of Yellow Bird
The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice
by Jeffrey L. SeglinClimb the Corporate Ladder Without Stepping on Others From ethics columnist and Harvard lecturer Jeffrey L. Seglin, discover practical tips for succeeding professionally by succeeding socially. Practicing business etiquette doesn't mean pretending to be someone you're not. Brimming with practical, up-to-date tips on minding your business manners, The Simple Art of Business Etiquette guides you through the tricky territory of office etiquette with real-life stories and workplace scenarios. Become attuned to body language (Don't gawk at others during meetings or at any other time. It's creepy.) Engage in thoughtful introductions (Don't guess at someone's name if you don't remember it.) Practice proper e-mail etiquette (Do you really want to be the jerk who sends annoying e-mails around the office?) Curtail office conflicts (Never punch anyone in the workplace. Never.) Exhibit workplace sensitivity (Listen to your coworkers without cutting them off). Plus, decode the 15 most commonly-used phrases in business. The Simple Art of Business Etiquette proves that minding your manners goes a long way toward successfully advancing your career.
The Sincerity Edge: How Ethical Leaders Build Dynamic Businesses
by Timothy L. Fort Alexandra Christina, Countess of FrederiksborgRecognizing their role as "corporate citizens," companies are seeking guidance on how to be true to their missions, principled in practice, and well regarded for their contributions to society. As this book reveals, the key lies in sincerity—the sum of values like authenticity, integrity, and trust. Countess Alexandra Christina, a European corporate director, and Timothy L. Fort, a leading American scholar, delineate a clear and actionable model for bringing sincerity to the business context. Their vision for sincerity complies with law, aligns corporate social and financial performance, and values corporate ethics in its own right, rather than as a means to an end. Underpinning this model is a synthesis of the top research in the field and a suite of new interviews with current and former CEOs. Tracing inspirational tales and scandals alike, this book shows how leaders can head up companies that more reliably make good decisions and conduct themselves in a trustworthy manner. It then concludes with twelve concrete actions that businesses can take to cultivate "the sincerity edge."
The Sins of Brother Curtis
by Lisa DavisThis brilliantly reported, unforgettable true story reveals how one of the most monstrous sexual criminals in the history of the Mormon church preyed on his victims even as he was protected by the church elders who knew of his behavior.When Seattle attorney Tim Kosnoff agreed to listen to an eighteen-year-old man who claimed to have been molested by his Mormon Sunday school teacher, he had no idea he was embarking on a quest for justice on behalf of multiple victims or that the battle would consume years of his life and pit him against the vast, powerful, and unrepentant Mormon church itself. As Kosnoff began to investigate the case, he discovered that the Sunday school teacher, a mysterious figure named Frank Curtis, possessed a long and violent prison record before he was welcomed into the church, where he became a respected elder entrusted with the care of prepubescent Mormon boys. Through Lisa Davis's deft storytelling, two astonishing narratives unfold. The first shows how Brother Curtis ingratiated himself into the lives of young boys from working-class Mormon families where money was tight, and was accepted by mothers and fathers who saw in him a kindly uncle or grandfather figure who enjoyed the blessing of the church. Having gained the families' trust, Curtis became fiendishly helpful, offering to supervise trips or overnights out of the sight of parents, when he could manipulate his victims or ply them with alcohol. The other narrative is a real-life legal thriller. As Davis shows, Kosnoff and his partners tirelessly assembled the case against the church, sifting through records, tracking down victims, and convincing them to testify about Brother Curtis's acts. What began as a case of one plaintiff turned into a complex web stretching across multiple states. Joined by what would become a team of attorneys and investigators, Kosnoff found himself up against one of the most insular institutions in the United States: the secretive and powerful Mormon church. The amazing legal case at the heart of The Sins of Brother Curtis shows how the church's elite, well-funded team of attorneys claimed the church was protected under the Constitution from revealing that Curtis had molested a number of Mormon boys. Yet Kosnoff and his devoted legal team (which included a female investigator adept at getting parents of victims to talk to her) succeeded in forcing the church to reveal that it knew about Curtis and ultimately achieved a successful settlement. Emotionally powerful page by page, The Sins of Brother Curtis delivers a redemptive reading experience in which the truth, no matter how painful and hidden, is told at last and justice is hard won. This is a remarkable story, all true.
