Description
From the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and noted professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, a book that examines both civil and criminal court cases from the Civil War to the present, to reveal the impact of stereotypingrace, class, gender - on the American legal system.The question Mary Frances Berry asks: Whose story most strongly influences the making of legal decisions in the American justice system? Using previously unexamined material from state appellate civil and criminal court cases - cases of rape, seduction, and paternity disputes, and cases dealing with murder, inheritance, and property disputes in which sexual relations are at the heart of the story - Berry takes us through two centuries of American case law to show how attitudes toward gender, race, class, and sexuality have materially affected, and continue to affect, judicial decision-making.
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"Sweeping and important.... Provides a fascinating vision of justice and history." --The Washington Post Book WorldFrom the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission comes a landmark study of the ways in which prejudice has shaped American justice from the Civil War era to the present. With an ear tuned to the social subtext of every judicial decision, Mary Frances Berry examines a century's worth of appellate cases, ranging from a nineteenth-century Alabama case in which a white woman was denied her divorce petition because an affair between a white man (her husband) and a black woman (his lover) was "of no consequence," to such recent, high-profile cases as the William Kennedy Smith and O.J. Simpson trials. By turns shocking, moving, ironic, and tragic, each tale ends in the laying down of law. And because the law perpetuates myths of race, gender, and class, they are stories that affect the lives of us all.
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