Law And Disorder

Over the course of his nearly forty-year career, John Douglas has pursued, studied, and interviewed criminals including Charles Manson, James Earl Ray, Dennis Rader, and David Berkowitz - a veritable Who's Who of violent predators. But he has also devoted extensive energies to helping the wrongfully accused and convicted, including several inmates of death row. Now, with longtime collaborator Mark Olshaker, Douglas addresses every law enforcement professional's worst nightmare: cases in which justice was delayed, or even denied. Book jacket.

Focusing on the moment when social unrest takes hold of a populace, Law and Disorder offers a new account of sovereignty with an affective theory of public order and protest. In a state of unrest, the affective architecture of the sovereign order begins to crumble. The everyday peace and calm of public space is shattered as sovereign peace is challenged. In response, the state unleashes the full force of its exceptionality, and the violence of public order policing is deployed to restore the affects and atmospheres of habitual social relations. This book is a work of contemporary critical legal theory. It develops an affective theory of sovereign orders by focusing on the government of affective life and popular encounters with sovereignty. The chapters explore public order as a key articulation between sovereignty and government. In particular, policing of public order is exposed as a contemporary mode of exceptionality cast in the fires of colonial subjection. The state of unrest helps us see the ordinary affects of the sovereign order, but it also points to crowds as the essential component in the production of unrest. The atmospheres produced by crowds seep out from the squares and parks of occupation, settling on cities and states. In these new atmospheres, new possibilities of political and social organisation begin to appear. In short, crowds create the affective condition in which the settlement at the heart of the sovereign order can be revisited. This text thus develops a theory of sovereignty which places protest at its heart, and a theory of protest which starts from the affective valence of crowds. This book’s examination of the relationship between sovereignty and protest is of considerable interest to readers in law, politics and cultural studies, as well as to more general readers interested in contemporary forms of political resistance.

Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth—an order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. As these essays make plain, however, there is another side to postcoloniality: while postcolonies live in states of endemic disorder, many of them fetishize the law, its ways and itsmeans. How is the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities to be explained? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses this question, entering into critical dialogue with such theorists as Benjamin, Agamben, and Bayart. In the process, it also demonstrates how postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.

One of America’s most successful trial attorneys built his career by going to war for consumers against the world’s most powerful and corrupt corporations. But his winning streak has ended. Money, power, and politics have lined up against Nicholas Deketomis, and he must fight for his freedom, his family, and the future of his prestigious law firm.

Litigation is like war, BabyBarista. Read this and learn. It's BabyBarista's first day as a pupil barrister in chambers. Never mind his legal qualifications; it's his summer working in Starbucks that's going to stand him in good stead, since coffee-making seems to be his chief responsibility (with the odd bout of photocopying to relieve the tedium). He's got one year to make his mark and prove by foul means or fair that, out of the four pupil barristers, he's the one who deserves to stay on and win the sought-after prize of a tenancy in chambers. It's sort of like Big Brother, but with little horsehair wigs. Once assigned to a pupilmaster, an oily character he calls TheBoss, BabyB retreats to his tiny desk in a dusty corner to consider the competition: TopFirst, a Cambridge graduate with a prizewinning CV and an ego to match; BusyBody, a human whirlwind on a husband hunt; and finally wide-eyed Worrier, who carries the world on her anxious shoulders. 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,' says Sun Tzu, whose book The Art of War is becoming BabyB's bible. Quietly, he smiles to himself, and begins to make some plans... Puncturing pomposity and exposing injustice with subversive wit, this diary of a nobody is an hilarious tour around the modern bar.

Trust the enemy?

This book considers two interrelated core questions. The first is: how have legal philosophers systematized law, and what types of assumptions have they made in undertaking this task? Second, in what sense is law a system, and how is it maintained as such? In answering the first question thebook surveys and analyses the theories of a number of European legal philosophers and in answering the second puts forward its own distinct theory.

Law school was never Anna Dorn's dream. It was a profession pushed on her by her parents, teachers, society... whatever. It's not the worst thing that can happen to a person; as Dorn says, law school was pretty "cushy" and mostly entailed wearing leggings every day to her classes at Berkeley and playing beer pong with her friends at night. The hardest part was imagining what it would be like to actually be a lawyer one day. But then she'd think of Glenn Close on Damages and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, and hoped for the best. After graduation, however, Dorn realized that there was nothing sexy about being a lawyer. Between the unflattering suits, sucking up to old men, and spending her days sequestered in a soul-sucking cubicle, Dorn quickly learned that being a lawyer wasn't everything Hollywood made it out to be. Oh, and she sucked at it. Not because she wasn't smart enough, but because she couldn't get herself to care enough to play by the rules. Bad Lawyer is more than just a memoir of Dorn's experiences as a less-than-stellar lawyer; it's about the less-than-stellar legal reality that exists for all of us in this country, hidden just out of sight. It's about prosecutors lying and filing inane briefs that lack any semblance of logic or reason; it's about defense attorneys sworn to secrecy-until the drinks come out and the stories start flying; and it's about judges who drink in their chambers, sexually harass the younger clerks, and shop on eBay instead of listening to homicide testimony. More than anything, this book aims to counteract the fetishization of the law as a universe based entirely on logic and reason. Exposing everything from law school to law in the media, and drawing on Dorn's personal experiences as well as her journalistic research, Bad Lawyer ultimately provides us with a fresh perspective on our justice system and the people in it, and gives young lawyers advice going forward into the 21st century.