Law Lit
Posted by admin on Mar 11, 2008
Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to The Practice: a Collection of Great Writing About the Law. New York: New Press, 2007. PN6071.L33 L39 2007
From the publisher: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King Jr., and Johnny Cash
have all written it. Joseph K., Hurricane Carter, Portia, and Bigger
Thomas have starred in the most timeless examples of the genre. And
now, law school professor and noted novelist Thane Rosenbaum has
collected the crusaders and casualties of the law, both real and
imagined, in one handsome volume of “law lit.”
Some of the
finest writers in the world have been tantalized by the law and the
nature of judgment, justice, and revenge. With dozens of selections,
including prose, poetry, essays, and even TV and film scripts, Law Lit
is a dazzling collection that transcends place and time, from ancient
Greece to foggy London to the narrow streets of Prague and the
spectacle of an Alabama courthouse, offering an enlightening look at
the legal system and its practitioners and at how lives can be laid
bare before the bench.
Chasing Justice
Posted by admin on Mar 11, 2008
Kerry Max Cook. Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit. New York: William Morrow, 2007. KF224.C66 C66 2007.
From Publishers’ Weekly:
Despite some amateurish prose, this
depressing account of an unfair criminal justice system that almost
claimed the author’s life deserves a wide readership alongside John
Grisham’s The Innocent Man.
After being arrested in 1977 for a brutal mutilation murder in Tyler,
Tex., that he did not commit, Cook, then 21 years old, was repeatedly
railroaded by corrupt police officers, prosecutors and judges bent on
ignoring all the rules to get him convicted. After his first trial,
Cook ended up on death row and underwent a hellish ordeal behind bars;
two subsequent trials ended in a mistrial and another conviction and
death sentence. The subtitle notwithstanding, Cook’s eventual freedom
was largely due to a team of dedicated attorneys, working from the
Capital Punishment Project or pro bono, who fought tooth-and-nail to
obtain his freedom in the late 1990s. Readers familiar with similar
travesties, such as the Randall Dale Adams case chronicled in Errol
Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line, will be outraged anew,
especially at the authorities’ deliberate disregard of another suspect,
linked to the crime by an eyewitness and DNA evidence.