The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (Chicago Series in Law and Society)
by Christopher W. SchmidtOn February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality. The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.
The Six New Rules of Business: Creating Real Value in a Changing World
by Judy SamuelsonThe rules of business are changing dramatically. The Aspen Institute's Judy Samuelson describes the profound shifts in attitudes and mindsets that are redefining our notions of what constitutes business success.Dynamic forces are conspiring to clarify the new rules of real value creation—and to put the old rules to rest. Internet-powered transparency, more powerful worker voice, the decline in importance of capital, and the complexity of global supply chains in the face of planetary limits all define the new landscape. As executive director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program, Judy Samuelson has a unique vantage point from which to engage business decision makers and identify the forces that are moving the needle in both boardrooms and business classrooms. Samuelson lays out how hard-to-measure intangibles like reputation, trust, and loyalty are imposing new ways to assess risk and opportunity in investment and asset management. She argues that "maximizing shareholder value" has never been the sole objective of effective businesses while observing that shareholder theory and the practices that keep it in place continue to lose power in both business and the public square. In our globalized era, she demonstrates how expectations of corporations are set far beyond the company gates—and why employees are both the best allies of the business and the new accountability mechanism, more so than consumers or investors. Samuelson's new rules offer a powerful guide to how businesses are changing today—and what is needed to succeed in tomorrow's economic and social landscape.
The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character
by Dale WrightHere is a lucid, accessible, and inspiring guide to the six perfections--Buddhist teachings about six dimensions of human character that require "perfecting": generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, meditation, and wisdom. Drawing on the Diamond Sutra, the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, and other essential Mahayana texts, Dale Wright shows how these teachings were understood and practiced in classical Mahayana Buddhism and how they can be adapted to contemporary life in a global society. What would the perfection of generosity look like today, for example? What would it mean to give with neither ulterior motives nor naivete? Devoting a separate chapter to each of the six perfections, Wright combines sophisticated analysis with real-life applications. Buddhists have always stressed self-cultivation, the uniquely human freedom that opens the possibility of shaping the kind of life we will live and the kind of person we will become. For those interested in ideals of human character and practices of self-cultivation, The Six Perfections offers invaluable guidance. "
The Six-Day War and Israeli Self-Defense
by John QuigleyJohn Quigley's controversial book seeks to provide a corrective on the character of the June 1967 war, widely perceived as being forced on Israel to prevent the annihilation of its people by Arab armies hovering on Israel's borders. Using period documents declassified by key governments, Quigley shows the lack of evidence that the war was waged on Israel's side in anticipation of an attack by Arab states, and gives reason to question the long-held view of the war which has been held up as a precedent allowing an attack on a state that is expected to attack.
The Skeptical Professional’s Guide to Rational Prescribing: The Impact of Scientific Fraud and Misconduct
by Charles E. DeanThe raging COVID-19 pandemic has shaken our trust in science. This volume reviews the evolution of misconduct and fraud in science, the many steps taken to alleviate the problem, and the likelihood that it will continue, given our profit-driven healthcare system. Contents are set in a clinical context, wherein misconduct and fraud affect rational prescribing, a process that depends on balancing the risk–benefit ratio of treatments, whether pharmacologic or psychotherapeutic. The clinical consequences can be significant, in that the efficacy of treatments can be vastly overplayed, adverse effects minimized, and costs to the healthcare system increased if corrective measures are not taken. Key Features • Discusses the various aspects of cheating in publications: spin, protocol changes; failure to publish negative studies, including current data on the publishing industry and its issues, like the menace of predatory journals, poor peer review, coupled with lack of early education in ethics, and its significant impact on rational prescribing. • Assesses the impact of misconduct and fraud on clinicians and healthcare professionals as they attempt to balance the risk–benefit ratio which is supported by multiple contemporary studies. • Presents shocking data on bribes to physicians, journal editors and other key opinion leaders, exposing the ultimate root of the problem which lies in the economics of the healthcare system, badly in need of repair.
