Law History

Softcover. London, T. Plummer, Printer, Seething Lane, reprint, 1801, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Disbound stab-stitched pamphlet. 4 pages in small typeface. Presumably reduced from the 8 page 1798 printing. Moore, a Scottish cartographer, chart seller and educator with a somewhat controversial reputation, was accused of copying a chart of the coasts of France, Spain and Portugal drawn up by William Heather. The case was heard before Lord Kenyon with the prosecution led by Erskine; the jury quickly found for the defendant despite Kenyon's balanced instruction.

Hardcover. Rutland, VT, Tuttle Co, 1st, 1905, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 736 pages, leather-bound cover, gilt lettered spine. Definite wear to cover with leather rot clearly evident, chipping on edges and corners, discoloration of page edges, especially on endpages, previous owner's signature and inscription to front endpaper that has a tear at the gutter.

Hardcover. Gretna LA, Pelican Publishing, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. In June 1892, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class railway ticket from his native New Orleans to Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The two-hour trip had hardly begun when Plessy was arrested and removed from the train. Though Homer Plessy was born a free man of color and enjoyed relative equality while growing up in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, by 1890 he could no longer ride in the same carriage with white passengers. Plessy's act of civil disobedience was designed to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, one of the many Jim Crow laws that threatened the freedoms gained by blacks after the Civil War. This largely forgotten case mandated separate-but-equal treatment and established segregation as the law of the land. It would be fifty-eight years before this ruling was reversed by Brown v. Board of Education. Keith Weldon Medley brings to life the players in this landmark trial, from the crusading black columnist Rodolphe Desdunes and the other members of the Comite des Citoyens to Albion W. Tourgee, the outspoken writer who represented Plessy, to John Ferguson, a reformist carpetbagger who nonetheless felt that he had to judge Plessy guilty. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1st, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages including index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 558 pages. In the past twenty-five years, no one has been more instrumental than Catharine MacKinnon in making equal rights real for women. As Peter Jennings once put it, more than anyone else in legal studies, she "has made it easier for other women to seek justice." This collection, the first since MacKinnon's celebrated Feminism Unmodified appeared in 1987, brings together previously uncollected and unpublished work in the national arena from 1980 to the present, defining her clear, coherent, consistent approach to reframing the law of men on the basis of the lives of women.By making visible the deep gender bias of existing law, MacKinnon has recast legal debate and action on issues of sex discrimination, sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, and racism. The essays in this volume document and illuminate some of the momentous and ongoing changes to which this work contributes; the recognition of sexual harassment, rape, and battering as claims for sexual discrimination; the redefinition of rape in terms of women's actual experience of sexual violation; and the reframing of the pornography debate around harm rather than morality. The perspectives in these essays have played an essential part in changing American law and remain fundamental to the project of building a sex-equal future. Clean copy.