"Haley Sweetland Edwards explains the history of global shadow courts and how these courts have spun out of control, threatening the interests of citizens everywhere including the United States. Her fantastic book is exactly what long-form journalism is meant to do, to move beyond current events and provide historical perspective that aims at future reform. SHADOW COURTS should be at the top of the reading list of all those interested in redesigning trade agreements to be in the publicinterest." -- Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor, Columbia University and author ofThe End of Poverty International trade deals have become vastly complex documents, seeking to govern everything from labor rights to environmental protections. This evolution has drawn alarm from American voters, but their suspicions are often vague. In this book, investigative journalist Haley Sweetland Edwards offers a detailed look at one little-known but powerful provision in most modern trade agreements that is designed to protect the financial interests of global corporations against the governments of sovereign states. She makes a devastating case that Investor-State Dispute Settlement -- a "shadow court" that allows corporations to sue a nation outside its own court system -- has tilted the balance of power on the global stage. Acorporation can use ISDS to challenge a nation's policies and regulations, if it believes those laws are unfair or diminish its future profits. From the 1960s to 2000, corporations brought fewer than 40 disputes, but in the last fifteen years, they have brought nearly 650 -- 54 against Argentina alone. Edwards conducted extensive research and interviewed dozens of policymakers, activists, and government officials in Argentina, Canada, Bolivia, Ecuador, the European Union, and in the Obama administration. The result is a major story about a significant shift in the global balance of power.

Friends or Foes? A Game of Shifting Dangers The Shadow Fey arrive and turn the city upside down--and their ambassador demands that the player characters explain themselves for interfering in a legitimate assassination! So begins the looking-glass adventure that takes 7th to 10th level adventurers to the Realm of Shadows. This inventive take on courtly combat and sandbox roleplaying includes: More than 60-location map of the Courts, fully detailed with 100+ NPCs More than 40 combat and roleplaying encounters Dozens of new monsters your players have never seen! Demon lovers and dangerous liaisons for those who seek them Jealous rivals, a quick-play dueling system, and the King and Queen of Shadows A Status system to track player character prestige--and new Status powers! Enter the world of shadows, and play the 5th Edition of the world's first roleplaying game on a whole new level! More than 140 pages of real action and adventure by designers Wolfgang Baur and Dan Dillon.

The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery’s expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public attitudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group’s encounters with the law—and placing these suits into conversation with similar encounters that arose in appellate cases nationwide—Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.

Winner, Next Generation Indie Book Awards - Women's Nonfiction Best Book of 2020, National Law Journal The inspiring and previously untold history of the women considered—but not selected—for the US Supreme Court In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice on the United States Supreme Court after centuries of male appointments, a watershed moment in the long struggle for gender equality. Yet few know about the remarkable women considered in the decades before her triumph. Shortlisted tells the overlooked stories of nine extraordinary women—a cohort large enough to seat the entire Supreme Court—who appeared on presidential lists dating back to the 1930s. Florence Allen, the first female judge on the highest court in Ohio, was named repeatedly in those early years. Eight more followed, including Amalya Kearse, a federal appellate judge who was the first African American woman viewed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. Award-winning scholars Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson cleverly weave together long-forgotten materials from presidential libraries and private archives to reveal the professional and personal lives of these accomplished women. In addition to filling a notable historical gap, the book exposes the tragedy of the shortlist. Listing and bypassing qualified female candidates creates a false appearance of diversity that preserves the status quo, a fate all too familiar for women, especially minorities. Shortlisted offers a roadmap to combat enduring bias and discrimination. It is a must-read for those seeking positions of power as well as for the powerful who select them in the legal profession and beyond.

Judge Clark N. Addison spends his days swimming contentedly, perhaps complacently, at the bottom of the judicial food chain. Above his chair, in the courtroom he commands with sardonic detachment, it says "We who labor here seek only truth." The truth is, though, that these days Addison is little more than a spectator, watching while others - like his friends, trial lawyer "Blackjack" Sheridan and homicide cop Ed Barber - do the real truth-seeking, teasing out what passes for justice in a South Florida landscape where crime and corruption lie over the town like the humid tropical air.But when Addison's quiet, book-bound world of legal abstraction is shattered by a violent loss, and he finds himself deep inside a mystery he didn't even notice entering, figuring out the truth will be hard enough - and figuring out what truths really matter may be impossible.The Shadow of Justice introduces Judge Addison (also the hero of Hirsch's sequel, Laredo Slider) amidst a roiling cast of Miami courthouse players who would be utterly improbable if they weren't all so authentic. And Hirsch should know: He's a former prosecutor, criminal defense lawyer and now a judge in the same building, with a courtroom on the same floor, where Addison sits.With characters drawn in deep detail wrangling over the highest stakes possible, The Shadow of Justice is a courtroom drama, a compelling mystery and book that demands its readers seek truths of their own. The Shadow of Justice was awarded first place in the mystery/suspense category by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association, and earned its author the Benjamin Franklin award as best new voice in American fiction.

"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--