The Mississippi Encyclopedia
The Mississippi Encyclopedia

Author: Ted Ownby

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2017-05-25

Total Pages: 1461

ISBN-13: 1496811593

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Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

A Legal History of Mississippi
A Legal History of Mississippi

Author: Joseph A. Ranney

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1496822595

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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 system has changed during the state’s first two hundred years. Through close research, qualitative analysis, published court decisions, statutes, and law review articles, along with unusual secondary sources including nineteenth-century political and legal journals and journals of state constitutional conventions, Ranney indicates how Mississippi law has both shaped and reflected the state’s character and, to a certain extent, how Mississippi’s legal evolution compares with that of other states. Ranney examines the interaction of Mississippi law and society during key periods of change including the colonial and territorial eras and the early years of statehood when the legal foundations were laid; the evolution of slavery and slave law in Mississippi; the state’s antebellum role as a leader of Jacksonian legal reform; the unfolding of the response to emancipation and wartime devastation during Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era; Mississippi’s legal evolution during the Progressive Era and its legal response to the crisis of the Great Depression; and the legal response to the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the cultural revolutions of the late twentieth century. Histories of the law in other states are starting to appear, but there is none for Mississippi. Ranney fills that gap to help us better understand the state as it enters its third century.

The Last Lawyer
The Last Lawyer

Author: John Temple

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-02-26

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 160473356X

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The Last Lawyer is the true, inside story of how an idealistic legal genius and his diverse band of investigators and fellow attorneys fought to overturn a client's final sentence. Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the United States. The Last Lawyer chronicles Rose's decade-long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. Rose called this his most frustrating case in twenty-five years, and it was one that received scant attention from judges or journalists. The Jones case bares the thorniest issues surrounding capital punishment. Inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones's original defense. Yet for many years, Rose's advocacy gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution. The book follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and small triumphs as he gradually unearthed the evidence he hoped would save his client's life. At the same time, Rose also single-handedly built a nonprofit law firm that became a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South. The Last Lawyer offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a capital defense team. Based on four-and-a half years of behind-the-scenes reporting by a journalism professor and nonfiction author, The Last Lawyer tells the unforgettable story of a lawyer's fight for justice.

The Fall of the House of Zeus
The Fall of the House of Zeus

Author: Curtis Wilkie

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0307460711

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“Masterful . . . an epic tale of backbiting, shady deal-making, and greed [that] reads like a John Grisham novel.”—The Wall Street Journal A real-life legal thriller as timeless as a Greek tragedy, tracing the downfall of one of America’s most famous lawyers and exposing the dark side of Southern politics—from the author of When Evil Lived in Laurel Dickie Scruggs was arguably the most successful plaintiff’s lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of former U.S. Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against Big Tobacco and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter-day Robin Hood and was portrayed in the movie The Insider as a dapper aviator-lawyer. Scruggs’s legal triumphs rewarded him lavishly, and his success emboldened both his career maneuvering and his influence in Southern politics—but at a terrible cost, culminating in his spectacular fall, when he was convicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge. Based on extensive interviews, transcripts, and FBI recordings never made public, The Fall of the House of Zeus uncovers the Washington legal games and power politics: the swirl of fixed cases, blocked investigations, judicial tampering, and a zealous prosecution that would eventually ensnare not only Scruggs but his own son, Zach, in the midst of their struggle with insurance companies over Hurricane Katrina damages. Featuring Trent Lott and Jim Biden, brother of then-Senator Joe Biden, in supporting roles, with cameos by John McCain, Al Gore, and other Washington insiders, Curtis Wilkie’s account of this uniquely American tragedy reveals the seedy underbelly of institutional power.

Mississippi Legal Research
Mississippi Legal Research

Author: Kristy L. Gilliland

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781594609909

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Mississippi Legal Research guides readers through finding and using the various sources of Mississippi law. The first of its kind, it is designed to introduce law students to the process of legal research, but anyone who needs to research current and historical legal issues--practitioners, paralegals, librarians, college students, and other lay people--will find it useful. Sample pages and screen shots, interspersed throughout the text, help clarify complex ideas. Mississippi Legal Research succinctly explains the ways in which constitutions, statutes, legislative history, judicial opinions, administrative regulations, and municipal charters and ordinances are published, accessed, and verified, in print and digital formats. Additional chapters describe the research process, legal analysis, secondary sources of law, such as encyclopedias and treatises, and practitioner materials. The sources of federal law, other states' law, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians are also highlighted. Print and online research strategies and techniques are integrated throughout the book. Important subscription services, including Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law, are thoroughly covered, but the many excellent free Web-based tools now available to legal researchers also receive special mention. This book is part of the Legal Research Series, edited by Suzanne E. Rowe, Director of Legal Research and Writing, University of Oregon School of Law.

Lawyer, Activist, Judge
Lawyer, Activist, Judge

Author: Martha A. Mills

Publisher: American Bar Association

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781634251310

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Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois is an inside look at one woman's struggle for civil and voting rights in Mississippi and Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s. In this engaging description of a life spent breaking down barriers, Martha Mills describes living and working in an ardent segregationist culture fraught with danger, and filled with both heroes and villains.

Heroes, Rascals, and the Law
Heroes, Rascals, and the Law

Author: James L. Robertson

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-12-28

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 1496819950

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James L. Robertson focuses on folk encountering their constitutions and laws, in their courthouses and country stores, and in their daily lives, animating otherwise dry and inaccessible parchments. Robertson begins at statehood and continues through war and depression, well into the 1940s. He tells of slaves petitioning for freedom, populist sentiments fueling abnegation of the rule of law, the state’s many schemes for enticing Yankee capital to lift a people from poverty, and its sometimes tragic, always colorful romance with whiskey after the demise of national Prohibition. Each story is sprinkled with fascinating but heretofore unearthed facts and circumstances. Robertson delves into the prejudices and practices of the times, local landscapes, and daily life and its dependence on our social compact. He offers the unique perspective of a judge, lawyer, scholar, and history buff, each role having tempered the lessons of the others. He focuses on a people, enriching encounters most know little about. Tales of understanding and humanity covering 130 years of heroes, rascals, and ordinary folk—with a bundle of engaging surprises—leave the reader pretty sure there’s nothing quite like Mississippi history told by a sage observer.