Law and True Crime
Soul of the Court
Legal legend Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer once stated that there were “only two people in the world who really understood the Constitution” and its impact on American lives. One was Hugo Black, deceased ...
The Delta in the Rearview Mirror
After graduating from Mississippi State University in 1976, Di Rushing and her husband, Sam, found themselves back on their family farm near Merigold, Mississippi, with 350 acres and no real clue what ...
See Justice Done
In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing ...
Rowdy Boundaries
Dwelling along the Mississippi River, the Tennessee state line, the Tenn-Tom Waterway, and the Gulf of Mexico are a trove of characters with fascinating lives and histories. In Rowdy Boundaries: True ...
The Ballad of Karla Faye Tucker
On a June night in 1983, twenty-three-year-old Karla Faye Tucker and her boyfriend, fueled by a sinister cocktail of illicit drugs, broke into a Houston apartment. “We were very wired,” Tucker later ...
The Poacher's Nightmare
Raccoons are not the only bandits wearing masks in the wilderness. Growing up, author Kennie Prince spent most of his time in the woods and creeks near his home in Rankin County, Mississippi. A highly ...
Black Boys Burning
On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program. Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, ...
Crooked Snake
In 1968, during Albert Lepard’s fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years old, from his family’s farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three ...
A Legal History of Mississippi
In A Legal History of Mississippi: Race, Class, and the Struggle for Opportunity, legal scholar Joseph A. Ranney surveys the evolution of Mississippi’s legal system and analyzes the ways in which that ...
Mississippi’s Federal Courts
This resource produces the first comprehensive history of the state’s federal courts from the inception of the Mississippi Territory to the late twentieth century. Using archival material and legal ...