The Skill Factor in Politics: Repealing the Mental Commitment Laws in California
by Eugene BardachThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
The Skillfulness of Virtue: Improving our Moral and Epistemic Lives
by Matt StichterThe Skillfulness of Virtue provides a new framework for understanding virtue as a skill, based on psychological research on self-regulation and expertise. Matt Stichter lays the foundations of his argument by bringing together theories of self-regulation and skill acquisition, which he then uses as grounds to discuss virtue development as a process of skill acquisition. This account of virtue as skill has important implications for debates about virtue in both virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Furthermore, it engages seriously with criticisms of virtue theory that arise in moral psychology, as psychological experiments reveal that there are many obstacles to acting and thinking well, even for those with the best of intentions. Stichter draws on self-regulation strategies and examples of deliberate practice in skill acquisition to show how we can overcome some of these obstacles, and become more skillful in our moral and epistemic virtues.
The Slave Trade, Abolition and the Long History of International Criminal Law: The Recaptive and the Victim
by Emily HaslamModern international criminal law typically traces its origins to the twentieth-century Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, excluding the slave trade and abolition. Yet, as this book shows, the slave trade and abolition resound in international criminal law in multiple ways. Its central focus lies in a close examination of the often-controversial litigation, in the first part of the nineteenth century, arising from British efforts to capture slave ships, much of it before Mixed Commissions. With archival-based research into this litigation, it explores the legal construction of so-called ‘recaptives’ (slaves found on board captured slave ships). The book argues that, notwithstanding its promise of freedom, the law actually constructed recaptives restrictively. In particular, it focused on questions of intervention rather than recaptives’ rights. At the same time it shows how a critical reading of the archive reveals that recaptives contributed to litigation in important, but hitherto largely unrecognized, ways. The book is, however, not simply a contribution to the history of international law. Efforts to deliver justice through international criminal law continue to face considerable challenges and raise testing questions about the construction – and alternative construction – of victims. By inscribing the recaptive in international criminal legal history, the book offers an original contribution to these contentious issues and a reflection on critical international criminal legal history writing and its accompanying methodological and political choices.
The Slave in Legal and Political Philosophy: Agamben and His Interlocutors
by Tom FrostThis book explores how the figure of the slave has been used to construct ideas of freedom in Western political and legal philosophy.The figure of the slave has supported philosophical and legal defences of colonialism, coloniality and the supremacy of the white subject. Yet for Giorgio Agamben, the slave stands (almost counterintuitively) as an exemplar of a potential form of future positive political existence. Developing this line of thought, the book reads key thinkers Agamben engages with in his thought and writings – including Aristotle, Saint Paul and G W F Hegel – and draws on decolonial theory to argue that the lives of people who were enslaved and unfree, and their actions and gestures, can point towards a paradigmatic form of political belonging. By reading Agamben in a decolonial direction, we can imagine alternative forms of agency, recognition and subjectivity, which can challenge the necropolitical world of racial capitalism in which we live. This study will appeal to scholars, researchers and graduate students with an interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, radical politics, legal and political philosophy and decolonial theory.
