"A Desert Storm veteran encounters two runaways. When he hears their stories, he keeps them with him in defiance of the law. When it is learned that his military discharge was due to psychiatric problems, it makes national headlines and fear mounts for the safety of the children. The FBI becomes involved when he crosses state lines. ... [T]he good guys win ... but who are the good guys? The veteran and those who help him? Or the legal entities who are after him?"--Publisher's statement, p. [4] of cover.

Nearly every law mediates between the desire for individual liberty and the perceived necessity for maintaining social order. Literature is a powerful tool to explore jurisprudential issues and to look critically at the American legal system. This book analyzes works in American literature to consider the tension between the desire for social control - as evidenced by the law - and the effect on individuals - as depicted in art. The concept of 'justice' is considered in each work in which female characters act according to their own code, which is at odds with civil law. As revealed by the examination of Anne Hutchinson and the trials against two American Indian women in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted laws on an as-needed basis to thwart political dissension and to subdue the threat of the Pequot Indians. Moreover, federal and state law was used to entrench slavery and to deny African Americans rights enjoyed by other American citizens. The effects of such laws are considered in connection with slave women who violate the law in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. In each context, women acted according to a core sense of beliefs and values, despite man-made rules of law. Their acts of civil disobedience make a powerful statement about the importance of defying unjust laws and remind readers of the social and legal change that has occurred in the past and of the necessity to look critically at current law.

Since the mid-1970s American presidents have, with growing frequency, claimed that they have the power to ignore any law they believe is unconstitutional. Beginning with a review of the English constitutional backdrop against which the U.S. Constitution was framed, this book demonstrates that the Founders did not intend to confer on the president a power equivalent to the royal prerogative of suspending the laws, which was stripped from the English Crown in 1689. The author examines each of the nearly 150 instances in which presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter have objected to the validity of a law, in order to determine whether or not the president then ignored the law in question. This examination of the historical record reveals that prior to the mid-1970s the White House only rarely failed to honor a law that it believed to be unconstitutional.

Introduction: Confronting the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Journeys to Racial Justice Organizing -- The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Criminalization as Racial Domination and Control -- "Nationalizing local struggles:" Community Organizing and Social Justice Movements -- "There is no national without the local:" Building a National Movement Grounded in Local Organizing -- The Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse: Intergenerational Community Organizing in Mississippi -- Challenging Criminalization in Los Angeles: Building a Broad and Deep Movement to End the School to-Prison Pipeline -- From the Local to the State: Youth-led Organizing in Chicago -- The Movement Spreads: Organizing in Small Cities, Suburbs and the South -- The Movement Expands: Police-Free Schools, Black Girls Matter and restorative Justice -- Conclusion: Organizing and Movement-Building for Racial and Educational justice.

Presents the history of the efforts to integrate the University of Mississippi, describing James Meredith's struggles to become its first African-American student and the conflict between segregationist Governor Ross Barnet and federal law enforcement officials.