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.

What does it mean to interpret the constitution? Does constitutional interpretation involve moral reasoning, or is legal reasoning something different? What does it mean to say that a limit on a right is justified? How does judicial review fit into a democratic constitutional order? Are attempts to limit its scope incoherent? How should a jurist with misgivings about the legitimacy of judicial review approach the task of judicial review? Is there a principled basis for judicial deference? Do constitutional rights depend on the protection of a written constitution, or is there a common law constitution that is enforceable by the courts? How are constitutional rights and unwritten constitutional principles to be reconciled? In this book, these and other questions are debated by some of the world's leading constitutional theorists and legal philosophers. Their essays are essential reading for anyone concerned with constitutional rights and legal theory.

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.

DEFIANCE HELPS TARGETED ENTREPRENEURSTAND UP TO GANGSTERS AND GOVERNMENTSNew tell-all book exposes corruption behind the worlds superpowers(NEW YORK, N.Y.)-- Alex Konanykhin was a wanted man. The Russian mafia took out a contract on his life. The KGB, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security were also on his trail. With paid assassins and two governments in hot pursuit, Konanykhin was running out of time and places to hide.What happened to Konanykhin, once one of Russias wealthiest entrepreneurs who by his mid-20s amassed a $300 million empire and bankrolled Boris Yeltsins rise to power, is, as one U.S. judge noted, a tale worthy of a spy novel.It is a true-life story so riveting, only Konanykhin himself can tell it. His debut book, Defiance, out in September 2006, is a hair-raising account of betrayal, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping, high-speed chases, as well as secret government cover-ups. The book goes behind the press headlines Konanykhins case has generated for the past 10 years; the case Washington Post called a spellbinding seminar on international intrigue.In Defiance Konanykhin, 39, the founder of KMGI, a thriving high-tech agency located in New York, describes in gripping detail his against-all-odds ascent from a poor but industrious science student in the former U.S.S.R, to a powerful tycoon in the post-Communist Russia, who lived in the mansion built for the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and was protected around the clock by Russian Secret Service. But when trusted members of his own security team betrayed him, and the U.S. government became a willing accomplice in an illicit pact with the KGB, the lives of Konanykhin and his wife Elena became a terrifying roller coaster of desperate attempts at survival, vindication, and search for justice.After fleeing the KGB-plotted assassination attempt in Budapest and eventually settling in the United States, the Konanykhins became pawns in a high-level political game between the two countries. Russias leaders threatened to have the FBI field office in Moscow shut down if the Americans refused to extradite the couple. What followed was an extraordinary and bizarre web of intrigue that started with a KGB search of the Konanyakhins Watergate apartment and their arrests on fake charges fabricated by the Kremlin.Written in a Virginia jail while Konanykhin awaited his extradition to Russia, Defiance chillingly depicts corruption in U.S. government. The American government was hell-bent on unlawfully sending me to a sure death, Konanykhin says, pointing out that on three occasions the U.S. courts declared the arrests groundless and illegal. Writing this book was all I could do while locked up in a prison cell and it looked like the last thing I would be able to do in my life.Freed and granted political asylum in the U.S. the only post-Soviet Russians to receive this status based on their political activities -- the Konanykhins are still fighting efforts of U.S. government to send them to the KGB fourteen years after their arrival in the U.S. Amazingly, despite these ordeals Konanykhin managed to build a new fortune in America from scratch. In 2004 National Republican Congressional Committee chose him as New York Businessman of the Year.

What is defiance, and when does defiant behaviour impede one's ability to aim at flourishing? People who are defiant can present perplexing challenges etiologically, diagnostically, and responsively. But in order to understand accurately when defiant behaviour is good, or bad, or neither (when it emerges out of mental illness), a fresh perspective on defiance is needed. This book offers a nuanced and complex look at defiance, taking seriously issues of dysfunction while also attending to social contexts in which defiant behaviour may arise. Those living in adverse conditions such as oppression, systematic disadvantages, and disability may act defiantly for good reasons. This perspective places defiance squarely within the moral domain; thus, it should not be assumed that when professionals come across defiant behaviour, it is a sign of mental dysfunction. Potter argues that defiance sometimes is a virtue, meaning that a disposition to be ready to be defiant when the situation calls for it is part of living a life with a realistic understanding of the aim of flourishing and its limits in our everyday world. Her work also offers theoretical work on problems in knowing that can impede understanding and responsiveness to those who are, or seem to be, defiant. Clinicians, teachers, social workers, nurses, and others working in helping professions are invited to engage in different ways with defiance so as to better understand and respond to people who express that defiance. Case studies, a framework for differentiating different forms of defiance, a realistic picture of phronesis-practical reasoning-and an explanation of how to give uptake well are some of the topics covered. The voices of service users strengthen the author's claims that defiance that is grounded in phronesis is just as much a part of moral life for those living with mental disabilities as for anyone else.