The Sleep of Reason (The Strangers and Brothers Novels)
by C.P. SnowWith England on the brink of disruptive social change, a man revisits his past—and confronts a monstrous crime—in this novel of &“clarity and perceptiveness&” (The Atlantic). In his late middle age, semi-retired Lewis Eliot, accompanied by his teenage son, journeys to the provincial town where he spent his poverty-stricken boyhood—and where his father is now dying. The London of the 1960s is changing, and this visit is a reminder of the passage of time and the world left behind. But Eliot&’s reflections are disrupted when he reunites with his now-elderly mentor, George Passant, and becomes involved in a horrifying child-murder case in which Passant&’s niece stands accused. And as Eliot sees his old friend through the trial, troubling questions arise about responsibility, the root causes of evil, and how, as the painter Goya once observed, the sleep of reason produces monsters. &“[The Strangers and Brothers series] invites comparison not only with Proust but with the other notable multi‐volume novel about modern Britain, Anthony Powell&’s The Music of Time.&” —The New York Times &“Lewis Eliot throughout the series has been a most engaging person. . . . Snow is at his best when writing about people under pressure: he makes the struggle for power of engrossing interest.&” —The Atlantic &“[Snow] looks at the social condition so that he can see better the human condition.&” —Queen&’s Quarterly
The Slow Death of the Death Penalty: Toward a Postmortem
by Todd C. Peppers Mary Welek Atwell Jamie AlmallenWhy the death penalty is in decline across the United StatesAcross the country, the death penalty is dying. Twenty-two states have abandoned state-sanctioned executions, including nine in the last fifteen years. Of the twenty-eight states that still have the death penalty, eight have not had an execution in over a decade. And public support for the death penalty has declined from 80% of the surveyed population in the early 1990s to approximately 50% today.As the death penalty slowly withers away, Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring together a number of distinguished death-penalty scholars, activists, and attorneys to take an accounting of the damage inflicted by the machinery of death. Contributors to the book point to a range of different pathologies which have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors.Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime. This important volume is an up-to-date accounting of the current state and, as the contributors argue, the future demise of the death penalty.
The Small Business Start-up Kit for California (7th edition)
by Peri Pakroo Catherine CaputoMany people dream of starting a business, but fear that without an MBA they'll get lost in the maze of government red tape. Here's the handbook they need. Step-by-step, The Small Business Start-Up Kit for California outlines how to set up a business in the Golden State quickly and easily, pointing out the hurdles, fees and forms along the way. In language that is clear, readable and straight to the point, the book explains how to: choose the best business structure, write an effective business plan, file the right forms in the right place, be prepared for, and file, the required taxes, acquire good bookkeeping and accounting habits. This completely revamped and updated book provides the latest rules and regulations, all the required forms and an expanded discussion of running a business on the Internet. Includes a sample partnership agreement; county, state and tax forms, and instructions to filling them out.
The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts: How to Comply with the Key Rules and Regulations . . . and Avoid Terminated Agreements, Fines, or Worse
by Steven J. KoprinceGovernment law attorney Steven J. Koprince teaches you to concentrate on the crucial but complex Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and other rules required for keeping contracts alive and avoiding penalties.Each year, the federal government awards billions of dollars in small-business contracts. The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts puts a wealth of specialized legal counsel at readers&’ fingertips, answering the most important compliance questions like:Is a small business really small?Who is eligible for HUBZone, 8(a), SDVO, or WOSB programs?What salaries and benefits must be offered?What ethical requirements must be followed?When does affiliation become a liability?Small-business contracts are both the lifeblood of hundreds of thousands of companies and a quagmire of red tape. No one can afford to be lax with the rules or too harried to heed them. The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts empowers contractors to avoid missteps, meet their compliance obligations--and keep the pipeline flowing.
