State Laws

What does a state governor do? Learn about the duties of a state governor, who can be a state governor, where they work, and how state governors are elected.

How does the U.S. House of Representatives work? Discover who can be a representative, what they do, where they work, and more.

One of the most revered, imitated, and controversial governmental documents in the world, the US Constitution serves as the foundation for the American government and shapes the lives of Americans every day. But how many of us know its history and the impact it has on guiding our ever-evolving...

Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. 

The “Law West of the Pecos", with a great appetite for publicity and a knack for achieving it, was something more than an amusing old scoundrel—for Roy Bean had in him the stuff of a folk hero of the sort which the Old West could hardly again produce.

Levels of violent crime have been in a steady decline for centuries-for millennia, even. Over the past 500 years, homicide rates have decreased a hundred-fold. We live in a time that is more orderly and peaceful than ever before in human history. Why, then, does fear of crime dominate modern politics? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over 3,000 years.

In the first of the three volumes of his projected comprehensive narrative history of the role of law in America from the colonial years through the twentieth century, G. Edward White takes up the central themes of American legal history from the earliest European settlements through the Civil War.

When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-listen book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed—and how millions of women sought abortions regardless of the law.

A "timely and hugely important" memoir of Justice John Paul Stevens's life on the Supreme Court (New York Times). When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court of the United States in 2010, he left a legacy of service unequaled in the history of the Court. During his...

New Deal Law and Order follows President Franklin Roosevelt, Attorney General Homer Cummings, and their war on crime coalition, which overcame the institutional and political challenges to the legitimacy of national law enforcement. Promises of law and order helped to manage tensions among key Democratic Party factions—organized labor, Black Americans, and white Southerners. Their anticrime program, featuring a strengthened criminal code, an empowered FBI, and the first federal war on marijuana, was essential to the expansion of national authority previously stymied on constitutional grounds.

Bloomsbury presents Westport by James Comey, read by Cassandra Campbell. The gripping new legal thriller from former director of the FBI James Comey. Lawyer Nora Carleton investigates a puzzling murder in the world of high finance... but soon finds herself on trial. Readers love WESTPORT...

A provocative book that imagines a world sans police—and whether we'd be safer without them. "Thoughtful and insightful." —Alicia Garza, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter It’s evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and...

The New York Times bestseller from the award-winning author of Den of Thieves and Unscripted. "Important and stunning. This is must-read material if you want to understand what the Trump administration is still up to right now." --Lawrence O'Donnell There are questions that the Mueller report...

Read about the electrifying and continuing fight for voting rights—and discover your place in it—in this dramatic exploration of American democracy, from renowned thought leader Michael Eric Dyson and widely celebrated author Marc Favreau. One of the most important and least understood true...

In his impassioned-yet-measured book, Rafael A. Mangual offers an incisive critique of America's increasingly radical criminal justice reform movement, and makes a convincing case against the pursuit of "justice" through mass-decarceration and depolicing. After a summer of violent protests in...

Former ICE Director Tom Homan has been at the forefront of the conservative fight to secure our borders and offers proof that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. Illegal immigration is the most controversial and emotional issue this country faces today. President Trump was elected on...

There is a war going on for the future of our country. Most people know that. What they may not know is that if Christians lose, the result won't merely be enduring public policy we disagree with, it will be a prison sentence for those who oppose it. We've all seen the attack coming. First the Supreme Court said kids can't pray in school. Then the Ten Commandments were ripped from the classrooms.

We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products - Coca-Cola and cocaine - this audiobook situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.

The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.

The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labor.

The New York Times bestselling author brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to offer a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today—an urgent yet hopeful story for our current political climate