In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily...

The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice. "Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the...

"An instant American icon--the first Hispanic on the U.S. Supreme Court--tells the story of her life before becoming a judge in an inspiring, surprisingly personal memoir. With startling candor and intimacy, Sonia Sotomayor recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a progress that is testament to her extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself. She writes of her precarious childhood and the refuge she...

History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era. On the night of March 5, 1770, shots were fired by British soldiers on the streets of Boston, killing five civilians. The Boston Massacre has often been called the first shots of the American Revolution. As...

She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s―and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member...

The most famous lawyer in America talks about the law, his life, and how he has won. Johnnie Cochran has been a lawyer for almost forty years. In that time, he has taken on dozens of groundbreaking cases and emerged as a pivotal figure in race relations in America. Cochran gained international recognition as one of America's best - and most controversial lawyers - for leading 'the Dream Team' defense of accused killer O.J. Simpson in the Trial of...

Bronx-native Bernard Slotnick's mantra was that everyone deserved a good defense. And he was the best defender out there. A bold strategist in the courtroom, and a doting husband and father of four at home, 'Liberty's Last Champion' proudly stood up for the unpopular and the controversial, including: John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family; Joe Colombo Sr., inspiration for The Godfather; Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League;...

In the tradition of true crime bestsellers by Alan Dershowitz and Dominick Dunne, Mickey Sherman delivers a powerful and extraordinarily candid account of his legal career that gives the readers an all-access backstage pass to not only the sausage factory that is the criminal justice system but the "big cases" we have all lived with on TV. Sherman started his career as a public defender, then as a prosecutor, and later became a criminal defense attorney...

"It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million--upwards of $400 million today--in phantom timberland and nonexistent oil wells in Panama. When Leo's scheme finally collapsed in 1923, he vanished, and the Chicago state's attorney, a man whose lust for...

"From a leading judicial biographer comes the untold story of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court justice To become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor went against the odds. Her historic appointment in 2009--made by President Obama, whose own 2008 victory appeared improbable--flowed from cultural and political changes in America that helped lift up this daughter of a Puerto Rican nurse and a factory worker. Sotomayor...