The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law (Critical America #3)
by Robert L Hayman, Jr.What exactly is intelligence? Is it social achievement? Professional success? Is it common sense? Or the number on an IQ test? Interweaving engaging narratives with dramatic case studies, Robert L. Hayman, Jr., has written a history of intelligence that will forever change the way we think about who is smart and who is not. To give weight to his assertion that intelligence is not simply an inherent characteristic but rather one which reflects the interests and predispositions of those doing the measuring, Hayman traces numerous campaigns to classify human intelligence. His tour takes us through the early craniometric movement, eugenics, the development of the IQ, Spearman's "general" intelligence, and more recent works claiming a genetic basis for intelligence differences. What Hayman uncovers is the maddening irony of intelligence: that "scientific" efforts to reduce intelligence to a single, ordinal quantity have persisted--and at times captured our cultural imagination--not because of their scientific legitimacy, but because of their longstanding political appeal. The belief in a natural intellectual order was pervasive in "scientific" and "political" thought both at the founding of the Republic and throughout its nineteenth-century Reconstruction. And while we are today formally committed to the notion of equality under the law, our culture retains its central belief in the natural inequality of its members. Consequently, Hayman argues, the promise of a genuine equality can be realized only when the mythology of "intelligence" is debunked--only, that is, when we recognize the decisive role of culture in defining intelligence and creating intelligence differences. Only culture can give meaning to the statement that one person-- or one group--is smarter than another. And only culture can provide our motivation for saying it. With a keen wit and a sharp eye, Hayman highlights the inescapable contradictions that arise in a society committed both to liberty and to equality and traces how the resulting tensions manifest themselves in the ways we conceive of identity, community, and merit.
The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law (Critical America #3)
by Robert L. Jr.What exactly is intelligence? Is it social achievement? Professional success? Is it common sense? Or the number on an IQ test? Interweaving engaging narratives with dramatic case studies, Robert L. Hayman, Jr., has written a history of intelligence that will forever change the way we think about who is smart and who is not. To give weight to his assertion that intelligence is not simply an inherent characteristic but rather one which reflects the interests and predispositions of those doing the measuring, Hayman traces numerous campaigns to classify human intelligence. His tour takes us through the early craniometric movement, eugenics, the development of the IQ, Spearman's "general" intelligence, and more recent works claiming a genetic basis for intelligence differences. What Hayman uncovers is the maddening irony of intelligence: that "scientific" efforts to reduce intelligence to a single, ordinal quantity have persisted--and at times captured our cultural imagination--not because of their scientific legitimacy, but because of their longstanding political appeal. The belief in a natural intellectual order was pervasive in "scientific" and "political" thought both at the founding of the Republic and throughout its nineteenth-century Reconstruction. And while we are today formally committed to the notion of equality under the law, our culture retains its central belief in the natural inequality of its members. Consequently, Hayman argues, the promise of a genuine equality can be realized only when the mythology of "intelligence" is debunked--only, that is, when we recognize the decisive role of culture in defining intelligence and creating intelligence differences. Only culture can give meaning to the statement that one person-- or one group--is smarter than another. And only culture can provide our motivation for saying it. With a keen wit and a sharp eye, Hayman highlights the inescapable contradictions that arise in a society committed both to liberty and to equality and traces how the resulting tensions manifest themselves in the ways we conceive of identity, community, and merit.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
by Bethany Mclean Peter ElkindThere were dozens of books about Watergate, but only All the President's Men gave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance and exclusive reporting. And thirty years later, if you're going to read only one book on Watergate, that's still the one. Today, Enron is the biggest business story of our time, and Fortune senior writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind are the new Woodward and Bernstein. Remarkably, it was just two years ago that Enron was thought to epitomize a great New Economy company, with its skyrocketing profits and share price. But that was before Fortune published an article by McLean that asked a seemingly innocent question: How exactly does Enron make money? From that point on, Enron's house of cards began to crumble. Now, McLean and Elkind have investigated much deeper, to offer the definitive book about the Enron scandal and the fascinating people behind it. Meticulously researched and character driven, Smartest Guys in the Room takes the reader deep into Enron's past--and behind the closed doors of private meetings. Drawing on a wide range of unique sources, the book follows Enron's rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise. It reveals as never before major characters such as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow, as well as lesser known players like Cliff Baxter and Rebecca Mark. Smartest Guys in the Room is a story of greed, arrogance, and deceit--a microcosm of all that is wrong with American business today. Above all, it's a fascinating human drama that will prove to be the authoritative account of the Enron scandal.
