President George W. Bush nominated Leslie H. Southwick in 2007 to the federal appeals court, Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans. Initially, Southwick seemed a consensus nominee. Just days before his ...

Growing up, Molly Walling could not fathom the source of the dark and intense discomfort in her family home. Then in 2006 she discovered her father's complicity in the murder of two black men on December ...

In Laurel, Mississippi, in 1935, one daughter of a wealthy and troubled family stood accused of murdering her mother. On her testimony, authorities suspected an equally prominent and well-to-do businessman, ...

For the most part, the book draws on the opinions of the court from 1817-1875 for its basic source material. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a judicial body trained in the tradition of the common ...

In 1847, in a small rural courthouse in Coles County, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln represented a Kentucky slave owner named Robert Matson in his attempt to recover a runaway slave woman and her four children. ...

In the early twentieth century, two wealthy white sisters, cousins to a North Carolina governor, wrote identical wills that left their substantial homeplace to a black man and his daughter.

Maggie Ross, ...

Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office chronicles the exploits of a diverse team of investigators at a coroner's office in Pittsburgh. Ed Strimlan is a doctor who never got to practice medicine. Instead ...

In 2004 Corporate Crime Reporter asserted that Mississippi was the most crooked state in America. By comparing the number of federal corruption convictions over the past decade and the 2002 population ...

During the 1980s fifty-seven of Mississippi's 410 county supervisors from twenty-six of the state's eighty-two counties were charged with corruption. The FBI's ploy to catch the criminals was code-named ...