Step into the world of 11-year-old Isis Carter, who's just been robbed of her Adidas trainers by an all-girl gang. Fast-forward into the world of 19-year-old Isis Carter, who has just been released from prison after spending time inside for trying to avenge that attack, alongside numerous other injustices against her. Isis dearly wants to rebuild a life. That isn't easy, though. Not for anyone, and especially not for Isis: her father's profession as a pimp means that her family home is constantly overrun with exactly the type of person she now trying to avoid.

Winner of the John Phillip Reed Book Award, American Society for Legal History A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries. Following victory in WWII, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes. In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions. Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened US credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan. In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.

A comprehensive guide to the Theodosian Code which provides an invaluable source for the legal, social, religious and cultural history of the late Roman Empire. Written between 429 and 437 AD, the Code was a compilation of 3500 texts, of which more than 2700 survive, which published Roman imperial legislation from the reign of Constantine the great to Theodosius II. Matthews initially examines the political context for the Code and the events surrounding its actual composition before considering the contents of the Code, the Sirmondian Constitutions, the nature of the late Roman constitution and detailed editorial issues.

To every explorer with his map upside down, to every air-traffic controller suddenly receiving Magic FM through his headphones, to every astronomer whose new planet turns out to be a bit of bran-flake on the eyepiece of his telescope, Sod's Law says: you are not alone. Sam Leith tells the hilarious—and painful—stories of the unsinkable boat that sunk, the unbeatable horse that lost, and the fireproof theater that burned to the ground. Sod's Law demonstrates that the entire universe is actually set up to ensure that your toast always lands butter side down and, what's more, that it lands precisely where the cat has shed hair all over the carpet. In this age of doubt, fewer and fewer of us are able to believe that a higher power takes an interest in our fate. This book reassures us that indeed it does—and that that higher power is hell bent on buggering things up. Only by laughing heartlessly at the misfortunes of others can we make ourselves feel better. Sod's Law enables us to do just that.

Profiles the controversial high school principal who employs a baseball bat to foster learning through intimidation, a method that has had surprisingly effective results.

With over 70,000 copies of the first edition in print, this radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers’ bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders like cogs in an industrial machine. This second edition describes the wide-spread impact of the book and Gatto’s "guerrilla teaching." John Gatto has been a teacher for 30 years and is a recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award. His other titles include A Different Kind of Teacher (Berkeley Hills Books, 2001) and The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000).