The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue (Literature and Philosophy #32)
by Daniel R. AhernIn The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.
The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue (Literature and Philosophy)
by Daniel R. AhernIn The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.
The Smoking Gun: Day by Day Through a Shocking Murder Trial with Gerry Spence
by Gerry SpenceFrom America's foremost criminal defense lawyer and author of the bestselling How to Argue and Win Every Time comes this riveting, true account of a trial that adeptly exposes the unrelenting power of the state, which so often crushes those -- guilty or innocent -- who come before the bar of justice. It could happen to you. When Sandy Jones and her teenage son were accused of murdering a real estate developer on their hardscrabble Oregon farm, the prosecution had an eyewitness to the shooting and a photograph of Sandy holding a smoking rifle. County officials kept Sandy in jail while they awaited the trial, despite ballistic evidence that strongly suggested she hadn't fired the fatal shot. The case erupted into an epic struggle between Sandy -- who was poor, different, and a woman -- and the "good old boys" of Lincoln County, Oregon, who held all the power. Though the Joneses' guilt seemed eminently clear to the county and the prosecution, Gerry Spence, renowned for his work on the cases of Karen Silkwood and Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, took the case pro bono and the courtroom battle exploded into three years of intensely moving jury trials, recounted here from the record of the case. The Smoking Gun follows Gerry Spence through his passionate arguments with two different judges and two different prosecutorial teams, his exacting jury selection, his expert questioning of the witnesses, and his incredible rapport with the jury as he fights for the rights of Sandy and her son. With a superb sense of drama and an intimate knowledge of the court system, Spence highlights the pitfalls that every defendant faces, making The Smoking Gun extremely relevant today, when our rights are being eroded and when the average American, even if innocent, is hard-pressed to obtain a fair trial.
The Snail Darter and the Dam
by Zygmunt Jan PlaterEven today, thirty years after the legal battles to save the endangered snail darter, the little fish that blocked completion of a TVA dam is still invoked as an icon of leftist extremism and governmental foolishness. In this eye-opening book, the lawyer who with his students fought and won the Supreme Court case--known officially as Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill--tells the hidden story behind one of the nation's most significant environmental law battles.The realities of the darter's case, Plater asserts, have been consistently mischaracterized in politics and the media. This book offers a detailed account of the six-year crusade against a pork-barrel project that made no economic sense and was flawed from the start. In reality TVA's project was designed for recreation and real estate development. And at the heart of the little group fighting the project in the courts and Congress were family farmers trying to save their homes and farms, most of which were to be resold in a corporate land development scheme. Plater's gripping tale of citizens navigating the tangled corridors of national power stimulates important questions about our nation's governance, and at last sets the snail darter's record straight.
The Snake Eater (The Brady Coyne Mysteries #12)
by William G. TapplyInvestigating the murder of a Vietnam veteran, Boston lawyer Brady Coyne uncovers a military conspiracy in this &“good, fast read&” (Publishers Weekly). Daniel McCloud may grow marijuana, but as far as he&’s concerned, that does not make him a criminal. A Vietnam veteran still suffering from exposure to Agent Orange, he&’s found no help from the government and no relief outside of homegrown grass. When the local police in his small New England town bust him for possession, a friend reaches out to Brady Coyne, a Boston lawyer who usually works with New England&’s upper class. Brady is readying Daniel&’s defense when the case is inexplicably dropped. He&’s just beginning to wonder why when the veteran is found murdered. McCloud had written a memoir, but the manuscript is nowhere to be found. Someone killed the author to keep it from ever seeing the light of day. As Brady digs into McCloud&’s time in the army, he finds that this troubled vet made some enemies in the jungle.